By Nathaniel Duggan.
This was the year the earth failed to end. Families huddled together in anticipation—so many sunspots exploding at once, waves of radiation hurtling across suburbs to ruin sprinkler systems and glue roadkill to the pavement, not to mention the meteorites passing by, third molars of the sky impacting formidably and ever downward, dislodging drainpipes, charring farm fields—and still, no apocalypse.
There was plenty of confusion otherwise. People slept until noon, their dreams flustered, claustrophobic with bombed cities, poisoned shellfish, previously-forgotten middle school crushes. They woke sweaty and already reaching for the beer they kept, forty-ounced and malt-warm, beside their beds. They called out of work and spent the rest of the day thinking up wistful metaphors for society. It was a headless ant still twitching, they decided. It was a coffin closing with the confidence of an elevator door.
People felt provoked that year, sultry as teenagers. They wondered what, exactly, constituted a “meteor”: the chief defining difference from a meteorite. There was something out there they had not been invited to, they suspected, a neighborhood block party, a free raffle, a Bingo night, whatever. The worst part was this perpetual not-knowing, the uncertainty of what they had missed out on. All they had left was their anger, placeless but all the more lashing, like a squid, giant, translucent, and hopelessly shored.
Luke and Jon themselves had decided to drive around town looking for space rocks. Luke had what people called a “winning smile”—that is to say, if pushed to a fight, it would likely win—and a dead tooth in the back of his mouth you could smell across any room. Jon, on the other hand, had grown perhaps too fond of pillow forts. He had built one out of his apartment’s only couch, sleeping there often, hoarding himself away from his reality, its sad convenience stores and failed superhero flicks. Though Jon did not want any part of any road adventure, he knew he needed it. His existence had become, he had sensed in the green-padded darkness of his fort’s cushions, secured with its own detachment—science-fictioned, even, a lunar base of private aspirations. He was twenty-two. He was writing a novel.
“It’s a good margin,” Luke said, balancing his beer against the steering wheel. “NASA would pay us millions, if we found one. That’s a phenomenal margin for a rock.”
“NASA faked the moon landing,” Jon said. He was sober and gradually sliding lower in his seat. “You’d have better luck playing the lottery.”
“You should read more proverbs,” Luke said. He tilted his head back to guzzle the last of his drink. “Buddha’s covered this subject extensively. The journey, not the reward. The frog in the well gets the squeaky wheel.”
“What did Buddha say about the Powerball?”
“Any loser can win the lottery,” Luke said, tossing his empty can out the window. “What we’re doing—hey, hold this for a second.”
He corkscrewed into the backseat, forcing Jon to snatch the wheel. The car jerked toward the traffic line, then righted itself.
“What we’re doing, it takes real dedication,” he was saying as Jon tried to keep the car steady. When he re-emerged, he had a fresh beer and a serious expression. “It takes depth of character.”
Luke and Jon had first met in high school, getting along well enough. They both had dead dads, for example. Luke’s father had passed away in one of those backroad, fireball-y collisions. For Jon’s it was cancer, scuttling sideways and undetected through the brain like a crab shy of sunlight. With this in common they had started a band, discussed girls, and smashed bottles late into the night, until Jon went to college. Luke, meanwhile, landed a job in bricks, carrying them from the first floor of a building to the fourth.
Now Jon had graduated, returned, and found himself decidedly miserable. This was one of those small Maine municipalities moody with abandoned paving projects and year-long close-out sales. To pay rent he gardened for a widow, Irene, who sometimes forgot his name and why he was uprooting her lawn. In the free time he had—and there was a lot of it—he wished Luke wouldn’t check in so often.
They stopped at a Chinese restaurant. The August heat had settled there in the parking lot like flu against a forehead. Jon returned from the bathroom to find Luke already at the bar finishing a beer, thick in conversation with a woman twice his age.
“Jon, Margaret, Margaret, Jon,” Luke said, offering a vacant stool.
Margaret lacked eyebrows. This did not make her ugly. Actually the angles of her face were very aesthetic, Jon thought, though hers was a sterile kind of beauty, like the gloss of a hospital reception desk, or a UFO’s blinding interior. A pile of broken chopsticks lay in front of her.
“How do you feel about seagulls?” she said.
“They’re fine, I guess,” Jon said, still standing.
“Some people idolize the gull.” She fiddled with an unopened package of chopsticks. “What for? They’re beggars. They’d prostrate themselves for garbage. Even a bird needs a little dignity. Now take the buzzard. Post-everything. Beyond life, death, the natural order. They don’t bother anyone and nothing bothers them.”
“There’s a saying for this,” Luke said. “About eating crows or something. You shouldn’t eat one is the point, I think.”
