Sometime before
***
May was dying and I was going to be the one to kill her. Assisted suicide, not murder. All month she had been whittling me down into a blunt, self-righteous object that could make death on impact easy. I would strike only once and it would feel good to do something so well.
So why don’t you do it?
Because just then I was comfortable under the familiar heat of the Memphis sun, sitting alone in a lawn chair in front of my empty dormitory and chain smoking to the point of near-blindness. I sneered out at the deserted campus from my spindly green throne and, just as I thought how lucky everyone was to be spared from my wrath, I leaned a little too far back in my seat and toppled onto the grass, butts from the cupholder spilling out and ash getting all on the front of my shirt. For a moment I remained frozen, hypnotized by a spinning sky that was dehydrated blue, with wispy clouds like streaks of dust to be brushed away. The only sound was my own breath, fast and shallow. An onlooker might think I hadn’t noticed my own fall at all.
So why don’t you do it?
This was the excuse I had been looking for. The universe had pushed me down to call me pussy, to heighten my simmering angst into a fine, roiling fury. Somersaulting backwards out of my upturned seat and dizzily rising, I paused for a moment to find my footing, then proceeded to massacre the poor chair, stomping and kicking it into an unrecognizable pile of cheap material. When there was no damage left to be done, after I had punted my pack of Parliaments across the lawn, I became still and realized the hot tears budding at the corners of my red and raw eyes, chafed by sleepless hours. I’d loved that chair.
How pathetic.
There was no reason to stay without a place to sit, so I turned south and began my slouch toward Gloria’s apartment to be born as Bad Boyfriend. Acrid breath crawled out of my mouth like a roach from a can to whisper the new title again and again. I wasn’t sweating despite the noticeable heat. No sweat, as they say, from someone dry as I! All liquids in my body had been redirected to my steam-powered brain, its pistons pumping furiously to send my agitation upriver. I ignored all provided paths to cut through desolate quads and add a disappointing fifth line to everything. Earbuds were put in but I ended up not listening to anything in particular, picking a song to suit the mood only to skip it after five or ten seconds. Every song felt like it had nothing to do with me, just a thing that was happening, so I chose silence instead. In this wretched way I left for the city. The campus of Rhodes bid me good riddance for the year.
***
Consider this: In January, a footnote in my copy of As You Like It told me that Shakespeare came from a tradition of poets and playwrights who liked to use the month of May as the setting for their more romantic and/or magical plots due to its position as a herald for the rejuvenation of Nature, as well as the aesthetic pleasures inherent to Her return. The essay I had been assigned asked that I be critical of this conceit. I thought it was a supremely stupid prompt. What would I say? In the following essay, I will explain why Shakespeare was wrong: May is, uh, actually bad.
I was flipping through the rest of the play, looking for leads, when Gloria adjusted her spot on the couch and unknowingly kicked my book off her ankles where I’d had it balanced. We were studying in the common room of my dorm. I gave her a perplexed look, thinking she was pulling shit to get my attention. But no. Gloria’s focus was on her own reading, All The King’s Men, necessary for an academic argument she was preparing that addressed the film adaptation. Either Gloria hadn’t registered that my book was resting on her in the first place or she had forgotten it was there. Whichever it was, she’d completely missed the collateral damage, lost in her goals like an enigmatic house cat.
Remembering this January scene from May as I shuffled along, the comparison of Gloria to the feline felt groundbreaking. I considered a theoretical lens whereby this Gloria-as-cat analogy could help me reach significant conclusions regarding my many questions about the Nature of Gloria. Then I told myself to stop doing that. Of anyone I had ever known, Gloria was the most difficult to stop thinking about. I’d really liked that about her, but now it was blowing up in my face.
Jaywalking from curb to curb, the recollection continued against my will.
“Damn you!” I had cried in affected disdain. Gloria kept reading All The King’s Men. I traced her shin with my index finger, going against the grain of her prickly leg hair, ran it up her thigh, then slowly grabbed her book from the bottom of its spine and started tugging.
“Nooo,” Gloria intoned, but she’d taken the bait. I kept tugging in a staccato rhythm, faster and faster until Gloria laughed in exasperation, “Oh my god,” and slapped the book down on her lap to glare at me, those eyes finding mine and demanding an explanation.
