I Do This I Do That: Chapter 30

XXX. I Do This I Do That

Tuan's car crept along the empty city streets as the sun rose above eastward apartment complexes and quiet boxy businesses in rows. We were all quiet now, and I listened to the hum of the old engine starting and stopping between the street lights. Tuan tapped his finger on the steering wheel and Wheeler made puffs of fog with his breath on the passenger window glass. We were heading to a bus station. Life was quietly stirring and waking on the sidewalks and streets around us, and the promise of a new day felt familiar.
"Where are we going?" Wheeler asked.
"Chicago, I guess." I muttered.

The station was closed, so Tuan said goodbye and we planned to waste time with a walk or a nap on a bench. Tuan's goodbye was warmer than we deserved, and this strangeness stuck with me. He meant all of his words as he patted Wheeler on the back and wished us the best. I gave him a hug and looked deep into his eyes. I saw love and craziness and a bit of confusion. He waved amicably out the window as he sped away.

I wanted orange juice so we walked to the convenient store on the corner from the bus station and devised ways to steal the juice, and maybe some bread or cookies, too. The bell of the door welcomed us as we walked in, eliciting the tired looking attendee to make a quiet note of our presence from behind the register. He was slobbish and dull looking. He gave us a nod then looked down towards his blue vest and whatever opening duties he was obligated to attend.

Wheeler motioned me coolly to divide into another aisle. He took an orange juice from the cooler and walked with a jazzy trot down the snack aisle, eyeing the attendant nonchalantly from over the edge. He put the juice in his pocket and quickly grabbed a box of cheese crackers and pressed them into his shirt. I watched awkwardly and suspiciously near the magazine rack. He shuffled towards the bathroom hallway and grabbed my arm as he pushed me into the bathroom and locked the door behind us.

"Breakfast is served." He whispered, covertly.

He took out the juice and drank exactly half in a few quick and desperate gulps. I drank the rest in a similar way as he opened the crackers and ate two at a time. I felt out of words, out of ideas, out of my mind. The day and time and place of my life mangled together into one disastrous scene. I could have been anywhere in any bathroom by any bus station in the country. I felt desperate for connection or feeling, and suddenly, before I registered this burst of desire, I was taking it out on Wheeler. I grabbed his gaunt cheeks and kissed him ravenously. He pulled me close to him and suddenly we were animalistic. His mouth was dry and he tasted like hot ash. He was bony and biting my lips and squeezing my hips with an intensity that catapulted us up against the wall. I wanted anything in that moment, and nothing at all.

The sex lasted only a few minutes, and when it was over we both took deep breaths and cleared our throats. Wheeler ate another cracker and zipped up his pants. We said nothing as I unlocked the door and walked outside. The attendee looked befuddled, but seemed to lack the gall to investigate into our behavior.

Outside more life stirred on the morning street, and something odd happened.

Wheeler walked out of the convenient store behind me, looking a bit mad and bug-eyed. His hands were in his pockets and he looked at me hysterically for just a moment, and then suddenly he began running down the sidewalk. I watched him run away into the distance, turning a corner at the next block without slowing his pace or looking back.

I stood dumbfounded, watching the street for a moment.

I walked to the bus station and bought a ticket for Chicago. I was almost completely out of money now, but I wasn't worried. I had nothing behind me and nothing before me as the heavy bus turned the corner out of the Minnesota bus station. The seats were filled with quiet strangers, sleeping or peeking out into the passing countryside.

The small trees and scattered houses looked bright under the ever rising sun. Fields of wheat and grass and rows of swaying trees dashed quickly passed the warm window. I thought of everything and nothing all at once. Time dragged on peacefully with the forward motion of the big ugly bus. Maybe I should move, I thought. Maybe I should visit home. Maybe I should get off at the next stop. Maybe I should sleep. I closed my eyes and soon heard the bus bellow and clamor as it tilted and hampered into a rest stop. I heard the strangers rise and shuffle off the bus. Click clack click clack click clack, the heavy steps descended and ascended the bus. I do this, I do that, I do this, I do that, their shoes echoed beyond me, out the open windows, into the risen sun.