Jon didn’t understand the ease with which Luke spoke to strangers. As a writer, Jon was always particular with his sentences. You could fool yourself with words, he knew, stash letters confidently in the closet of your larynx, only for those trusted syllables to pupate, take on a mutated cast, then come exploding out, startled and erratic as irradiated moths, the city-sized kind that terrorized Japanese films.
“Well, after all, Freud himself never coined the term ‘Thanatos,’” Margaret said. “The so-called death drive.” She cackled. “We’re all going to die,” she said, snapping her chopsticks in half, letting the fragments scatter like dandruff across the table. “Doesn’t mean we should conflate the inevitable with the desirable.”
“Maybe I should be getting home,” Jon said to Luke.
“Jon and I are on a mission,” Luke announced. “We’re hunting for meteorites.”
Luke had perhaps never looked more handsome than in that moment, his cheekbones pronounced from the paper lamps hanging above the bar, his smile sharpened into a white dazzle—although it was hard not to notice the reek of his dead molar, cutting clear through even the restaurant’s greasy air.
Margaret rolled her eyes that did not have eyebrows. “Better luck winning the lottery.”
Luke clasped her hand. “Consider the margin, though,” he said with an air of conspiracy, leaning close. “It’s an awfully good margin. NASA alone, they’d pay—”
“It’s getting pretty late,” Jon said. “I have to work tomorrow.”
Margaret placed her thigh on Luke’s lap. The paleness of her bare skin seemed to flash. “That’s ambitious,” she said to Jon. “Articulating anything in terms of ‘tomorrow.’ I like that about you.”
“Ever since college he’s been very philosophical,” Luke said proudly.
The air conditioner creaked like something prehistoric. Jon listened to it. His friendship with Luke, he knew, had acquired a woozy, far-off bent, like a moon flung from its orbit. A year ago, a bar had banished them, and in revenge Luke had tried climbing its roof to dismantle its TV satellite, only to lose his grip, fall two stories, and piss blood for a month. After all that, Jon had tried not to be around Luke so much, yet somehow, like an infection’s persistence, they still hung out together.
“It’s getting late,” Jon repeated, quietly now, more to himself than anyone else.
“If anything, it’s always too early, never too late,” Margaret said, fingering yet another package of chopsticks. “The mistake of living in the moment is believing the moment has yet arrived.”
“Does that mean you do or you don’t want your fortune cookie?” Luke said.
Out the window the sun was oozing down the horizon. A fleet of fire trucks shuttered along the road, red as the sky. Jon found himself drinking a beer, feeling immobile and absurdly vacant. This was a not-unfamiliar sensation, or an unwelcome one—sometimes he went entire zoned-out days like this, floating in the space between two complete thoughts. Personally, he felt it was acceptable to waste time like this. So long as there remained the chance of something happening, you could be satisfied with nothing happening. You could procrastinate your hopes, outsource them to some other month, an hour exotic with the likelihood of better things.
Death’s whole problem, then—its design flaw, he thought in bed whenever he could not sleep, sweaty with the suspicion he had misplaced another day, put it in some shadowed corner he’d never find again—was how it lurked within these deferred optimisms. It accumulated year after year, with interest, a series of innocently veiled, tiny defeats, one lining up after the other to confront you in the middle of the night without ceremony or warning, little trick-or-treaters of the heart all grinning and brandishing clubs.
Right when the food arrived the fire trucks began to shriek. Luke scrabbled for chopsticks, only to find the shards Margaret had left. He shrugged and then, shedding his hesitation, plunged his bare hands into his steaming noodles. Jon looked at Margaret. She winked back. The sirens swallowed all conversation.
“The reed that bends but never breaks,” Margaret said once the noise had faded, picking at an egg roll the way someone might try to dislodge a hangnail.
It was somehow decided that the three of them would drive together to a local lake. In the remaining light, the water was mucus grey, the trees silhouetted as veins. There were dead leaves everywhere, swirling in the exhaust of the car, scuttling along the dirt road, so many tumbling and displaced that it could’ve been autumn, were it not for the humidity squashing Jon’s lungs.
Once they had parked, Luke led them to a tilted shack on the water’s edge. Jon watched him fumble under the welcome mat for a key.
“Luke,” he said. “Whose place is this?”
“Dunno,” Luke said. “There’s pictures inside. Happy couple. Grandparents. I’ve been here a month, more or less, and no-one’s shown up.”
He let himself in, whistling. Jon, dizzy, remained on the threshold. Frankly, he felt ill-equipped for these situations, the kinds where things happened. He sensed that maybe somewhere down the line he had skipped a crucial prep class for life, the standardized test of it. He became aware of Margaret hovering behind him.