Gloria’s eyes. In May they made the memory stop again, for I realized how Gloria’s eyes rendered my Gloria-as-cat-theory lame: Gloria had those big ol’ cow eyes. How could I forget? It was even a pet-name I had for her: “Ol’ Cow Eyes,'' because she had these big ol’ cow eyes that were always embracing what I gave and giving what I needed, an entity in and of themselves that grasped my heart when I was in sight. Those big ol’ cow eyes, heavy from the brown deepness of their irises, were Gloria, but also a conduit to a thing higher than Gloria. They belonged to the sacred tradition of sacrificial cattle, one of few eyes that truly see God.
A car honked at me when, ignoring the present, I’d started to cross the street without looking and we almost collided, its lethal speed kicking up dust and ruffling my clothes that hung on me like afterthoughts. The vehicle’s side-view windows whipped by inches from my chest and I didn’t even flinch. It was satisfying to see I could behave as grim as I felt. Death was my collaborator for the moment and I was secure in the knowledge that it was against Death’s interests to cut off one of its most promising agents of the day. And who knew. Maybe when all was said and done, when I’d killed May and Gloria had caught her flight to Los Angeles the morning after, Death would start going my way.
“You knocked over my book.”
I had pointed with faux-indignance to where As You Like It lay on the filthy carpet. Gloria’s gaze shifted to it, then back on to me.
“Do you need me to get it?” she’d asked in a straight tone, eyes round and innocent. This was Gloria’s style, to debase pettiness by receiving it in earnest. Whether this was her nature or an intentional tactic was hard to pin, but my guess was that it varied.
I gave a short exhale in submission. “No, of course not, it’s just that that’s why I then–” I gestured at her book, limply evoking my earlier trickery.
“Whatever.”
Fighting the resistance of Gloria’s sturdy brown legs, I bent over to snag my book with grasping fingertips and accidentally hit my temple against a corner of the nearby table. Too stunned to summon language, I made a sound like an inversed orgasm and rose back up with book in hand, but too quickly; a rush of blood assaulted my brain, replacing my vision with crackling stars and muffling my hearing. Somewhere I heard Gloria cry out to subsequently laugh. She took me in her arms and kissed me where it hurt, my cheek against her breast and ear near her heart, which beat noticeably through her soft, dark blue long-sleeve. As certain senses were exploded, others became accentuated to compensate, and so I felt formless and yet completely a being of feel, like I’d returned to the womb. Gloria’s lips pressed down like a soft salve on the pain that pulsed from my wound, and like a finger in the leaky dam, it plugged the flow.
I’m not being romantic. The throbbing atop my head ceased immediately and totally, my dizziness quickly following suit. Gloria pecked the spot twice more for good measure and gave me a squeeze. Not wanting to leave Gloria’s sweet embrace, I contorted my body and tilted my head so I could show her the grateful astonishment on my face, which made her laugh and run her fingers through my hair affectionately.
“Gloria. What was that? Am I dreaming?”
“Nope! Just doing something nice for my guy. Don’t act so surprised. You’ve said it yourself, I’m a ‘special girl.’” Gloria’s voice was light with casual whimsy, a reassurance that operated just on the edge of gaslighting. It seemed best to match her energy, though of course I was a bit freaked by my magic girlfriend.
“Come now. I was referring to your charm and wit, not your...uh?”
“Mmm, I know. But now you were referring to both.”
I lay there thinking, combing through all the data I had on Gloria to see how this new information affected my current projections. Gloria let me do it, continuing to pet my working head.
At 12 pm on May 31, I stared at Gloria’s apartment from across the street as my head did that same work. Heat waves sprouted lazily like weeds from between the cracks in the pavement, distorting my vision to where it seemed that everything rippled and swayed like a projection on a sheet.
“Have you ever felt more magical in May?” I asked back then in an inspired move to kill two birds with one stone: Extract secrets from Gloria while technically doing research for my essay.
“Please don’t call it ‘magic.’ Cassius always just called it my ‘talent.’ Why May?”
“For this essay.”
“Ah. I will say, I don’t remember this personally, but my family says that when I was five I made a lightbulb explode on Christmas, and then at the next Christmas, when I was six, I disappeared and they found me on the roof. Apparently back then I didn’t have much control of these, ah, ‘bursts,’ like I do now, though it’s still true that I can only do something ‘talented’ every once in a while.”