THE END

I Do This I Do That- Chapter 29: Blue and Green and Purple and Pink

XXIX.

I opened my eyes and saw Cait's face above me. She was holding the back of my head over a faucet and pouring warm water on my forehead. She was wearing a clean white t-shirt and her uncombed dull brown hair fell in pieces onto my face. She had that same tricky grin on her face that she did in the picture of her as a young girl.

"Hey," I said.
"Shhhhh," she answered. "Just keep your head back." She smiled calmly.
"Okay," I said.
"Tell me about your favorite colors." She pet my hair and I cooed back like a baby.
"Blue..."
"And?"
"Green..."
"Yes?"
"Purple.."
"Okay?"
"Pink.."
"Like a sunset?"
"Yes."
"And?" She tilt my head back further and water splashed into my eyes. Her voice was cool and pacifying, in a way I'd never heard her speak.
"Black." I closed my eyes tightly as the water became hotter and the pressure increased. I tried to move my head up from her hand but couldn't. She was pulling my hair back down into the tub. I opened my eyes and saw her bright smile and faded eyes watching me struggle from her grasp. I pulled up my head again against her resistance.
"Shhhh," she said again.

Now she moved my head directly under the faucet. The water crashed into my eyes and nose and mouth. I spit it out in struggled breaths. I dug my nails into her warm arms and peddled my head left and right, attempting to escape the water.
"Shhhh," I heard her say again. "Think about the colors," she said. "Blue...and green..and purple...and pink.." She pulled my hair down further into the tub.

Suddenly she let go of my hair, letting my head drop to the bottom of the tub. She pushed my legs in after me and I dropped in like a dummy. The water pressure lightened and I heard the distinct sound of creaking and diminishing footsteps. I felt the steps with an intensity as they faded away, like each foot on the ground was lodged directly onto my spine.

I opened my eyes and there was Tuan sitting on the edge of the tub, with a detachable shower head in one hand and a beer can in the other. He took a long drink from the can and kept the shower head steady in my direction. He glanced at me with a look of happy inertia. It was clear from a certain weirdness and wisdom and ease in his eyes that anything odd we'd experience tonight would be merely average in the great scope of his life.

"Cait," I said.
"Hey!" He said brightly.
Wheeler walked in looking high and holding a large blanket.
"We did it," he said. "We found it."
"Where is she?" I asked.
"Who knows," said Wheeler. "Not here."
"I saw her," I said.
"Me too. That was definitely her in the picture. You hit your head hard there in the kitchen. You woke up the dogs, man!"
"She was here," I argued.
"Hacket hasn't seen her in 5 years, yo. And since you passed out things have been gettin' a little weird here. The old man's back in bed but we need to go. She's not here and he doesn't want anything to do with it."
Tuan turned off the faucet and finished his beer.

The two insisted on carrying me out of the Hacket house wrapped inside the blanket like an adult baby. I felt too dizzy to disagree, and we piled into Tuan's car once more, rounded the bend passed Cait's family home, and headed back into the city.

I Do This I Do That- Chapter 28: Mouse Guts

XXVIII.

The naked man was holding a flashlight, and as he neared us he stumbled twice into the narrow hallway walls. His footsteps creaked on the wooden floor and he swore manically under his breath. "What the..fuck. What time is it. Goddamn it. Fuck." He focused the light through the screen door and peered into our lit faces, squinting.

"Jesus Christ. What is it?" He said. His voice was both gentle and raspy. His face was dark and tight as though he'd spent days in the sun. He had a head of grey hair and smoker's eyes and lips.
"Do you have a daughter named Cait Hacket?" Wheeler asked, unapologetically.
"Yeah? Why? Who are you?"
"Our friend, Cait Hacket, disappeared from us in Chicago a few days ago. We're trying to track her down. Is there anyway we can see a picture of your daughter?"
"Christ. It's the middle of the goddamn night!"
"We're sorry to wake you, but we came a long way and we really need to find our friend." Wheeler seemed more coherent than I expected.

