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Edgar is the one who calls Gretchen an Uber, after Jimmy gets home with his eyes too wide, looking manic and hollowed-out, and says “I just proposed.”
“Jimmy!” Edgar almost yells, springing to his feet. “That’s–– wait, so where is she?”
“In the Hollywood Hills somewhere.”
“What?”
“She said we were a family,” Jimmy sneers, enunciating every inch of the word like it’s a curse.
“Oh. That’s not good.” That’s really not good, and Edgar knows that and Gretchen knows that, right? By now, she must know. He orders the fucking Uber, because saying “no” to Lindsay's pizza request has maxed him out for the week, and he doesn’t want Gretchen to get murdered for real.
The Uber driver cancels the trip and charges him a no-show fee, which is perfect, and finally Edgar gets the directions out of Jimmy and drives up there himself because yeah, of course.
He finds her halfway down the hill, weaving a little as she walks, and as she wrenches open the car door, all flaming hair and brittle bravado, he’s overwhelmed by how fucking badly he needs her and Jimmy to work.
“Jimmy didn’t send me,” he tells her, because this seems important.
“I know,” she scoffs. Then, when she sees him take the turn for Silver Lake, “Don’t you fucking dare.”
They end up in a bar in West Hollywood, the worst kind of place, “pub fare with a Cajun twist”. Gretchen orders six tequila shots and slams five of them, pushes the last towards him and he knows he shouldn’t, because he’s been better lately, so much better and alcohol is still the biggest variable. Drinking without smoking first is a bad idea, but he drinks the shot, and then three more.
“He’s never gonna give a shit about you,” Gretchen tells him, words slurred but sharp. “I know you think if you follow him around for long enough then he’ll stop kicking you in the face and adopt you, but he won’t. Jimmy’s one of those people who can just keep kicking a puppy forever until it dies.”
“Did you say yes?”
“What?”
“When he asked you to marry him.”
She looks straight at him, eyes glistening, and says nothing. Of course she said yes. They both love Jimmy too much, and he less he gives back the worse it gets, but then again maybe he’s projecting.
*~*
On Monday, he pitches a sketch about a guy who fakes a murder scene to propose to his weirdo girlfriend, only for her to get murdered for real. Too dark, Doug Benson tells him, with a creeped-out glare, and in retrospect he can see that. His sense of what’s too dark is a little off on account of the years he spent watching people die. He tells Doug that, too, which is a bad call.
On Thursday, Doug fires him. “I thought I was hiring Dr Weed, not his self-harming cousin,” he says by way of explanation, which isn’t even an objectively funny line. Edgar figures now isn’t the time for constructive criticism.
He thinks about calling Dorothy to tell him there’s no need to be jealous of him, that he’s way more of a failure than she could ever dream of being, because even if she never gets her dream at least she has one. At least she knows what she wants to do with her life, other than get through the day. But he doesn’t call her, because he doesn’t miss her even a little, because he feels lighter now that she’s gone, because he’s no longer really human.
Gretchen has been staying at Lindsay’s since that night, and now Jimmy has vanished too, his car gone, not answering his cell. Edgar had forgotten how much he hated being in the apartment alone, his thoughts too loud with nobody else’s sounds to distract him, and on the fourth night he can’t take it any more.
“I have roaches,” Lindsay tells him when she answers the door, beaming.
“Oh. Yeah, Dorothy used to sign up for the exterminator, or you can get these traps that use pheromones––“
“I’ve never had roaches before!”
“You don’t seem… that unhappy about it?”
“Living in a shitty apartment with roaches and loud pipes and scary neighbors is a rite of passage, like piercing your ears, or getting fisted for the first time,” she says, eyes gleaming. “And I never did it! This is why I don’t know how to do anything!”
He likes being around Lindsay, because nothing ever seems to touch her. Bad things happen and they just bounce off her, and she remains unchanged and oblivious, a feather-light constant. It’s comforting.
Gretchen’s out at a work thing, Lindsay says vaguely, the kind of afterparty which means she won’t be back til dawn. They smoke, and order pizza, and smoke some more, and though this is his usual supply it’s not coursing through him the way it should. There’s no calm warmth spreading outwards from his chest, and his thoughts aren’t slowing down, and he realizes he’s just waiting to be numb.