“You’re talented every day, boo,” I clucked. “But I don’t care about Christmas. I’m asking about May because Shakespeare says it’s a magical month and I’ve got to write this essay about it; so, as the most ‘talented’ woman I know, I’d like you to dig a little deeper, thanks.” I ended my line with a sarcastic sneer and laughed when, for my insolence, Gloria bopped the heel of her hand against my forehead. The physicality of the whole thing was getting to be too much. I wiggled out of Gloria’s grasp and we started kissing like it was the point all along.
I walked up the wooden steps to the porch of the building, which Rhodes owned for student housing. Typically, the small, attached lot would be full-to-bursting with parked cars, but today there was only one, and I groaned upon recognizing the forest-green Subaru with Maine plates. It belonged to Chase, Gloria’s close friend and roommate, a tall outdoorsy man with nice long hair who called me ‘buddy’ and had a suspect record of repeated propositions to Gloria in the time BS, Before Seth. I didn’t want anyone around for what was about to happen, and Chase least of all.
So I paused at the door.
Our kissing was an abstract smudge in my memory, a cloying little thing that believed being loud equaled being significant. The bodily attractions I had for Gloria were uncomplicated; the methods I used to satisfy my desires, boring. Still, I could not deny the simple, hard Want that struck my chest as I thought of us on that couch. It was enough to make me not notice Chase until he opened the front door, his own view obstructed by the big box he was carrying.
“Oh,” I said, and moved aside without bothering to hold the door, camouflaging my unsettlement as aggression. Chase made it out just fine and set the box down, putting his hands on his hips to assess me.
“Seth.”
“Chase, hey.”
“We missed you last night. And at graduation.”
“Well, I’m not graduating this year.”
“Right.”
Chase gave me a thin-lipped smile, picked up the box again, and went down the stairs of the porch to his car. I stayed where I was.
“Gloria’s in there,” he called over his shoulder.
“I know,” I said. What an absolute fuckhead. He fenangled the back of his car open and pushed the box in with the rest of his stuff, then turned back to keep talking to me. I could see in his eyes that he thought of this as his Moment. Chase liked to give himself many Moments.
“Gloria’s a really special girl, as I’m sure you know.”
Gloria pulls out of the kiss and I cup her face.
“Yeah.”
“And there are a lot of people who really care about her.”
“I know.”
In my hands, Gloria’s cheeks squish.
“So you’d understand that I–we don’t want to see her get hurt, especially right now. It’s a hard time.”
“Right.” I knocked hard on the door, as my fob didn’t work anymore.
“Gloria deserves the best, Seth. She’s special.”
“I know.”
Ol’ Cow Eyes’ countenance flashes. She has an answer to my May question.
“So do the right thing, Seth. For her.”
I heard a door slam on the third floor and footsteps descending.
“Okay,” and turned my back to him to glare at the doorknob.
I stroke Gloria’s hair as she gives me the answer I need:
Gloria opened the door abruptly and began our ending:
“You already know.”
My mouth opened and closed, then opened again, then closed. Gloria waved goodbye to Chase, who weakly waved back with something on the tip of his tongue, but before he could get it out she’d turned around and started walking back up the stairs.
“I don’t know,” I called from behind, voice hoarse from lack of ease.
No response was warranted and none was provided as we ascended to 117 Nickel St. The spot, once cluttered and content, was barren. Large swaths of blank, battered hardwood floor and popcorn wall stared, depressed, back at me when I followed Gloria inside. She walked to the center of the living room and turned to face me. I stood six feet away with hands at my side twitching. In loose-fitting shorts and a large cotton t-shirt Gloria was dressed smart for the heat, though a fine sheen of sweat shone on her brow. I was suffocating still in my non-breathing-material, blue jeans and black long-sleeve, too proud to open any of the large windows against the left wall.
“How was last night?” I asked. It didn’t really matter what I said first.
“Ruined because of you. You already knew that; why ask?”
Gloria's stoicism was a monument to her commitment to principle, for it was a matter of principle to be and stay unhappy to see me. Her words came out in deadened clips that tonally held but a modicum of tolerance, the slightest energy required to get through this conversation with me. It was disquieting to see anyone like this, let alone Gloria, but I reminded myself that being comfortable wasn’t what I was trying to achieve here. These were the necessary consequences of acting in my best interests.
