Scenes 9

One:
We just kept laughing, do you remember that? We laughed for about three minutes straight, first it was about the noise that woman made as she fell off the grape stomping platform, but it dissolved into nothing, I was laughing because you were laughing and you were laughing because I was laughing and your face looked so red and tears were rolling down our cheeks and we struggled to breathe. That was my favorite, laughing like that.

Two:
There is this moment during her song when he plays bass drum and you play wood blocks and I play xylophone and I know we've had our differences but in this really weird way I just feel very connected at that moment, like it's easy, like this is how it should be.

Three:
I marked the stairs and then you marked the stairs.

The Dream

In her dream, she's handing in a math quiz.

She looks out the window as she settles back in her seat. Outside, it's storming. Lightning strikes the oak in the courtyard, fusing together a squirrel and a bird. They tumble to the ground and struggle to get separated. The bird twitches its feet.

The teacher calls her to the front of the room with a frown on his face and her paper in his hand - her quiz, marred with red pen. Didn't you read the directions? he asks her, they explicitly say to perform the integration at standard temperature and pressure.

She wakes up drenched in sweat.

School the next day is shaky. She pours over the math quiz instructions and finds not a single hint of chemistry. She laughs it off. Finishing with her quiz just a few moments to spare, she looks over her work. Something is wrong. Instead of positives and negatives, she wrote sharps and flats.

Things get worse from there.

She's learning about Ksp values in third period. She can't stop thinking about sulfuric acid on the staff paper - a diminished chord, she decides. She tries to find the volume of Brahm's Quartet No. 5 if it's rotated about the y-axis. Instead of taking notes on Dos Palabras she finds herself analyzing the syntax of her Spanish-to-English Dictionary. She writes a DBQ on the French Revolution as it relates to Heron's Law. Lines start blurring everywhere. She accidentally makes out with her brother and calls her boyfriend "mom". She slurps her soup with a fork. She sharpens a pen.

That night, lying under her bed, she knows it can't go on. She sneaks downstairs and writes out a suicide note in Spanish with an eraser, and then, sitting at the kitchen table, her hair pulled back into a ponytail, her eyes squeezed tightly shut, she presses the gun to her forehead and pulls the trigger, gently drenching herself with a water pistol.

N's Last - Part Three

"You need to read this."

"What?"

"You need to read this."

Bill blinked. He moved his hand from the receiver. "Hello? Hey, yeah. I'm going to have to call you back."

He hung up and took the manuscript from Theo, who began pacing the room, finally settling at the window. Arms crossed, legs shoulder-width, he stared out at the street and chewed on his lip.

"I don't see what the problem is. It's definitely genuine," Bill said.

"Did you actually read it?" Theo moved across the room, grabbing the story. "Look: ‘the bunny hopped as if in slow motion, his owner did not chase him, for there was no need in this land; things moved differently here, and-'"

Bill interrupted. "I read it."

"We can't publish this."

"It's by N."

"It's terrible."

Bill was angry now. "Are you kidding me? The man wrote the best fiction in the world. He sold millions of copies of every single book. Critics raved. The man is the best."

"He was the best," Theo corrected him. "Not anymore. Look at this – it's awful. If we print this we ruin the quarterly. We ruin N. No one's heard from him in thirty years. The guy went crazy."

Bill stood up, his voice measured, his fists clenched, his face inches from his fellow editor's. "If we publish this, we make a million bucks on one issue."

"Is money all you ever think about, you conniving bastard?"

"You don't have a family," Bill said between gritted teeth, "your paycheck doesn't matter. Mine does."

Theo yelled. "I don't care about your goddamn paycheck, Bill, we can't publish this."

Bill's punch was quick. It hit Theo in the nose. Something cracked. Theo fell.

There was a beat. Bill steadied his breathing.

"We have to publish it."

He grabbed the phone and left, slamming the door behind him. Theo could hear him dialing in the next room. Grabbing N's story, he picked himself up and walked over to the door.