“You don’t want to live,” she said, clicking her tongue, “but you’re too scared to die.”
Things were falling inside. Lights blared, doors slammed. Swarms of bugs threw themselves at the shack’s glowing windows, and Jon could hear the tiny futility of their bodies against the glass.
“That’s not true,” Jon said. His brow furrowed. In fact, he often suspected he was dead already. He’d breathed in the wrong fumes as a child, maybe. Microscopic things had invaded him and corroded his insides. Or else he’d been sucker punched in the distant past, and it was just a matter of time now before the blow, the neural damage, finally reached his brain. Regardless, the point remained: there was some black, toxic invader in his body, and it was waiting for a single show of weakness, one misaligned cell, to begin its work. Standing there on that doorstep, he felt doomed in a million ant-sized ways.
“I’d just rather not commit any felonies on a Tuesday night,” he said finally, stepping away from the entrance.
“Relax,” Luke said. He’d returned with a cooler of beer. “Since when was it a criminal offense to enjoy ourselves?”
On the shore they found several dinghies. The shapes of the boats beneath the trees looked alien and dispossessed, like a pod of beached dolphins. They dragged one out onto the lake and piled inside.
“Keep those eyes peeled for meteorites,” Luke advised as they started rowing. “Space really makes you think. We’re all made out of stars, you know.”
Jon was handed a beer. He sipped it in silence. The moon hung low and huge, as if magnified by the evening heat. When he finished his drink, he reached for another. He was beginning to feel a calm sort of resignation, as if the lake’s glassiness had entered and thickened his blood. No-one was rowing anymore, and they sloshed quietly as a pulse in place.
Margaret lit a cigarette. For a brief second firelight tongued across the boat, gleaming against faces, eyes. Somewhere far off a loon wailed.
“Listen,” Margaret said. “I was drunk for eight straight years. My first marriage. We desire this in oblivion. It’s like the buzzard—we want to be picked clean.”
“Sorry,” Luke said, “did you need a beer?”
“Consider the fly,” she went on, her tone brooding. “Rot is the building block of life. We’re made from twinkling stars? No. We are made from maggots.”
Jon watched the two as their shadows briefly interlocked like passing clouds, Luke giving her a beer, cinders from her cigarette skittering down past their legs and vanishing into the hull.
“I wouldn’t mind dying for somebody,” Luke said, standing now, each word he spoke causing the boat to heave. “I’d die for you tonight, if you wanted.”
“You should be more careful with your body,” Margaret said. “It belongs to you, after all.”
Luke started to cough from her smoke. He stifled himself with a shrug. “Worth less than a space rock.”
“Your first marriage,” Jon said, turning to Margaret as he grabbed another beer. He was surprised by the forcefulness of his voice, the alcohol like a hammer in his throat. “What number are you on now?”
Another burst of coughs escaped Luke. Sparks flailed as he doubled over.
“Three,” Margaret said. “The first died from surgical complications. I was young then. The second, a little more recently. Locked himself in the garage and left the car running.”
Luke was properly hacking, so hard the whole boat trembled, spit leaking in long, tangled strands from his mouth. Margaret watched him placidly as she lit another cigarette.
“Yes,” she said, and there was something smug and awful in her tone. “Terrible, isn’t it? Life isn’t all about chasing shooting stars.”
At that, Luke fell backwards. The sound of his coughing vanished immediately in a gasp of water. Alarmed, Jon rose to his feet, causing the boat to sway even more, straining his eyes to see the dark ripples where his friend had sunk. Margaret released a laugh like a wheeze.
“You don’t understand,” Jon said. “He doesn’t know how to swim. He can’t swim.”
He wasn’t speaking to Margaret so much as to himself, trying to shock his own body into motion. She had settled herself into a bored lean, her finger tapping listlessly against her leg. Tearing off his shirt, Jon dove after his friend, the lake meeting him in a flurry like snow. He was expecting a darkness complete as the ocean floor, but the moonlight snagged in the bubbles around him, and he saw Luke’s shipwrecked shape.
They emerged together and scrabbled, coughing, sputtering, flaying water everywhere, back into the dinghy. It rocked like a fun park ride. Margaret’s eye sockets without their eyebrows were cocked now in dull amusement.
“Everyone’s problem with the future,” she said, “is that it keeps happening.”
Luke’s wet clothes clung to him like a layer of shedding skin. He choked and gagged, looking crumpled as the last embers of Margaret’s cigarette. While Jon surveyed the scene—Margaret rubbing her ash alongside the dinghy’s side, Luke vomiting water, everything drenched in jagged darkness—he could not stop thinking about how serenely limp Luke had been beneath the lake, not bothering to struggle or even panic, his body like a skipped stone.