 It suddenly occurred to me how odd the three of us looked standing on this small slanted porch in the middle of the night. Tuan's perm was wild and disheveled from the windy drive, and I was filthy and skinny and pale from the trip. Wheeler seemed coherent for the circumstances, but his stark features and bug-eyed adrenaline  must have appeared a bit psychotic to this tired naked man on the other side of the screen. We were, after all, three strangers to him and each other, hungry for answers, on a journey of nonsense and disillusion.

"Goddamn it. Hold on a second," he said, closing the door and dipping into a room on the right side of the hallway. He turned on a light and re-approached the door wearing a long navy bathrobe.

He opened the screen door and led us inside. The house was cramped and smokey. There were 4 dark rooms off the hallway and a bright stairwell leading down. He led us down the creaky stairwell, lighting a cigarette and leaving smoke in our path.

The downstairs was the kitchen and living area of the house. Mr. Hacket sat down on a stool at the kitchen island. He didn't turn on any lights as he smoked, and the room was filled with shadows from the lit stairwell. The ceiling was low, which sort of created a sense of pressure and heaviness upon the house. The room was seemingly tidy, and there seemed to be animals everywhere. Two dogs slept on the kitchen tiles, and there were 3 cats eating on the island by Mr. Hacket. Another cat jumped through a broken sliding screen and waited to be fed. The cat jumped on the counter and dropped a dead mouse from it's mouth onto the counter. Mr. Hacket looked at the mouse and looked away, blowing smoke into the room.

 "We haven't heard from Cait in years," he said, breaking the silence. "She left home about.. 5 years ago, hasn't been back since."
"Why is that?" I asked.
"Christ. Who knows? She always seemed to be pissed off about something. We weren't surprised when she left. She's always been.. a bit strange."
"Where did she go?" said Wheeler.
"How the hell would I know? She left one day...didn't say goodbye." This sentence sent him into a coughing fit for approximately 2 minutes. He struggled out of the cough then opened the door and spit onto the back porch. He took a relieved breath and sat back down.
"You've never tried to find her?"
"No, no. Not really. She always wanted to do her own thing and I stayed out of her way. She's an adult. What she's doing is her business," he said.
"Is she your only child?"
"Yeah."
"And it doesn't bother you that you don't know where she is?" Wheeler asked, with a dash of intensity and judgement.
"Why the hell should it?" He was becoming agitated.

Tuan was sitting on a couch in the shadows with his head tilted back. He seemed to be asleep or falling asleep. The cats were now eating the mouse on the counter and Mr. Hacket pet the back of one as it competed for pieces of the tiny dead animal.

He got up to find a picture of Cait. There weren't any visible family photos hanging on the walls. There was a rifle and a model sailboat above a fireplace mantle in the center of the room, and the brick walls were empty in the dim of the moonlight. As Mr. Hacket left down a dark hallway, Wheeler grabbed my hand and watched the cats finish pulling apart the limbs and innards of the mouse. The feverish look in his eye was ascending as Mr. Hacket walked lazily towards us with a picture in his hand.

"Here," he said, handing us the picture as if it was nothing. As if she were nothing. It seemed clear that no matter who this girl was, our Cait or just his, he had no intention of finding her.

Wheeler held the picture and I flicked on the kitchen light switch. It was a picture of a young girl leaning against the trunk of a tree. She was slightly chubby and tired looking with a goofy grin on her face. It was suddenly clear to both of us. This was our Cait.

Suddenly the sight of her young eyes and devious smile made me dizzy. My heart beat sped up and I felt weak and nauseous from the stirs of smoke and cat fur, mouse guts and dirty dogs. I felt the weight of the low ceiling and the weight of the picture in my hand. I looked up at Wheeler. His mouth was moving but I couldn't hear any sounds. The room became dark and I felt myself slipping out of reality. I saw a motion of black and suddenly I felt the cold of the kitchen tile on my head. Silence.

I Do This I Do That- Chapter 27: He was Naked

XXVII.

It appeared we had exited the city part of this city district and Tuan seemed small gripping the wheel. He looked dimly into the beaming headlights, careful to move right when the road winded such, and left when the road winded such, too.  Wheeler looked at Tuan but watched me in his peripheral view. I hung my head against the seat by the open window. I breathed in the wind and watched trees and low buildings zoom past into a moving scene of black and dark green.