Bill heard the click, and his heart sunk. He dropped the phone. "Theo," he yelled, yanking the locked handle furiously, "open the door."

Theo took out his lighter.

Friday

On Friday nights, he drives.

He drives starting twenty minutes before rush hour in suburbia - four-thirty, most nights - but on Friday he leaves a little early because rush hour comes a little sooner. He leaves twenty minutes before rush hour because the intersection is twenty minutes from his house.

It's a little before four-thirty, right now, and he's there, doing his first round. He's sitting pushed back from the steering wheel, right arm straight out, shades on. He comes from their right, from Mill Plain Street, signaling left onto Sturges. Across is a regular with a red volvo, and she knows the deal with this intersection even if she doesn't know the twenty-year-old waving her on has waved her on thirteen times before. With a curt nod in his direction she makes her her turn. He cuts left right on her tail, slowing up bumper-even to the car behind her. The guy coming the other way on Mill Plain slides through after him.

He makes two more lefts and then starts over - Mill Plain to Sturges, letting someone go, taking his turn, and then slowing up so the car coming the other way can move. He does this every day at rush hour because there should really be a light at this intersection. He gets annoyed about little stuff like that. His high school girlfriend said it was cute.

His sister calls him and asks for a ride to her friend's house. He says no and feels bad, but he's busy and they need him here. If there's anyone who could make him leave his post it would probably be his sister, but even then it isn't likely to happen. On Fridays the intersection is a little more jammed than usual, and he knows it better than anyone. He herds his flock carefully.

His sister is a freshman at the same high school he went to. She's the kind of girl that seems to have it all: good friends, a junior boyfriend, a spot on the varsity field hockey team, fantastic grades. She's smart - that's for damn sure - and she's really the only one he trusts. She understands him.

He slots up in the queue for a third time, glancing around, eyes sharp, ending up helping a nervous looking teenager get past the intersection. As he pulls around a fourth time, he thinks about his old high school friends and wonders when they'll get a break from college. Probably in April.

By the seventeenth turn around, the intersection has thinned out. He makes one more left, letting a middle-aged man in a Chevy go in front of him. No one is coming the other way, so he decides to call it a night. The intersection will be okay without him.

He stops at the Burger King down the street and gets the number three with no fries - he's trying to shape up a little bit. He eats his dinner in the dark parking lot, contemplating what he'll do for the rest of the evening. Ultimately, he decides on a movie.

He tries to throw his garbage into the can from the curb, but he misses. With a resigned sigh, he picks up the trash and drops it in the can. On the way back to the car, he absent-mindedly wonders what his ex-girlfriend is doing right now. Maybe playing the clarinet. That had been an old inside joke between them.

He drives away.

The Accident

N's Last - Part Two

He began leafing through the manuscript wildly. "Bill, this is from N."

Bill gave a fake laugh.

"No, I'm not-," Theo insisted, "this is an honest-to-god manuscript written by N."

Without looking up, Bill said, "Oh, yeah, 'cause it's not good enough that the best writer of our generation who went recluse and hasn't been seen for twenty years sends us a submissions. He has to actually write it out by hand and send us the original."

Theo grinned and held up the stack of paper, N's distinct autograph dominating the bottom half of the front page. "Also, he signed it."

Bill was halfway across the room in the blink of an eye. "That's genuine, isn't it?" he demanded, ripping the story from Theo's hands and tearing through it. "This is his handwriting, too."

"This could be big," Theo said, leaning forward in his chair, his forehead on his palm.

Bill laughed in disbelief. "Are you joking? This is huge. This is what Fiction has been waiting for. We publish this story and we make a million dollars in one issue, easy. Not to mention the ten thousand extra subscriptions." - he was getting giddy - "I'm calling our publisher."

Dropping the package, Bill practically skipped to the next room.

Theo picked it up and began reading. He heard Bill's voice from the other room. "Pam? Yeah, hey. Listen, how much would it cost to print a few extra copies of the magazine this month?"

