Work Text:
Here comes the rain again
Falling on my head like a memory
Falling on my head like a new emotion
-Rav Ashi
If an animal has previously suffered escapable shock, and then she suffers inescapable shock, she will be happier than if she has previously not suffered escapable shock — for if she hasn’t, she will only know about being shocked inescapably.
But if she has been inescapably shocked before, and she is put in the conditions where she was inescapably shocked before, she will behave as if being shocked, mostly. Her misery doesn’t require acts. Her misery requires conditions.
-Charli XCX
JULY, 2015.
As far as deathbeds went, Florida was it, baby. It was the damp and spider-filled crawl space that a cat limps underneath to die alone. The under-porch of America. In the distance Mickey Mouse could be seen peddling corn dogs to listless children. Rose gathered up her things and retreated to Dirty Florida: cypress groves, shrimp boats, and football games.
*
Dave agreed to meet her at a diner called The Cracked Egg. (“More like The Crackhead,” Dave said over the phone. “Let us reach ever upward for higher fruit,” Rose said.) There were signs on every inch of the yellowed wall, Leyendecker-lite consumer art with Facebook mom slogans. DRINK COFFEE! DO STUPID THINGS FASTER WITH MORE ENERGY. 24-point ads for vape shops and surf lessons in lime green and aquifer blue littered the spaces in-between.
The bell above the door jingled. Dave walked in wearing a pink shirt that said PUSSY DESTROYER and a pair of Uggs, a combo which told Rose he had spent too long getting ready and, in a fit of anxiety, had settled for the most contentious choices possible. He ambled over to her and slid into the booth.
“What, suddenly I’m not good enough for the Queer Bart shirt?” Rose said.
“It’s at the dry cleaners, I’ll have Jeeves pick it up later,” Dave said. “Hey, this town rules. I just passed like three separate places that claimed to have the best fried shrimp in America. There’s an unbelievable amount of things that factor into shrimp quality it’s literally fucking impossible to go into it all right now, we have to do a Flavortown mouth tour of them later. All like, are these grass-fed shrimps? Did they lead fulfilling lives? Are they jumbo shrimp or just shrimp? Do y’all have legit cocktail sauce or do I have to settle for ketchup like a Midwestern degenerate?”
The waitress approached, a weathered blonde woman in her forties.
“I will have your ‘fruit bowl’ and toast,” Dave said, holding the menu at arms-length like an old lady. “Also coffee, please.”
“Two mimosas,” said Rose. “And the number three brunch special. Thank you.”
The waitress collected their plastic menus and left.
“I don’t drink,” Dave said, picking at his cuticles.
“Oh, I know,” Rose said. “They’re both for me.”
“I hope their coffee is just deliriously nasty,” Dave said, doing the polite thing and not commenting on Rose’s eleven a.m. drinking habits. “I can only enjoy it if it tastes like straight jet fuel. Like I’m giving a Boeing 737 a sloppy-ass blowjob first thing in the morning.”
“Yet you dump the entire contents of a dairy farm into it,” Rose said. “How can you taste the delicate subtleties of engine fluid upon your tongue when it’s drowned out by the labor of a thousand cows?”
“Man, don’t bum me out about cows,” Dave said. Their drinks arrived. Rose downed one mimosa immediately and began to nurse the other one, leaning back in her seat. No use beating around the proverbial bush, she thought.
“I brought you here because I’m going to kill myself,” she said. Dave opened his mouth. “Please don’t bother,” Rose continued. Dave shut his mouth. “I've prepared several devastating arguments against every feasible reason to not kill myself. If I genuinely got into them you would be so distraught, you’d do a Neverending Story swan-dive with me off the Chrysler building next week.”
“No. What?” Dave said, shaking his head like a wet dog. “What’s the Chrysler building?”
“I keep forgetting that you don’t know jack shit and this timeline is broken,” Rose said. “It’s actually quite frustrating. Let me put it this way--”
“What timeline, why are we talking about fucking timelines,” Dave said, ripping open four sugar packets simultaneously, showering them into his coffee and onto the table. “Is this an ARG or something? Is that your newest gig? Got tired of writing about the U.S. Men’s Football Team running a train on a space alien who looks like Kurt Russell?”
Indeed, Rose earned a paltry living self-publishing niche erotica online-- under a pseudonym, of course. If asked, her usual justification was that it was funny and mostly easy. Intellectually she knew Dave was aware of this bawdy career choice but she hadn’t thought he would actually sit down and read them. “It’s called soccer,” she said.
“Woah, your eye is twitching,” Dave said, leaning over the table and poking her in the face. Rose batted his hand away.
