I was sitting in a little concrete hollow behind my building, smoking my second cigarette and trying to make sense of the day. It hadn’t been a great one. I had given a reading at Pacific Northwest Bookfest, eaten breakfast with N earlier that morning, and all afternoon I languished in bed with a book that wasn’t great, but had less than 50 pages to go. By all accounts, I should have been whistling a little tune while I had my smoke, smiling stupidly at my feet and the passers-by; as it were, I couldn’t unfold my brow, and my chest was heavy with its nesting vacuum.
In the car ride to the train station, where I would give N a hug without unbuckling myself from the car before depositing her on the sidewalk, I tried taking a couple stabs at the unhappiness lurking in my gut. It could have been the piece, I told her—I had written a little something about artists, about art, and my general contempt at the idea of both. It was arranged and voiced well enough, but I wasn’t sure where the sudden outpouring of hate had come from, or why I had felt not only the need to exercise it, but to then dress it up and show it off to a crowd that couldn’t help but feel offended.
Finally, I told her that it was probably the general discomfort, the intermittent distress that was being alive.
“Are you uncomfortable?” she asked.
“Of course,” I said, coaxing the brakes to keep us from flattening a jaywalking couple. “When I’m not feeling manic, I’m uncomfortable. But that’s just normal, I’m used to it.”
“I hate to say this, but have you thought about taking pills?”
“Sure I have.”
“And?”
“And fuck that.” That was the end of the pills conversation. We drove in silence a while. I tried tuning into the local stations, but they were spamming the airwaves with desperate donation drives. It was a goddamned conspiracy, I thought, all of them outstretching upturned palms at once so that you either had to fork out fifty bucks or drive with only the mix of traffic as auditory comfort.
“I probably shouldn’t say this,” I said finally, “but I think that someday, if I actually end up accomplishing the things I think I want to, I’ll probably kill myself.”
“No,” she said immediately, hanging on the vowel for emphasis, “you can’t say things like that. Please don’t say things like that.”
I shrugged with both hands still holding the wheel. “Why not? I don’t say that with any sadness or spite, it’s just I can kind of get why a lot of writers end up offing themselves. I mean, imagine telling yourself your whole life that everything would be better if you were recognized, if people knew and loved your work. Then you get there, and you don’t feel any different. In a way, I feel like it’s saying ‘Enough is enough. I’ve done what I’ve done, and I’m okay with that and that alone.’”
She chewed on this for a moment, along with a small bite of lower lip. “You know, not a day goes by that I’m not surprised by something.”
“And?”
“And don’t you think that’s worth something?”
“No,” I replied without consideration, “I don’t think it is.”
Sitting in the brick and plaster hollow, replaying the car ride and the empty faces at the reading, I felt the exhaustion kick back in. All afternoon I had lay in bed and still I could not sleep, so now the promise of a nap didn’t offer up any false hope.
Down to last centimeter of tobacco before the filter, I brushed a few droppings of ash from my knees, when a small humming wormed its way into my left ear. Around the building’s edge, a scooter pulled into view, a frozen explosion of synthetic flowers bursting from its every non-mechanical surface. A bouquet crested the headlamp, the back hump held sprouting sunflowers and daisies. The rider wore a handmade crown of gold standing three feet high, and more plastic flowers stretched higher still from this magnificent cap to receive the rain. On the scooter seat’s back end, standing from a thatch of ever-blooming roses, a flag with a heart in its blue-circle’s center flapped sharply in the wind. The man idled for a long time, and I allowed myself to stare. He didn’t look over, and even if he did, I don’t think I would have looked away.
I realized, after some time, that he was fumbling for a garage door control, and that he was pulling his flower-mobile into the basement lot of my building. As the gate cranked open, I said, “I like your scooter.”
“What?” He scrunched up his face, and a silver shower of raindrops fell noiselessly from his beard.
“Your getup,” I pointed, the cigarette a burning stick of fiberglass now, “I like it.”
“Well isn’t that fucking great,” he cursed, and rumbled into the dark hollows of the garage.