"Bill," Theo called out, still reading the story. He was picking at his lip.

Bill said, "yeah?"

Scenes 8

One:
You tell me that it will be only you and me presenting the details of the Teller Amendment, and then you suggest maybe we use a sledgehammer.

Two:
I think it's pretty funny that you printed off a picture of that hedgehog.

Three:
El gato es el nuestro.

The Laugh

It was her laugh that made him nervous, at first.

She thought he was funny, and when he said something really amusing and she was standing next to him she would press her nose against his shoulder and grab the underside of his arm and squeeze her eyes shut and laugh. He liked that about her – that little extra bit of contact – but it made him a little nervous.

He fell in love with her because of that laugh, and it was pouring on the day he asked her out in front of the library downtown. They walked outside and she was just about to leave to get on the bus when, suddenly, he called out to her:

Hey, wait.

Yeah?

Do you want to hang out some time?

Like a date?

Yes. I mean- yes.

With you?

Yeah, with me.

She paused for a second, and then she walked back, kissed him on the cheek, whispered in his ear, and flounced away, impervious to the rain. Momentarily, he froze, petrified by his own bravery, his own success, and yet even as the biggest smile he had ever smiled stretched across his mouth he felt something else, something wrong, something nervous. He knew something was incorrect about this. In the movies, no one had doubts. No one felt scared.

He felt scared.

Time passed, and his fear focused. He knew how it would end. It would be a note left somewhere he would find. It would be written out in her curvy feminine cursive. It would say: “It’s been fun.”

As their lives changed, so too did the location of the dreaded note in his imagination. During high school it was pinned to his locker door with the magnet his little sister made for him. When they went to the same college, it was in his mailbox along with an advertisement for bad pizza and beer. Even when they got married the note persisted – left on the kitchen table, next to the fruit basket. Thinking consciously, he tried to convince himself of the reason for his nightmare. She was extraordinary. He was not. He wondered why she stayed with him. For the most part, this kept him content. When she laughed, though, something different boiled to the surface. When she pressed her nose against his shoulder, he knew there was something else.

The note came one wintry evening in January – a Monday – and she had a doctor’s appointment in the morning. He came home from work and called out her name as he stomped the snow off his shoes. It was on the kitchen table, as he feared, and he spotted it while he was taking off his jacket and read it by the light from above the stove.

It said, simply:

The doctor says I’m dying.

As he sank to the floor, the note he never saw coming clutched in his palm, he realized there never had been anything dishonest in her laugh.

The Anti-Jeff: Part 4

There was a click.

At first, I prepared an entire speech. I took my government-issued writing utensil and government-issued lined paper and wrote out a whole speech, but in the end I decided to go with a punchier approach - the kind that left the Jeffs confused and dead, in that order. Now my whole plan was ruined.

I pulled the trigger again.

There was another click.

One of the Jeffs stood up. I pulled the trigger for a third time, but the only result was that damned clicking.

Jeff grabbed the gun out of my hand.

"Tim was right," he remarked. The other Jeff made a little sound of approval as the first one examined the gun.

"We knew you were an enemy from day one, Sam. Tim planned all of this. He's one of the best Jeffers out there. We're quite glad to have him."

At this point, I was fairly convinced that someone had replaced my government-issued with water with non-government-issued water and I was, in fact, hallucinating.

"We replaced your phone wiring with a direct line to Jeff headquarters. We pretended to be the police and acted like we didn't want to use your house. We hoped that you would let it go. You had been a friend for so long. We didn't want to hurt you. When you went out on your own we were crushed."

I tried to make eye contact with the other Jeff. He didn't look at me.

"We knew you were tracking us here, so when you asked for a gun, we gave you this one. It's a real gun, Sam, and we knew you'd show up with it. The only issue is that the safety controls are reversed. Quite an efficient little problem solver. With you gone, the Jeffs can be free to continue our plan to overthrow the government and set up our own regime."