“It’s always nice to meet a fan of my work,” she sighed, pulling a napkin towards her and fishing around in her purse for a pen. “I suppose I can spare the time for a teensy little autograph.”
“Make it out to Knuttsach Jones,” he said, jabbing a finger onto the napkin. “That’s K-N-U-T-T--”
Rose signed her name and, with a flourish, made it out to Insufferable Prick. Dave took the autograph, folded it into fourths, and put it in his wallet next to a Yogurtology stamp card.
“Where was I?” Rose said. “Oh, right. I’m killing myself tomorrow. This is a courtesy call, in a manner of speaking. I don’t want my mother to have any of my things. I would also prefer my body to be cremated and unceremoniously tossed into the Atlantic Ocean.”
“I’m gonna scatter that shit like a chubby-fisted toddler throwing rice at a wedding,” Dave said, pantomiming. “Hey, you’re not serious, right? ‘Cause I don’t think I--”
“I am, if you’ll pardon the expression, dead serious.”
Dave’s face fell behind his glasses, and the air around them became a little tense.
“What about your cat?” Dave asked.
“He died,” Rose said. “Last week, in fact. I told you not to bother with this shit. I’ve written a 2-act play about my decision if you’d like to read it, although you’d probably find it impenetrably dense.”
“Shit. I’m sorry about your cat,” Dave said. The effects of the coffee and the conversation were making him look a little strung-out. He had gotten his ears pierced sometime within the last year and the left lobe was red and swollen.
“It’s okay. He was quite old,” Rose said. “If I wasn’t killing myself tomorrow I’d give some serious thought to pivoting and becoming a dog person.”
“No way, that is so wrong,” Dave said. “I cannot fucking picture you with a dog. It’s not your brand.” He paused, like he was remembering something unpleasant. As if ushered onstage by a nervous director, the waitress appeared at Rose’s elbow with their food.
“Thank you,” said Rose, looking down at her plate of wobbly eggs and feeling rather ill.
“Enjoy,” the waitress said, already moving to her next table.
“Bone apple teeth,” Dave said. He began rummaging around in his fruit bowl for the grapes and partitioned them off to the side. Then he fished out the pieces of honeydew and placed them all on Rose’s plate in a little pile, as though he was doing her a favor. The corner of one of the honeydew chunks was touching her scrambled eggs, which meant she probably wasn’t going to eat any of it.
“Why not just order a whole cantaloupe next time,” she suggested, briskly buttering her toast. “Save everyone the trouble.”
“Do you think they’d have a hibachi chef come out and cut it up in front of me?” Dave said. He made chopping hand motions to demonstrate. “Then my guy starts gettin’ fancy, flipping pieces into my mouth and shit like I’m a trained seal and he’s the benevolent old-timey ringmaster, you know one of them dudes with the uh, the big fucking tophats. But he’s new at this so he cut them kinda janky and a chunk of cantaloupe rind gets lodged in my windpipe. I’m frantically waving my hands in the universal I’M CHOKING sign but he just thinks I’m loving it.”
“Are you still a seal?” Rose said, innocently.
“Oh, Dave, do at least try to keep up,” he said in his Rose impression, which was all bland Pacific Northwest. “I was only a seal within the metaphorical confines of the circus. Really, it’s disgustingly basic--”
“Do I sound like Frasier to you? Is that all you hear when I open my mouth, just ‘Tossed Salad and Scrambled Eggs’ playing ad nauseam?”
“Nah, I usually hear calliope music for some reason,” Dave said. He hadn’t touched his food after that frankly autistic routine with the fruit separation and was now occupying his hands by folding a straw wrapper into an accordion. “Because you’re a clown. Geddit? You know there’s a fuckton of squirrels here? I’ve only seen squirrels on TV. I’ve been walking around like a fucking country bumpkin, all Jed from The Beverly Hillbillies, gawking at the little bastards and not watching where I’m going. Almost got hit by a Ford Bronco with a Confederate flag license plate.”
“I thought they had squirrels in Texas,” Rose said. “Or is this just your first time outside in your entire life?”
“I don’t live in Texas,” Dave said slowly. “I’ve never lived in Texas. I live in New Mexico.”
Suddenly Rose was sure she was going to be sick. She gripped the plastic edge of the table and stared down into her lap. Amateur hour, Lalonde. This happened all the fucking time.
“All those bullshit states sound the same to me,” Rose said.
“Yeah, I guess the letter X is really all that matters,” Dave mused. He flicked a drop of water onto the folded accordion wrapper and it unfurled, expanding like a worm. Dave looked thinner than last she saw him. He had never been able to keep much weight on but after he started taking testosterone he kept making all this noise over the phone about “pumping mad iron” and “running through the forests of middle earth like im an aggro uruk-hai and i just smelled a prime morsel of manflesh.”