No one spoke now but it sort of felt as though Tuan was really with us. I didn't feel as if we were merely hitching a ride. I closed my eyes and imagined Tuan being with us back at Lake Michigan with Cait. I could see him standing in the distance of the shore, smoking a cigarette and waving towards me as I watched him look at ease beneath the moon light. He would have laughed a bit at Cait and Wheeler kissing in the waves, I thought.

After an unidentifiable amount of time I could hear the sullen voices of Tuan and Wheeler. Suddenly the car stopped and I jolted from my half-dream. We were on a dark dirt road that winded left and descended to a hill. In the curve of the road was a beaten red picket fence that seemed weathered and old. A mailbox by the fence read "Hacket" in the bright of the headlights. "We're here," said Wheeler.

Outside the stars welted and boomed above us, then diminished in the bright of the busy distance. I hadn't seen stars this bright in a very long time, and suddenly the scene of it all made me feel like I took a drink from the hose. The red fence lined a large yard that slanted down. A blue house that seemed to be falling backwards a bit sat in the middle of the hill. The lights were off from inside the small vertical windows by a screen door, and rows and rows of trees lined the right side of a home-made paved driveway.

None of us noted the time or pondered over the appropriateness of our arrival. The endurance of our mission was unspoken and understood, and if this wasn't the right Hacket house we would move on to the next one. I had no hankering for sleep or stopping. I was going to the last two Hacket houses without pause. At the time I hadn't wondered or cared about what would happen after this night. I didn't assume we wouldn't find our Cait. I just began to descend the dark driveway in silence.

I felt a bit of a chill in those steps from the enormity and depth of the woods on our right. I could feel, or at least imagine the feel, of dozens of pairs of eyes peeking between the brush and thick branches at us as we walked. I could sense, or at least fantasize a sense, that critters or ghosts or wild barefoot children in dirty nightgowns were licking their lips and concocting schemes of torture for the fresh flesh in their territory.

There was no electric doorbell on this house, but an old brassy looking bell hung just eye-level of the screen. Wheeler pulled the bell back and forth three times and the chimes seemed louder than we'd all expected. Tuan stood a little straighter at the sound.

15 seconds passed.

Nothing.

Wheeler rang the bell 4 more times with a bit more muscle, and I took a deep breath waiting for life to emerge.

Then, from inside the house a small light turned on, followed by the sound of a deep and sleepy cough.

A man walked into the hallway from a room on the left, and as he moved closer to the front door it became clear; he was naked.

I Do This I Do That- Chapter 26: What the Fuck Am I Doing Here

XXVI.


Soon the light faded beneath the square brown fence behind the house. I peeked out the window in the midst of conversation and watched the sun rays whisper slowly into the earth. As the sun fell deeper and deeper into the wooden cracks of the fence, Tuan and Wheeler sank further into the artful chaos of conversation. Tuan was becoming more difficult to understand as the PBR amplified his Vietnamese accent, yet Wheeler deciphered the anecdotes with stupefying ease. Moments of laughter and emotional silence bounced between the mustard colored walls, and I sank into the linoleum kitchen, deflated.

My mind stumbled around the day and days that had passed. I could hear Vietnamese Cait Hacket sifting through drawers and picking up heavy objects and heaving them onto different parts of the floor upstairs. What the hell was she doing up there?  I couldn't help but think of her as an imposter, as though she was at fault for sharing the name of our missing Cait. I imagined the real Cait unzipping from the inside of this Vietnamese costume. She'd probably just have a secret smile on her face as she would step out of the plump suit and regain her image as the Cait I knew. She would wonder why I worried. She would strike up a joke or commit herself to a new scheme.

I excused myself from the kitchen and walked down the narrow dark hallway to the bathroom. A dangling chain triggered a single bulb light on the ceiling, which was accompanied by a fan that sounded like an alarm that lacked urgency. I could see my reflection in the high rectangular mirror. My skin looked like paper against the deep green walls, and my hair hung in tired strings loosely around my face. It had been a few days since I'd seen myself, and I almost didn't recognize my own face. I wondered if things truly changed that fast, or if it was just the way I saw things that did.