He clicked the safety to the safe position which was, in this case, the non-safe position.

"No long speeches," he said, "no melodrama. This ends here."

"You already made a speech," the other Jeff commented.

"Yes, and I already said that when I was about to shoot you," I added.

"Yes, well, no more long speeches. This ends here, after my other long speech."

He pulled the gun up to my head. My heart was hammering in my chest.

"Feeling tired?" Jeff grinned.

Now that he mentioned it, I was feeling a little weary. My eyes ached.

"This room has a slightly lower oxygen concentration than that of the normal atmosphere. As I scare you with this gun, you'll panic and start to need more air. Eventually you'll faint and fall to the ground, thus activating a multi-contact electrical pad in the floor, killing you instantly."

"Wow," I said, feigning awe.

Jeff smiled. "I know! It was all my idea."

"No, it's just that it sounds sort of..." I petered off.

"Impressive?"

"Incredible?"

"Iconoclastic?"

"I was going to go with," I paused here, for the dramatic effect I so duly deserved, and then shouted: "inefficient!"

I bolted for the door, squaring up my shoulder, aiming, making contact. The door smashed open.

"Hey," the sitting Jeff yelled, "shoot him!"

I vaulted off the catwalk. The gun went off. The bullet struck the railing next to my hand. It sparked. I landed on a box. It collapsed. I sprinted past three more government-issued crates, under a government-issued forklift, and past a government-issued economy-sized bottle of ketchup-flavored-condiment. Bullets whined by my face.

Outside, I raced to my car, throwing myself over the hood and into the driver's seat. I revved the engine and raced down the long industrial driveway back onto the interstate.

As I drove away from the warehouse that evening, I knew what future lay ahead of me. Immediately, I would have to switch cars as soon as possible, of course - I now knew that the claws of the Jeffers reached further into the government than I at first feared. In the long run, though, I could never return to my home, and I would not let myself risk my family's safety by contacting them. I would have to travel alone, rely only on myself. An early death was inevitable, but I would just have to hope I could take a few of them down with me.

My old life was over. I had one purpose. I have one purpose. Nothing remains but the enemy.

I am the Anti-Jeff.

Turn Around

I have missed opportunities before, that is an understatement, I have missed so many opportunities I could fill up a blank dictionary with a list of opportunities I have missed, it would look like this: didn't talk to a girl, didn't try to jump over the fence, didn't grab you and shake you and say what happened we were best friends and I told you everything, I told you about all the opportunities I missed, and now what, what, what, so what follows is a list of reasons to turn around.

It starts with the photograph - I like relating a photograph to a post, even if it is by saying that if you don't look up from that book you will get struck in the head by a dumpster, but unfortunately that is how I have to relate a photograph to a post in this case, so here: if you don't look up from that book you will get struck in the head by a dumpster and I'm not sure what that stick figure is doing with his legs and with his arms but whatever he is doing you will be doing and it doesn't look comfortable, so look up from that book if only because you should be ducking right about now and also look away from the teacher every once in a while, because even if there weren't any dumpsters in the parking lot that evening I'm sure there was someone with a brightly colored shirt that wouldn't have minded some eye contact, that wouldn't have minded your smile, and that didn't mind your smile when you smiled at him (if only briefly).

Sometimes it will be that simple, but I have found that it is often much worse, I have found that oftentimes people who do not look around get run over by trucks and buses and sadness, out of the three getting run over by sadness is not the worst but it is the longest - getting hit by a truck and a bus happens quick, just boom, and then that's it, but getting hit by sadness is like feeling something eat away at your stomach, is like watching a slow-motion punch because you will be sitting around and you will not look around and then suddenly you are sad because someone you love has left and will never come back or someone you love was never there in the first place and you were imagining it the whole time or someone you love has become someone you don't love, has become someone you just know, or even someone you don't know at all, someone you never met.