If he had been running through forests, Rose couldn’t tell. He looked much the same as he had as a teenager, and if it weren’t for the flecks of stubble on his jaw and the tattoo on his forearm Rose could imagine they were back in her mom’s lake house that summer, smoking shitty weed and making fun of the art on the walls. That was before Rose had started remembering. Back when she was as happy as someone like her could realistically be.
“I know you said to not bother but for the record I think it’s stupid to kill yourself,” Dave said. “Just in my humble opinion.”
“I don’t want anything,” Rose said, which sounded too much like a non-sequitur. She tried again. “There is nothing for me to look forward to. This is a stale and useless place to be. Do you understand? Nothing is fun. Nothing is interesting. It’s not a chemical imbalance, this is simply how the world is presented to me because of a set of unfortunate factors and information that only I possess.”
“What about new experiences,” Dave said, biting his thumbnail. He was clearly trying to think of lifelines normal people would offer. It was a bit like drowning in a public pool and watching your teenage lifeguard ask around for someone who knew how to swim. “What about like, kids and shit.”
“I certainly don’t want a baby,” Rose said, jamming her fingernails into the toast and tearing it. “I’d rather die. If a baby happened upon me I would toss it into the nearest available Dumpster.”
“That’s fucked,” Dave said, looking around nervously like the three grey-haired occupants of the diner would offer violent retaliation to this statement. Rose put a corner piece of rye in her mouth, forced herself to chew it 15 times until it was gummy and soft, then swallowed. After repeating the process once more she snapped her fingers in Dave’s direction.
“Hi, how were your formative years?” she said. “Pretty good? Do you realize the neuroses they wove into us are inoperable? I wouldn’t trust myself a dozen miles from a child’s fragile eggshell of a psyche.”
“Way to implicate me for literally no reason,” Dave said. He was now shredding a straw wrapper into paper confetti. “I went to therapy and shit, okay? Dealt with all my issues-- back catalogue, real deep cut 1999 issues of Hustler--”
“You’re going to sit here and look me in the eyes and tell me therapy did anything for you? It’s puppetry-- or smoke and mirrors, rather. It’s for people too stupid to figure out dialectics on their own. What did they tell you, Dave? You have no sense of self because your big brother was a piece of shit? I could have done that for free.”
“Look, I’m not like you,” Dave said. Having rendered the wrapper to shreds he sat with his hands useless and empty. He was looking right at her. “You think you already got it all figured out. But you’re wrong, okay?”
“Do you have an eating disorder?” Rose asked him. The waitress came and filled their coffees in the ensuing silence. After a moment, Dave dumped three packets of raw sugar and two creamers into the mug. Rose learned in a dream that when they were on the meteor, Dave made his coffee sweet but didn’t stir it; he liked the unevenness of drinking it that way, the pockets of cream and primordial mass of sugar at the bottom. Pure insanity. Rose “remembered” this but not really. It was like learning something for the first time and realizing, in a platonic manner, you’ve known it all along and were only just remembering. Like algebra, or the national anthem.
(And what nation, again? Of course one of the Americas. Florida only ever spawned in the North American biome. Then again, it was hard to tell: everyone spoke round Midwest English on Earth C. [Really? No, stupid, of course not, that would be naivety; a child’s worldbuilding. A flat Star Trek planet with flat little aliens; homogenous natives and a ludicrous planet-wide culture. Cue Dave voice: and one of the most b-roll 1988 writers strike-ass eps too, dug out the bottom of roddenberry’s trash can, feat. papier-mâché aliens and the most boring away team comp of all time-- like shit, they got data, riker and lieutenant whats-her-name fucking around on a backlot sound stage leftover from ‘the three stooges in orbit’ and then have the gigantic balls to sell it to the drooling masses (yours truly) as groundbreaking television--!] Rose took her coffee black, as a rule, and pretended Alaska had always been on fire.)
“I hate to roll out the evidence like a sadistic Poirot,” Rose began, “but--"
“Okay, you have a fucking eating disorder, Columbo,” Dave said. He slapped his hands on either side of her plate, framing it. “Like what are you even doing here? Eating the toast molecule by molecule? Shit’s taking so long it’s already past its expiration date! Are you reducing it to the atomic level? Some kind of bread experiments the government is keeping under wraps? And don’t say ad hominem, Rose, I know you’re about to.”
“I wouldn’t stoop to it,” Rose said. If she was tossing out conversational bombs she might as well go all-in. “Do you really not remember anything from when we were kids?”
“I kinda hate talking about this,” Dave said. “This is why I don’t--”
He stopped himself.