“He doesn’t really want to die,” Margaret said.
They were in the lakeside shack’s sole room of a house, Luke asleep on a flower-patterned couch with his head in her lap as Jon fiddled with batter and a waffle iron. Most of the night had passed since the accidental attempted drowning, but Luke had yet to stir. Sunrise dribbled in like a pipe’s leakage, a smudged gleam against the empty beer cans that covered every last surface.
“Not like you tried to help him,” Jon said. “You sat there and you watched.”
Luke’s jawline was strong as ever. The color had drained from his skin, but this in turn gave him a regal cast, like the brush of powder on a body displayed at a funeral. Margaret kept stroking away the hair falling across his eyes, reminding Jon of how birds mechanically plucked at themselves, of scabs getting scratched.
“I just told you,” she cooed, her fingers like insects all over Luke’s face, “he doesn’t want, or for that fact, need help. Help,” she said, her lips curling into a sneer. “Help is a phone number. Help is a maid.”
“And what about you?” Jon said. “What are you?”
“Practicing mortician,” she said. “Lawyer. Plastic surgeon. Name it and I’ll be it.”
He rubbed at his eyes. This was one of those raw dawns, the kind where they forgot to deliver the newspaper and you cracked all your yolks. “You could drive us home, at least.”
Her hands stopped drumming on Luke’s skull. His eyelids fluttered, as if there were butterflies beneath them—as if the world could suddenly, simply explode with flowers.
“That I cannot do,” she said. “My license has been, we’ll say, compromised. Why don’t you drive?”
“Never learned,” he said. “Sometimes I feel I haven’t learned a single thing about how to be alive.” He kept glancing at her and then abruptly away—she was one of those things you wanted to stare at but couldn’t for too long, like a car accident flittingly passed. “How did you end up in a Chinese restaurant in the middle of a nowhere town? Shouldn’t your husband be expecting you?”
“Which one?”
“Whichever’s still alive.”
“Expect nothing,” she said curtly. “Now and forever and for all time. Consider that at least one thing learned for yourself today. If you carve out your heart, seal the wound with cement, such that you bleed only stone and are always sinking toward the depths of something, the way a dog, circling, returns to his own vomit, again and again.”
She showed her teeth to him in a smile. Yet again he noted the lack of her eyebrows. He kept forgetting their absence. The waffle iron sizzled. She clenched her skirt and pulled it high enough to reveal the veins varicosed there beneath, her thighs transparent as a cicada’s molting. This caused Luke to stir; with a yawn, he sat up.
“Morning, everyone,” he grinned, instantly grabbing a beer can from the table beside him, finding it empty, reaching for another. “What’d I miss?”
Jon looked deliberately at the window. He wanted to look out of it, but he had to settle for at, because its glass was so smudged with handprints as to be impermeable. Luke was standing now. Beer cans kept clattering as he searched them. Picking each one up, holding it at eye level for inspection, he resembled a researcher handling materials microscopic and fragile. He had long since dried from his near-drowning, but his hair remained matted and erratic, like a child triumphant after his first pool party.
The waffles were almost done. Jon glanced around. Assembled there, the three of them all were like some shattered mirror’s reflection of a family: Margaret splayed across the couch with its upholstery punctured and protruding as tumors, Luke tapping a can against his ear like a seashell, and Jon himself encased in batter, spatula twirling in hand in some absent parody of a housewife.
“Well then,” Luke said. “Are we ready to find some shooting stars?”
“Did you forget everything we discussed last night?” Margaret said.
“I make it a matter of principle to never remember anything,” Luke said. “To never, ever learn my lesson.”
And he put down the beer can he had been clutching with such finality it seemed to whistle with all that it lacked—the song of a thing emptied. To Jon it sounded like a childhood memory of a wasp’s nest he had once tumbled by mistake and cowered at, only to find it, then, unexpectedly hollow, devoid of the buzzing of menace or even life. It was the kind of ringing that filled a space even once it had left it. Margaret said nothing in rebuttal, simply glaring at the two of them, although without eyebrows it was more like her face had taken on the suggestion of a glare, the possibility.
“Who wants breakfast?” Jon said at last to the room, but the question came out more rhetorical than he anticipated, and he felt suddenly bemused by himself, at once lost as he was found. Outside the sky was deepening. No matter the time of day, he was realizing, whether you could see them with your naked eye or not, there were always meteors in all that blue, streaking as anything wished. He cleared his throat in a phlegmy beginning.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nathaniel Duggan is a former mattress salesman. His work has appeared previously in Hobart, X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, and New World Writing, among others. He lives in Maine.
