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All things considered, Jack could be doing better. There’s something approaching a tinny quality to the lights in the Pitt, now; overly bright and contrasting, making the lurking shadows loom too near at hand. He can’t help but notice Robby’s absence everywhere. Two weeks is a lifetime. He has to bite his tongue to keep from complaining about it, but it doesn’t help; half his crew look at him with pity on their faces, and the other half outright make fun of him. He can’t control looking like a beaten dog, apparently.
When Dana catches him pretending not to mope at his desk one morning, she plants her hip on the side and sends him a stern glance. “Alright. What’s with the pouting?”
He sighs. “It’s just—have you heard from Robby?” he asks, and feels embarrassed of how naked the emotion is.
She frowns. “Yeah. He sent me a picture. And the kid, too, Whitaker—said he texted him. Something about housesitting.”
Jack turns slowly. He hadn’t actually expected her to have heard from Robby. He had absolute radio silence from the man, despite his attempts to reach out. “Are you serious?”
Dana studies him for a moment. “He’s been stonewallin’ you?”
He doesn’t reply, but that’s answer enough. She huffs quietly and looks to the side, adding: “Well, he’s doin’ alright. I’m not as worried as I was when he left.” Jack feels a sharp pang in his chest at that.
He looks down at his desk. “Okay. Thank you.”
He feels a hand pat his shoulder twice. “He’ll come to you in his own time,” Dana reassures with a soft smile, and for a moment he sees in that smile the same Dana who was a bit more bright-eyed and bushy-tailed ten years ago. A constant kindness at her center, still. He doesn’t know how to express to her how sick he feels that Robby won’t lean on him. He settles for a tight grin.
When he gets out of work, he ends up falling asleep staring at his phone, waiting for a lame picture of Robby doing a thumbs-up or a blurry landscape shot at sunset. When he wakes up he has (0) notifications. It’s hard not to take it personally.
After puttering around the house for a while, he throws in the towel and goes to the bar.
Sitting in the last seat with his back to the wall, cool glass in hand as he looks over the whole room and all the people in it, it’s easy to imagine he has anyone to talk to. This is the universal appeal of the bar, and he isn’t afraid to say he enjoys it. Except for nights like tonight, when a deep sort of apathy shutters his eyes and tends to drive away company.
He has two beers, and then gets tired at the prospect of having to drink another pint of liquid, so he switches to whiskey. He gets Robby’s Sazerac as a joke, but it turns out he’s the one who has to drink it, so the joke is entirely on him. It’s a good drink but it just depresses him. He switches back to plain whiskey.
At some point the bartender tries to ply a life story out of him. Jack takes this to mean he seems pretty drunk, and makes a point of ordering fries with his next drink; accepts the water that comes with them. He’s hungry anyway. They’re warm and fill his stomach and that is nice, he appreciates it. It’s a good feeling. He rides that for the next couple drinks until, what do you know, it’s 2 A.M. and the bar is closing. What he gets for trying to go out on a Tuesday night.
He leans against the brick wall and stares at his phone, willing something to appear on its screen, but the stupid thing stays dark. The bartender walks out of the bar and locks the door behind him, then sends Jack the kind of glance he’s been getting pretty tired of lately. At least it’s worth it when the guy opens his cigarette pack and offers him one if he lets him call Jack a cab. Jack accepts the cigarette and the offer in the same quick movement.
The bartender lights his cigarette, and then with a short grin walks off and gets on the phone to call a real, old-fashioned taxi cab. Jack feels a pang of affection for him and all Gen X bartenders of his ilk, genuine pillars of society. The guy is kind enough to offer him a safe way home but he doesn’t get paid enough to stay and make sure Jack gets in it; watching him walk off, Jack feels a sudden obligation to stay put and get in the taxi, whenever it may arrive. Bad karma to betray one’s bartender.
He tips his head against the brick wall and huffs, skin already beginning to prickle with sweat in the humid July air, barely less suffocating in the middle of the night. He pulls on the cigarette a couple times; thinks of sharing a cigarette with Robby in those spare moments before Jack and then Robby had both quit.
Nothing for it. He presses Robby’s contact.
It rings four times. It goes to voicemail. Jack is very lucid at this moment.
“You—” he starts. It’s a bad start. “Okay, yeah, I’ve been drinking, we can start with that. But it doesn’t mean I can’t call you anyway, Robby. You are my best fuckin’ friend, and my emergency contact, too, and I don’t get why I can gut myself in front of you and you gut yourself in front of me and then you don’t talk to me for two weeks. I know you have cell service, man, you sent a picture to Dana. And to Whitaker,” he whines, then coughs around the cigarette.
“I—you saw what I was like, after she died. I was a fuckin’ mess, you—” he heaves a breath. “You got me through that. I let you see all the ugly shit. I let you carry me through it. And you already carry so much, shit, I just—” he cuts himself off and watches with rainy eyes as a couple cars pass him by on the street.