So when you are done reading this please get up, please look around a little bit, and if you see someone who makes you smile go ahead and smile and don't stop smiling until they look around and see you and start smiling too.

N's Last - Part One

It was a cold day, grimy day - the kind where the sun shines bright and the week-old snow looks gray and oily in the harsh new light - and Bill's punch was quick, unexpected. It sent Theo reeling, toppling back onto the pile of reject submissions - a thousand of the worst stories ever written cushioning his fall, a million imprecise words delivering him from a concussion that would have left his ears ringing for months.

Bill lowered his voice. "We have to publish it."

It started a half hour ago. The courier pulled off his hat as he climbed the stairs, N's last tucked under his arm, stuffed inside one of those padded minella folders that comes with a string to keep the flap shut.

Theo signed for the package at the door and dumped it on the pile with all of the others.

At first, he and Bill had rented out a PO box - the second-smallest one they could find - but as their circulation increased so did the number of submissions they received. Now Fiction published every month to a few thousand subscriptions. Not bad for two guys who worked out of a dingy little office above a record store.

Theo stood up from the beat-up leather couch and lit up a cigarette, wandering over to the window. This was how he and Bill spent their Sundays - reading submissions. Most of them were lousy, some redeemable, and only a tender few really readable, really excellent. These were the ones that were published each month, and that was what Fiction was - a collection of excellent fiction from unknown authors. Bill clutched the story he just read in his left hand, folding it up as leaned against the sill.

"Got anything?" Bill asked, looking from up from a ten-pager about a goldfish that wouldn't die.

"Nah," Theo replied. He turned from the window to throw the little bundle of paper into the rejects. "One man's fight against the car wash industry. I'm thinking no."

Bill gave a little snort as Theo once again surveyed the mountain of submissions. He picked out a thick, padded minella envelope from the top of the stack and meandered back over to the couch. Taking a drag from his cigarette, he carefully untied the string, pulled open the flap, and dumped the contents of the package onto his lap.

His eyes got wide.

On Jumping and Catching

I've had two experiences that bordered on religious. The first happened when I was seven. I dreamt I was an adult, driving down a hill. I looked up saw God.

The second involved a frisbee.

I have seen a million things move through the air - footballs, shoes, sandwiches - and each has moved a different way. I have seen things soar through the air; I have seen things fly through the air; I have seen things push air out of the air while they barrel towards their intended victim.

It was winter. This was appropriate. Winter is a time for preciseness. We were at a hat tournament. It was cold. I was clearly the worst player on my team. Everyone resented being stuck with me, except for Joe. Joe was tall, and he had a beard and a beanie to protect against the icy wind. He was friendly. He coached me through my biggest mistakes. He was the only one who would throw to me.

After one point where I had made a good cut and dump, Joe came up to me, rubbing his raw hands together and smiling.

Good play. You got in and out of the cutting lane quick so I could make that pass to you.

Thanks, Joe.

It was a couple plays after that that it happened. One of the players on our team with a phenomenal backhand hucked it long to Joe. Joe followed it. His defender stayed tight. The disk slowed down, and both passed it. And then suddenly Joe planted a cleat into the frozen ground. He stopped short. His defender tried to stop himself but he slipped. Joe sprang up opposite to the direction that only milliseconds ago he had been sprinting. He caught the disk. His gaze dropped to the ground. He landed.

It was in that moment, though - the one right before the disk was in his hands - that I finally recognized a new verb. Things can soar and fly and barrel, sure, that's fine (if you're into that kind of thing). What disks do is different. Disks hang. Disks stop completely. Disks wonder if they left their oven on and pause for a second, contemplating whether they remembered to press the off button after they took out the brownies. Disks think their cell phone is ringing and pause to rummage through their backpack before they realize the noise is coming from somewhere else. Disks have a moment where they are simply not moving.

