My dream: I sleep through your funeral, then stand, eulogy in hand, as the last car pulls away from the muddy cemetery road, see the remaining audience waiting in the ground in rows, your blanket of earth still fresh, and know I won’t read it to you. You would laugh.
I have carried your plan to die for too many weeks.
In my constricting clothes, mastered by too much wine, I’m briefly awake. The motel clock reads three-thirty, but motel clocks are often wrong. Hours and minutes left us days ago. It is only day or dark, speaking or not speaking. The overhead light is still on and you are gone with the car and I am the one who tossed you the keys. You will become public. So will my neglect. As the alcohol takes me away from worry, my last thought is the weakness of my will.
The motel phone rings like a rock shattering a window. This cheap room has no carpet to smother the echo. In a few hours, someone will come and clean up the mess, this one and maybe yours, too.
“Ethan?” I ask as the receiver touches my ear.
“Did I wake you?”
“Where are you?”
“Where do you think?”
“I can’t think.”
You sigh. “The bus station.”
I try for a mental map to the bus station in this small California city whose layout I’ve ignored. The light doesn’t help. I squint at my bright, white Converse, remember them thunking in the laundromat dryer yesterday.
“Why?” I stall for time.
“Isn’t it obvious? My nasty little deed. You won’t get your photo after all.”
My feeble plan. ‘Let’s get a photo to remember,’ I had said. ‘Remember what?’ you had responded.
“What time is it?”
“Six-ten. My bus leaves in twenty minutes.”
I picture you at a wall of phones, loudspeaker muffled behind you, hand resting on top of my guitar case.
“Where are you going?” I pinch the phone between my shoulder and neck while bending to tie a shoe.
“So many questions, Ace. That’s for me to know. You’re out of the picture.”
“What about my car?”
“Ah, a question that matters. The key possession. Not to worry. The lot on the right side of the bus station. I left you gas for your drive home.”
I say nothing, look at a suitcase, my guitar leaning by the television, strewn clothes.
“I’ve been up all night,” you say. “My brain is fogged. I almost won’t have to think to act.”
You took the case, not the guitar.
“Don’t blame yourself,” you go on. “I got you drunk. I’d have gotten the keys another way.”
I should be responding, cursing, manipulating, but the light, the glare, the droning words.
“Let’s meet and talk,” I plead.
“I’m leaving.”
“I’ll come to the station.”
“Don’t.”
I scream “Wait!” and throw the phone behind me, reach the door but fall when it doesn’t open, clutch the doorknob and twist to unlock it, crawl out, pull to my feet using the railing, sprint, hear the door close from cement steps I am running down two steps at a time, try to hold the wine down, miss a step and spin all the way around, catch the railing and right myself at the bottom.
The motel office is lit but empty. The boulevard is my chance. I run in the direction of downtown. Dawn is behind me, and I only hear myself, sneakers slapping on the sidewalk, the whining friction of my arms sawing against the plastic coat, my gulping breath. I run with my thumb out.
A car rushes up behind me. I turn, stumble, fall on the sidewalk. My palms scrape the cold concrete. I must not register, my face hardly visible in the twilight to the shiny car.
As more headlights approach, I stand and face them. None stop. I kneel and hold my swollen hands out in prayer. In the glare, I face the silent accusation of everything I have never done.
We joked about this, kept it unreal, debated life and death while playing Space Invaders.
A black Jaguar slows beside me. Its window lowers and a middle-aged man, an early riser, crisp, glowing white shirt and striped, blue tie, brushed silver hair, heading to work, motions me in impatiently. I jerk to my feet without using hands, and open the door, careful not to smear blood.
“Thanks,” I say. “Got to get to the bus station. My friend is going to kill himself.” I feel like an idiot child, you bastard, having to confess that for you. He looks me over. “Okay.”
“Quickly, please.”
The Jaguar accelerates. He glances, but I am thinking of the emptiness to come.
“You from here?” he asks.
“Pennsylvania.”“We’re all from somewhere else. Student?”
“No, we were coming out here to live in California. Get jobs.” I look at his
dashboard. “What time it is?”
“Almost six-thirty.”
“That’s when his bus leaves.”
The car surges.
“What happens at the bus station?”
“I don’t know. Find him.”
In front of the glass entrance, I look for you inside.
“Anything I can do?”
“No. Thanks.” I almost shake his hand but remember my blood, am running again.
The station has few passengers. At the counter, a guy with tinted glasses eyes my hands.
“Did the six-thirty bus leave?”
He looks down at the counter. “There was no six-thirty bus scheduled.”
“Are you sure?”
“I am sure,” he says, without rechecking. He waits for me to step aside.
“Have you seen a guy, tall, with dark curly hair in a blue jacket?”
“No.”
“Dark circles under his eyes? Carrying a guitar case that might have a shotgun in it?
He looks up. “Is there some trouble?”
“Yes. Somewhere,” I say, turning.
You’ve tricked me. Are you laughing? A grim laugh about failure—mine, yours,
and the world’s?
An awful day waits to be lived.
I will never share your joke.
You will never read this story.
Who wins?
Robert Bires writes in Chattanooga, Tennessee. He has published most recently in Corvus Review (I reset my publications list when a new year begins). He also sings, plays guitar, and writes his own songs in a rock band.