So why don’t you do it?
“So why ask?” Gloria repeated.
“Because I wasn’t there.”
Her eyelids fluttered for an instant. “And why not?” she asked.
“I couldn’t figure out the point.”
“You’re usually so good at that.”
Beckoned by hurt, a true anger coiled around my heart. “Thanks. Yes, sorry, I meant: I haven’t been around the last week or yesterday or last night because I don’t want to see you anymore.” It came out too loud and self-conscious, like a poorly read line, yet was decisive and on the record. Generally no one cares how the blade comes down when the head rolls, and I would watch it roll until Gloria’s ride arrived and I could go sleep until June. However, being on the third floor, that head had a long way to roll. When I’d said ‘anymore,’ a wink of color wisped past my eyes like a lightning bug going off. A literal thing was in the air to join the figurative tension, a luminescence accompanied by a barely perceptible hum. Commitment kept me steadfast. Gloria was distracted from the light show, her jaw working. No air moved through the apartment.
Then she said, “I need water,” and went into the kitchen, the aura trailing behind. I heard the tap running, and Gloria raised her voice slightly to ask me, “And where was I for that decision?”
“I mean, you’re the one who made it,” I replied, irritated. “You took that job in L.A. at the beginning of the month and you know I’m here for another year, so I figured, you know, might as well give you freedom during your last month here. I made my peace with it and left you alone, ripped off the bandaid.”
This was a bit of a fib, a feeling I’d felt but not quite the point. I was trying to suss out what Gloria was aware of, if she would accept this half-truth. The water was still running.
“Cause it’s not like you didn’t have options,” I added.
A sharp bang rattled the apartment, accompanied by a kaleidoscopic explosion of color in the kitchen. I jumped about a mile in the air, and out of the chaos stormed Gloria, walking up to stand toe-to-toe with me, empty glass in her right hand. An electric shock passed to my lips and I recoiled slightly.
“You idiot!” she yelled, the air around her crackling. I could see all her teeth, her barbed tongue. “Seth, you stupid idiot! Did you hit your head too hard? ‘Options.’ You thought ghosting was an option? I could give a fuck about my options! I chose you. Have you been awake this past year? Have you not seen me choose you? And you chose to quit, you coward!”
Gloria shoved my shoulders with both hands, forgetting about her glass. It flew from her grasp and tumbled to the ground, shattering on my left. This was more or less ignored. “I don’t care if I took a fucking job on the moon!” she continued. “We would hear each other out. I thought, man,” Gloria crossed her arms and summed me up with disgust. “I thought you really cared about me.”
This was too much. Gloria didn’t have the right. “Oh that’s rich, coming from you,” I shot back. “Never pegged you for a hypocrite.”
Gloria faltered, and the air around us shimmered at a lower frequency.
“How do you mean?” Her tone was measured but imperceptible, so I kept going.
“You’ve been using me. Since the beginning, you’ve been using me, you never cared about me at all.” I hated how the words quivered as I spoke them, resented the watery ache that lodged itself underneath my Adam’s apple.
“I know,” I continued in a halting way, “You chose me, sure, but I know why.”
The pain drawn on Gloria’s features told all. Ah, special girl.
Outside a car honked and the stagnant heat of the apartment bred a swampy itchiness that crawled up my spine. Shimmers of color still swirled around us, alighting on Gloria’s tangled curls and round nose. It had been so thrilling before to picture her reaction to my supposed revelation, but now all I could do is look at the broken glass on the floor. “Two weeks ago,” I started, “the night you accepted the offer, Chase came to my dorm room super drunk and started yelling at me about how now that you’d gotten this job in L.A. he’d never see you again and that I’d taken up all of the last of the time he had to see you, just totally out of his mind. All this wasn’t a big revelation for me, but then he started telling me something I didn’t know. About you and me.”
“Seth…”
“About how you had a vision last September. A vision, a glimpse, a dream, a prophecy; whatever. You saw this, then came up to me after my presentation on Lost.”
“It was a good presentation,” Gloria murmured, momentarily softened.
“Yeah,” I said, unmoved, “I know. You’d seen that I’d save your life.”