It was watching Joe pluck the hanging disk out of the air that winter morning when I realized jumping was something I didn't care about. Everyone watching the game wasn't looking at Joe's form - his stomach pulled in tight, his spine stretched to the breaking point. Instead, we were looking at his hands, his fingers, which seemed to give at the moment of contact, which instinctively changed to a backhand grip before he hit the ground, which were cold and dry and raw but clenching the disk with a sort of quick tightness. It was at that moment that I learned something important:

It's not the jump that matters. It's the catch.

****

This, along with On Jumping and On Catching, will be on Miscellaneous Serials as soon as I get the theme photo.

How It Will Happen

Here is how it will happen:

You will have been flirting with her for a little while - maybe since the first day of school, when you saw her and smiled a little bit because you liked her hair, you liked her shirt, you liked the way she slipped a pen into her back pocket like it belonged there - and after a few months you are friends but on this day something changes for you and her, and it starts with a note that you scribble on the back of the business card you took from the Chipotle just off-campus, which says, in your semi-legible handwriting, What are you thinking about?

You are asking only because today she seems a little distracted and so you slide the note on her desk when the professor's back is turned so he can write on the board (integration of inverse trigonometric functions) and she looks at you and you wink and she reads the note and scribbles under it, nothing, which you were very much hoping she would not write because nothing is nothing; nothing means nothing; nothing will forever and always be good for abso-freaking-lutely nothing but this time nothing is not good enough for you. You demand more.

So you scribble back, no, really, which means very little by itself but in context it means everything, in context it means I am your friend and I have been your friend since the first day when I liked how you slipped that pen into your back pocket like it belonged there and I want to know what you were thinking about and I will not accept nothing, and she gets what you are saying and so this time she thinks about it a little longer.

You have almost forgotten about the note when she puts it on your desk a few minutes later, and when you look up her cheeks are red and her eyes will not meet yours and so you open the note and there it is: I was thinking about kissing you.

You stop breathing, momentarily.

The professor says class is over and she gets up like her seat is on fire and makes a run for the exit but you are pretty quick (and you only knock over one desk it falls with a bang don't stop to pick it up that part is imperative) so you leave your bag at your desk and you catch her arm in the hallway and she turns and tilts her head up because you are taller than her and she goes to give you an excuse she goes to apologize but you do not want an apology what you want is to explain that the reason you smiled at her on the first day of class was because you liked the way her pen fit in her back pocket like it belonged there and every day since you smiled at her because you were thinking about kissing her but for god's sake don't tell her that or at least don't tell her that right now because what you do right now is ten times better than that what you do right now she has been dreaming about what you do right now is you take her and you kiss her, once, for a long time.

After that you should probably go pick up the desk you knocked over, and then maybe ask her if she wants to get dinner or something.

Scenes 7

One:
I set up a sentry gun (Dustbowl; Part 3; Cap 1) and we made it last about an hour.

Two:
I felt the pencil hit my face and it hurt more than I expected but it did not hurt enough to matter what hurt enough to matter was your face which looked sort of like you had just kicked a puppy by accident and since first grade when people have hurt me and offered to let me hurt them I knew it was stupid so I always said no but this time I wanted to hit you with a pencil so you'd feel better and so you wouldn't be sorry and so instead of a frown on your face you'd have a mark and a smile just like me.

Three:
I did not know I could get that happy about someone asking for a bagel with cheese.

Question Four

There is no question four. If there was, it might have been a question about the acidity of stomach acid, which I would have answered effectively and efficiently (in as few words as possible). I like to think it would have been something more, though - a question of free will, of whether the chemicals that circulate through our bodies control us or if we control them; a question of love, maybe, asking if we really feel attraction towards one another or if we are the simply the result of years of chemistry piled up; a question of fate that asks if we are masters of our own destiny or if we're just the result of some unfortunate cosmic joke; a question questioning the question that has had humans lying down on the ground and staring up at the starry night sky and pondering since the dawn of time: the question of whether we have any part in the process or if we're really just monkeys pulling levers. We may never know what question four was, but I hope it was something like that. I would have had a good answer.