Next to the bathroom door was a small staircase leading up towards the loud thumps and heaves of Vietnamese Cait. I walked lightly on the wooden stairs and my feet squeaked into the old boards, "rick rack, rick rack, rick rack." Cait must have heard me coming towards her. She peeked her head out into the dark hallway from inside a lit room and screamed something in Vietnamese. She turned and saw me.

"Oh. It's you," she said.

Her voice was a bit kinder now in a way that seemed to surprise both of us as it escaped her lips.

"I'm moving my furniture around." She leaned against the doorway and took a tired breath. "Want to see?"

"Sure," I said. I followed her into the room.

There was a large bed with a heavy black frame on an angle in the middle of the room, mid-move. A dresser was nearly blocking the entrance way, and piles of clothes and knickknacks lined the walls in chaotic graves.

"Wow, this is a lot of stuff," I said.
"Yeah it is. It's really heavy, too, you know. Well the bed is. And the dresser. My dad bought this bed for me a few years ago, and the dresser was my mom's."

I didn't know what to say. She seemed suddenly too comfortable.

"All of this stuff over here was my mom's, too. She was going to throw it away." She put her hands on her hips and looked down onto the piles. I nodded my head. I could see some black and white framed pictures, piles of books, and a delicate jewelry box amongst the things she signaled to be her mother's.

"Want to give me a hand quickly?" She walked towards the bed.
"If you could just pick that side up and move it over here, like this," she said, motioning towards a position on the opposite side of the room.

We moved the bed to where she wanted it, and then we moved the dresser, too.  I was beginning to fear that she'd ask me to help organize all of her things on the floor, too, so I tried to slyly slip back downstairs.

"I think I'll get another beer," I said. "Do you want one too?"
"Oh no thanks I don't drink. I'm drunk after just a sip of a cocktail," she said, smiling as though she'd expected a response.

I said nothing and quickly set for the door. Before exiting I turned once more towards her, waiting, rather fantastically, for my Cait to jump out from inside this impostor. No costume was shed though, and the Vietnamese Cait stood next to her newly arranged furniture, sweating and purveying the new surroundings.

Downstairs the conversation had become intimate. Tuan was clearly weeping, despite a large smile on his face, and Wheeler was slapping the table vigorously with his open palm shouting, "That's FUCKING right! FUCKING right!"

"I think we should go..." I announced with a tone of suggestion. Suddenly I felt an anxiety, a pressure, a claustrophobia. I felt as though we were running out of time in this place. I felt like the time and the mission were slipping away and I couldn't bear to be in this linoleum kitchen. I could no longer handle the mustard walls. Nothing about this place gave dignity or purpose to why we were in Minnesota to begin with. My heart began to speed up and I slipped out the sliding door and into the fenced in back yard. The trees beyond the fence soared above it and shifted in soft chills, shaking the leaves into a frenzy that made me truly want to fly. I knelt down and touched the palms of my hands to the tips of the soft grass. "God. What the fuck am I doing here," I said to myself.

I heard the slider open and there was Wheeler smiling psychotically. "Tuan's gonna drive us to Hacket house number 2. I filled im' in. I told him about the whole goddamn issue. He's gonna drive us there and it's cool," he said. I felt the breath escape my chest in bursts without control. "Okay," I said. We got into a small white car with Tuan and sped down the dark ugly street.

I Do This I Do That- Chapter 25- But That's Okay

XXV.

The first Hacket house was off-white and square, with a shallow roof and tall mangy grass in the yard. The block was stuffed and squeezed with cardboard looking shacks that each faded like tired dogs into the dirt. None of the buildings seemed like homes from the looks of things, and I imagined the properties were giant burdens to the owners, and shelters of strange moments and fleeting chaos. We smoked and smoked and smoked before working up the courage to approach the porch.

Wheeler knocked vigorously and someone ran to the door and it sprung open. A small Asian man in high-waisted light jeans and a loose button up shirt squinted into the sun, measuring us carefully.

"Yes? You here for facial? It ten o'clock. Facial at eleven thirty. You come back."

He began to close the door.

Wheeler interjected. "Wait, wait. Sir, we're actually here looking for our friend. You have a daughter named Caitlin? Caitlin Hacket?"