She sighed. “I didn’t know Chase did that. How did he describe what I saw? I doubt it tracks.” Her straightforward spite made me emit a dry laugh, and the abrupt shift put a dent in my constitution. Suddenly I was very very tired of what I was doing.
“He said you two and Jane were hanging out here the day before classes started when all of a sudden your eyes rolled up and–”
“I know what I did,” Gloria said, her tiredness also plain, “I was there. What did Chase tell you?”
“Sorry,” I said, then winced at the submissive reflex. “He pretty much said when you uh woke up, you saw–”
“See, there,” Gloria tsked with a hissing annoyance, “I didn’t see anything. A notion was imparted to me–”
“Oh fuck off with that!” I spat, re-invigorated. “Your special vocabulary. Doesn’t matter! You got the notion that I would be there to save your life at some future point, so then you got the notion to become interested in me. Otherwise, ha! A joke.” I waved my hand dramatically past Gloria’s face, which she slapped as it passed; I couldn’t help it, I pushed Gloria’s shoulder in response. The ambient hum thrumming throughout the apartment was steadily rising in pitch and volume. Gloria trembled with rage as I continued to rant, her mask of rage so tight as to wring tears from those ol’ cow eyes. Though the sun beamed outside, all the light in the room was steadily evacuating to be replaced by shadows that flickered across the wall.
“I can’t believe your bullshit!” I yelled, still gesticulating wildly. “How could you say those things to me just then, knowing what you know? I get wanting to save your own life, but lying to me, pulling this ruse, I don’t understand.”
An inexplicable clap of thunder and the windows flexed.
“I WOULD HAVE RATHER DIED THAN WASTE MY TIME.”
This, Gloria screamed. The hair on my arms and the back of my neck stood up and a building current of feeling pulled at my heart like an ocean wave desperate to crash. Lightning flashed, glinting off the scattered glass on the floor, and a sourceless wind whipped through the apartment, blowing back Gloria’s hair and making tears flit more quickly from both our glassy, reddened eyes. Nothing inside of me was processing coherently. I could assemble no logical sequence of thought. Instead I’d been utterly reduced to the writhing, gurgling crush of emotions and motivations brutalizing each other in the pit of my heart, all vying to be the dominant influence in getting my mouth to spit out the single right thing to say to cleave this convoluted nightmare in two and take me to its protected center, that which was all I’d ever asked for: The truth.
What was right?
I crossed the distance between us in slow, deliberate steps, shielding my eyes from the flashing lights and swirling shadows for fear of epilepsy. All sound had been subsumed by the relentless howling of wind and the electronic hum that had heightened into an unbearable whine. One step after the other brought me chest-to-chest with Gloria, making it so I was looking down and she had to look up. The gaze I met burned with betrayal, scouring my face for any possibility of redemption, for some sign that I was willing to just let it go, to take her in my arms and see her off with a good heart that held good faith.
But once again: What was right?
“IF BEING WITH YOU WAS A WASTE, SETH, I WOULD HAVE RATHER DIED,” Gloria repeated, the tendons around her collarbones raising, showing the strain to get her voice to rise above the wind.
I nodded and my lips quivered with equal parts anticipation and apprehension.
“THEN YOU’RE ALREADY DEAD,” I yelled. “YOU’RE ALREADY DEAD.”
The floor quaked and a horrible wailing filled the air. There was a strike across my cheek and my balance was lost. I flailed, reaching out for anything, and felt my hand clasp on some part of Gloria’s shirt. There was resistance against my touch, and amidst the chaos we pushed and pulled, each of our bodies instinctively motivated to right themselves at the cost of the other’s. Our struggle couldn’t have been longer than three seconds, but it stretched into an awful eternity, elongating further and further like dough pulled from two ends, becoming more and more thin until it eventually...breaks.
I fell backwards with Gloria still in my hands. The world spun and upturned. A shattering pain gouged into me. I blacked out.
***
When I woke up, I was in the hospital and a doctor was telling me they had extracted seven pieces of glass from my chest and ribs and that I had lost enough blood to necessitate a donor. Without one, he explained, I would have died. When I asked the doctor where Gloria was, all he did was point to a crumpled note on my chest that read, Left for Los Angeles. Fuck it I loved you.
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