“Oh, this is why you don’t hang out with me?” Rose asked. Her stomach felt cold. She finished the second mimosa in a dramatic gesture and slammed the flute down. “I’m sorry, Dave. I didn’t realize it was such a gigantic goddamn Herculean burden to spend time with the only other person on Earth who understands what you went through.”
“My therapist says guilt-tripping is emotional manipulation,” Dave said. He folded his hands on top of the table, like look what a good student I am. Rose was filled with the overwhelming urge to throw something.
“If you don’t want to hang out with me then don’t,” Rose said. She felt all of 10 years old. “I certainly wouldn’t want you to--”
“Woah, hold up. In my defense, your honor,” Dave said, putting his hands up defensively, “this is the first time I’ve seen you in over a year, and the second fucking thing you say is that you’re planning on killing yourself?”
“That just happens to be what is going on in my life,” Rose said. “Feel free to offer me literally any details about yours at your leisure.” She could go for another mimosa but was having immense difficulty catching the eye of their waitress.
“You mean like besides the fact that I live in New Mexico?” Dave said. He rubbed his hands over his eyes, knocking the glasses off-center. “So am I just supposed to sit here and like, what? Just nod along with this shit? Am I supposed to be okay with any of this?”
“I’m not asking for your blessing, I just wanted to give you a heads up,” Rose said. Where was their waitress? “If you’re going to be hysterical about it then forget it.”
“No,” Dave said. “No, no, because-- You think you’re so ahead of the game, whatever. I guess you forgot about me, or thought my feelings don’t matter--”
“Jesus H. Christ, they'll just give a psychology degree to anyone these days,” Rose said loudly. Dave ignored her.
“It sucks that your cat died,” he said. “And-- I know you’re unhappy. And I know all the other bullshit reasons people give to not kill yourself, none of that matters to you. Whatever is going on in your Rubik’s Cube of a brain, I don’t know. But what about me?”
“What about you?” Rose asked, flat.
“You can’t kill yourself, Rose,” Dave said. “It would fuck me up so bad.”
They sat there for a moment. It felt like a bomb had gone off. Since the moment she had begun planning her suicide in earnest Rose had already seen that this was the argument that would deflate everything, the angle that would puncture her righteous determination like a tragic balloon. It was naive to think that Dave wouldn’t play this card; she knew he would. She wanted to scream. All of it was for nothing, and in fact she had come here knowing that he would ruin everything. It was like she was just waiting for him to say it.
“You don’t understand,” she said. “This world is wrong. Everything is wrong. Not in the meaningless way that other people say this-- I mean on a deep, fundamental level. I’m the only one who remembers the truth. Doesn’t it stand to reason that removing myself from the equation could possibly trigger a reset, or--”
“I dunno,” Dave said. “You should just be like-- ‘this isn’t my problem anymore.’” He shrugged cartoonishly, as if demonstrating how easy it would be.
“It is my problem and will always remain my problem, in perpetuity,” Rose said. “I spend every day wracked with agony, burdened with the metaphysical decay of this timeline and yet unable to act, unable to lift a goddamn finger, reduced to a feeble shade of--"
“Ughhhh,” Dave groaned, and he threw a packet of strawberry jam at her. “Stop it with the timeline crap, that isn’t even a thing.”
“Yes it is.”
“No it isn’t.”
“You are the absolute last person who should be peddling nonsense like that. I can only hope for the reappearance of your third brain cell so you may one day join me in the bittersweet ranks of People Who Are Cognizant Of The Fucked Up Shit Going Down. We meet on Thursdays and our agenda largely consists of wailing, gnashing of teeth, et cetera."
“You are so goddamn loony,” Dave said, slumping back in the booth. The waitress re-appeared from whatever multidimensional pocket she had fled to.
“Anything else?” she asked.
“Check, please!” Rose said brightly, just like in the movies.
*
They walked along the beach and Dave stopped to inspect every third shell he saw. It was an overcast day, and the afternoon was sure to bring those 30-minute east coast storms that came and went like lightning.
“Are you good?” he asked after a few minutes. Rose stood still and watched the crash of the surf.
“I won’t fill my dress with rocks and drown myself in the Atlantic, if that’s what you mean,” she said, “but no, I’m not ‘good.’” And I don’t think I ever will be, was the unspoken conclusion.
“Me neither,” Dave said. He was crouched down on his heels and poking around a tide pool with a stick. “You know what's fucked up? I think I actually like Florida. Might stay a while.”
“I’ll warn you now, we’re not going to Disney World,” Rose said.
“Look, a sand dollar,” Dave said excitedly, and pressed it into Rose’s palm, and it was dry and cool.