“I lost my job.”
“You got a job?”
“I shouldn’t have got it. I don’t know how to be anything in between numb and scared,” he says, then realizes he’s still talking out loud. “There’s no middle ground. I either feel nothing or I feel everything.”
“That sounds awful.”
She’s oblivious, Lindsay, but she’s sincere at the most unexpected times. She’s not Gretchen’s best friend for nothing. He wonders what she’d say if he told her his worst thoughts, the worst memories he has, the blood and the shrapnel and the children. The man he saw blown to pieces. The endless days in the desert where he’d prayed for death. He really never expected to make it back, and sometimes he thinks he died there and everything since has been his Jacob’s Ladder death dream.
Later in the night she straddles him, the smell of her shampoo overwhelming and her breasts so close to his face. Her mouth is soft and hot and wanting, and he kisses her back but then he can’t breathe.
“Wait––”
“Edgar, I felt you smelling my hair like a big creeper that one time. You totally want this.”
And he does, he did, but now he doesn’t want anything. It’s been so long since he wanted anything other than to survive, and it’s like the weed is turning on him, or maybe he’s turning on it. He knows he won’t be able to get hard, doesn’t even want to try.
He pushes her away, mumbles an excuse as he leaves, and at least he knows that this, too, will bounce off Lindsay like nothing.
When he gets back to the apartment Jimmy is there, typing at the kitchen table like everything’s normal, and for a moment Edgar imagines choking him.
“About bloody time!” he exclaims, not looking up from his screen. “I did not expect to get back from a three-day creative pilgrimage, a road trip designed to take me to the very limits of my psychological endurance a la Kerouac, to find literally no food in the house.”
“Sorry,” says Edgar automatically, and listens to Jimmy ramble on about his road trip without hearing a word. How long has he been gone? He’s lost track of days, and that’s not good.
“Gretchen not here?” Jimmy says eventually, his tone exaggeratedly casual.
“No.”
“Where were you this evening, anyway? I thought Dorothy finally gave into her self-preservation instinct and left the state, presumably in search of a man who’s less likely to mistake her for an enemy combatant in the middle of the night.”
“Fuck you, Jimmy.”
The astonished look on Jimmy’s face is almost worth it.
*~*
He’s dreamed of killing Dorothy before, is the thing. Has woken up to find her strangled beside him, the feeling of her neck so vivid under his hands. He’s dreamed of killing all of them, always by accident, and that’s probably why he spends so much time cooking perfect meals for them in reality. They think he’s a doormat, but really he’s making amends: I made gourmet breakfast nachos, I’m sorry I slit your throat while you slept last night.
He hasn’t slept in days now, or maybe he has without knowing it. He lies awake and stares upwards until the ceiling looks like the sky, and he’s in the desert wondering if tonight will be his last. At some point he wakes up and understands where he is, and after he smokes a joint he finally sleeps, the desert returning to him, because he never really left.
There’s gunfire nearby, louder than normal and not from his camp, and he tries to spring into action but his legs aren’t working right, every movement like he’s in molasses. Something is about to blow and he knows he needs to get out, a ticking in his ears so loud it could be inside his skull, and suddenly there are figures all around him and he’s moving, running, gripping his rifle which feels too smooth in his hands.
More shots fired, bullets raining on either side of him and he tries to make himself as small as possible, gets a wall at his back but the whole camp is about to blow, no good taking cover. A blast at his left ear, so close he can feel the heat of it and his throat is raw from screaming but he can’t hear himself over the gunfire, can’t hear what the others are trying to tell him.
“Edgar. Hey.”
Someone is shaking him, trying to get him up, but his legs won’t hold him and he tries to tell them to go without him, just get out. He hears his own name again and again, and tries to make himself as small as possible so they’ll just leave, please, just let it happen.
The gunfire is gone. He’s on the floor, not in a tent, his back up against a solid wall, and he doesn’t recognize anything around him.
“Edgar,” Jimmy says, right by his ear. Everything comes back to him, this apartment, the couch there, the wooden steps, the corner into which he’s wedged.
“What––” He looks around into the darkness. “I heard––”
“Fireworks. The new neighbors, it’s fireworks.” A pause. “Jesus. I thought fireworks were alright, now.”