“I wanna be that person for you. I wanna carry you. I wanna, fuck, dance through the darkness with you, and I didn’t come up with that, no,” he says. “I’m sorry if you don’t want that. I’m sorry if I keep forcing you to deal with all my shit. I’m sorry if you don’t wanna be ugly in front of me, you don’t wanna see me be ugly. Fuck, if—if that’s why you won’t talk to me, I’ll cut that shit out. You’ll never see me on the roof again, unless I’m there to drag you down; you just gotta let me drag you down. Or let me know you’re okay. Something. I’ll do anything, whatever you want, if you just let me in a little bit, brother. I can’t sit here and let our relationship become… nothing.”
“But even if—” his voice catches and slurs. “Even if I—fuck, even if it fucked our relationship, I don’t regret letting you help me. I wouldn’t have made it, man. Just let me help you. Just talk to me,” he pleads, looking up at the endless clear night sky for some kind of answer, as if it would ever look back.
Jack gets his answer: there is none. He stays on the line until the taxi pulls up a couple minutes later. He lets the cigarette tumble to the ground and die there. He hangs up. He slides in and presses his head against the pane of glass.
When he comes back to himself, he’s in front of his house. He pushes a ten and a twenty into the taxi driver’s hand and then hauls himself out of the car, his leg and his drunkenness making him unsteady on his feet. Falling over would be really bad; he tries not to do it.
As he’s taking the keys out of the lock and shutting the door behind him, his phone lights up with a buzz. Robby is calling.
Most of what Jack said evaporated from his mind as soon as he said it. He has no idea what Robby’s going to say. He picks up anyway.
There’s silence on the line for a while. A hoarse cough, then: “I got your voicemail.” His voice is heaven-sent but sounds like hell, a little bit.
“Are you sick?”
“I’m smoking,” Robby says. Jack’d judge him if he hadn’t been doing the same.
“Thought you quit.”
“Well.” Robby exhales. “I bought one pack for the whole trip. Relative to—” he pauses, awkward. “You know, the little deaths seem pretty harmless.”
Jack huffs. “There’s something else they call the little death that’s medically proven to be way better for you,” he says wryly.
“Are you asking me if I’m having enough orgasms, Jack?” Robby asks incredulously.
“As your doctor, I think you should have at least as many as you have cigarettes on this trip, man. An orgasm a day keeps the doctor away.” Robby laughs. Jack keeps quiet, waiting for him to say anything of substance. He waits for a while.
Finally, Robby says: “I’m sorry I didn’t text you.”
Jack flops onto his couch. “Yeah.” He doesn’t have the energy to make it sound like it’s okay.
“I didn’t mean to worry you. I just—” he sighs. “I didn’t know what to say. I don’t want to keep up a front with you but I also don’t want you to see how I’m doing. It’s easier just not to talk to you at all.”
Jack lays his head back on the couch. Hard to see how he can take that in a positive light. “Thanks, man.” Robby makes a frustrated sound.
“No, Jack, I—what you said. About being ugly with you. I haven’t—I haven’t been able to do that. With you. Not like maybe I need to. Sometimes when I can’t keep it together, I’ve let you, but. I just find it so fucking intolerable to be. Vulnerable. Like that,” Robby grinds out, voice thin. “So I just need to—” his voice catches and becomes a wheeze. “To run away, okay?”
Jack sniffs. “Wish you wouldn’t. Wish you would let me carry you. Or just hold your fucking hand while you find your own way.”
“Yeah,” Robby breathes, and Jack can hear him wipe his nose. “I wish I would too, sometimes.”
“What do I have to do?” Jack begins to plead again, and doesn’t care that he seems pathetic. “What can I say to you that’ll get you to let me fucking love you? What can I change for you?”
“I dunno, man,” Robby replies, voice strangled and high. “I don’t want you to change. I already—” he chuckles. “I already love you, as you are, Jack, and you love me as I am, too, and it just—it fucking scares me. You’ve always looked at me so closely and sometimes I hate being looked at.”
Jack hums. Something warm grows in his chest; the hot burning coal of humiliation blooming into a contented inferno. “I do love you, Robby. I don’t care if you’re afraid to be looked at. I’m always gonna look for you. Don’t make me miss you, man.”
“I’ll come back,” Robby says, shaky. “I don’t know when, but I will.”
Jack leans his face further against the phone, as if he could press his cheek to Robby’s chest. “You don’t have to be perfect. You don’t even have to be good. You just have to be here. Come back to me when you’re ready for it,” he murmurs. “And I’ll love you.”
“Okay,” Robby replies. He takes a deep breath in. “I’ll love you too. See you, Jack,” he chokes out, then hangs up.
Jack lets his phone fall onto his sternum, warm and pressing against the heat already roiling in his ribcage. It’s not nothing; it’s something. The promise of everything, later down the line. He just has to let Robby come to it.
He lets the soft spiraling of the world drag him under, spinning in even rounds; which fits so well, feeds his suspicion that to be drunk be to be able to see the truth, knowing the Earth revolves on an axis ever-turning and bringing the sun back around, even if for a time it fails to shine on his face. ✷