“They were.” He can barely choke out the words, the admission of how meaningless that so-called breakthrough has become. Every solution is only temporary and he’ll never live like more than a half-person, not for long. He wants to tell Jimmy to leave but he’s crying too hard to speak, too hard to hide it even in the dark, hunching into himself and trying not to sob out loud, head pressed into his knees.
“What kind of a sociopath sets off fireworks at random in the middle of November, anyway?” he hears Jimmy mutter, and there’s a hand on his back, rubbing firm circles. “Oooh, we just moved in, let’s assert our presence by symbolically ejaculating in blazing technicolor all over the night sky for ten minutes straight, at a volume that ensures every single person within a ten mile radius will be unable to sleep! I saw them moving in and the husband’s got a man bun, so fuck literally everything about these people.”
He’s not sure whether he’s laughing or crying now, probably both, and Jimmy doesn’t know how badly he needs him to keep talking. Except that maybe he does know, because Jimmy is the most self-absorbed person on the face of the planet, except for the scant and subtle ways in which he’s not. The silence is gaping now, though.
“Tell me something else,” he whispers, closing his eyes tighter to try and stop the tears. “Anything.” Just talk.
“Well,” Jimmy begins, after a pause. “I did have a revelation about my next book while I was on the road, which I was gearing up to talk about before you flounced off earlier. It’s a post-apocalyptic revenge story, which unfolds from the dual perspectives of two teenage lovers separated by the blast. We begin in modern-day Las Vegas, New Year’s Eve, the night the world changed forever…”
He falls asleep right there on the floor, listening to Jimmy’s story. In the morning, he will wake up in the same place with a blanket over him, and neither of them will mention any of this. They never do.
*~*
One morning, Gretchen is back. Edgar’s been taking sleeping pills this week, a new prescription that actually works, which means he’s dead to the world past midnight and doesn’t hear a thing. The pills knock him out so hard that everything feels fuzzy and indistinct for a few hours after he wakes up, so that seeing Gretchen in the kitchen feels almost like a dream, Jimmy next to her making shitty instant coffee like everything is back to normal. There’s no ring on her finger, and he doesn’t ask.
“I’m glad Linds is finding herself or whatever, but that place is disgusting,” Gretchen says, bare legs propped on the table like she never left.
“I know since moving in here you’ve become accustomed to the good life, but I’m finding it hard to imagine an apartment worse than that hellhole you used to call home.”
“My place never had roaches!”
“No, because even cockroaches took one look at that place and said ‘Hmm, this seems unsanitary and potentially like a violation of at least four housing codes, let’s keep looking’.”
Neither one of them acknowledges Edgar when he enters, and he can’t stop smiling. That morning, he serves definitively the best breakfast burritos he’s ever made, so good that even Jimmy can’t find much to criticize.
“I can’t believe that cunt just skipped town,” Gretchen is complaining, when Edgar tunes back into the conversation. “She’s lucky I don’t sue her ass for negligence. Therapy’s just one big fucking power play for grown-up nerdy kids who never got to feel important.”
“I thought you said she’d uncovered earth-shattering truths about your relationship with your mother. Truths that had fundamentally shifted your worldview and your entire emotional identity,” needles Jimmy.
“Yeah, well, a stopped clock’s right twice a day.”
“Hey, Gretchen?” Edgar says, impulsively. “How did you find your therapist?”
“Google. Ain’t rocket science. You can read reviews first to weed out the pervs and the Freudians.”
“Lot of overlap in that Venn diagram, one assumes,” Jimmy mutters.
“And you’d… Would you recommend it?”
She shrugs. “It’s a whole bunch of bullshit, but you literally get to talk about yourself for an hour a week. Hey, you could tell all those creepy war stories we don’t want to hear! They love that shit.”
This seemed unthinkable, after the VA doctor whose name he’s tried hard to forget, but she’s one person and Los Angeles is the therapy capital of the world. This morning, that Google search seems possible. And he figures if he can piece together enough mornings like this, enough of Jimmy’s stories and Gretchen's snark, enough moments when the world seems human and infinite, then maybe he doesn’t need to be exactly stable. Maybe this works.