"Yes. Cait? She here. She watch TV. You come in?" He held the door open and we walked into a narrow foyer behind him. He was a short man with a mop of curly black hair that sat just below his ears. He had it slicked towards the back of his head and it bounced lightly while he moved.

"Leave shoes here," he said.

We took off our shoes and followed him around a corner into a living area. The carpet was soft and brown, and yellow patterned wall paper sprung from the level of our toes and up into the low ceiling. A coiling red interlock of waves twisted together, and the paper vines moved against the yellow walls. The oriental furniture looked rich and delicate, and a hodgepodge of couches and dining room chairs formed a semi-circle around a small boxy television. A robust Asian girl sat low in a plush orange chair.

"These your friends, Cait?" her father said.

"Um.. no?" Her voice was full and American, a generation apart from the choppy English of her father.

He stood erect and talked loudly. "You not Cait's friends? You no here for facial! Why you here?"

"Ah Sir, we're actually looking for a different 'Caitlin Hacket.' We came all the way from Chicago to find her. I'm sorry to bother you guys man, but were just looking for our friend." Wheeler's voice was harsh and smoky, and he looked British in the light of the room. 

"From Chicago? I live in Chicago once. Ya, I live there ...TEN years ago man!" He held up both hands and all fingers and smiled widely. "Where your friend? She live up here?"

"She used to. She left and we're just trying to find her," I said.

"Okay okay." A loud cell phone rang and he walked away, trailing into a foreign conversation.

"You think that's Japanese?" Wheeler whispered.

"It's Vietnamese, actually," the girl interjected.

"Oh nice," said Wheeler, enthusiastically. "So, Hacket. That's not Vietnamese, right?"

"It's my step mom's last name. She's white." She didn't look at us while she talked, but kept her eyes focused on the TV as she flicked through channels rapidly.

"Ahhh, okay okay. So do you know any other Cait Hackets around here?"

"Nope." She reached down and ate some chips from a bag in the nook of her arm.

Her dad re-entered the room and the two exchanged words in Vietnamese. The conversation became angry and the girl walked away.

"You two want beer? I have Pabst Blue Ribbon? I have Sam Adam?"

We accepted the offer, graciously, and followed the man into the kitchen. "Come, come!" he said.

There was a barber chair in the center of the kitchen floor, and mirrors were placed sporadically on the walls. He opened a can of beer for each of us and we sat down at a metal table in the corner. We introduced ourselves, and the man smiled largely. "I am Tuan," he said.

--

Tuan told us about his life. He told us about the two-week journey he took from Vietnam to America in 1971. We asked idiotic questions, ignorant and oblivious to this thread of tribulation, to a history we had no concept of.

Wheeler sat erect in his chair. Beads of condensation fell from his PBR and  trickled into a cylinder pool on the kitchen table. "That's fucking crazy, man," he said. "That's really fucking crazy. Like, two whole weeks? From fucking Vietnam? It's crazy." His leg tapped lightly on the tile floor, and his eyes scanned Tuan with an edge of fever.

Tuan had a goodness about him that I'd never quite experienced. So many of the people I'd met in my life had fallen flat to me. So many encounters with strangers and acquaintances had never resounded past the moment of formality. Tuan had this heaviness to him that wasn't accompanied by grumbling or tired complaints. He just seemed to be. He told us story after story, some a little lost in translation, some a bit sad, some without having any known point at all.

He told us he had permed his hair since the 80's. He told us his ex-wife was a model in the early 90's and his new wife was a poor cosmetologist. "She's ugly," he said. "But a nice lady." His children were "too American," he said. They didn't understand him and he didn't understand them. He was happy he came here, he said. He'd lived in California and Texas, and Idaho for a short time. He'd divorced his Vietnamese wife in Chicago and moved to Minnesota with Mrs. Hacket and their children.

His youngest daughter was bullied in school and he said that he babied her. "I tell Ginny to do homework? She say- Daddy I love you- and doesn't have to do her homework!" He laughed uproariously in between his stories. "But that's okay," he said. He said that Cait was too fat. She hadn't been that fat before but she's so American, he said. "But that's okay," he repeated.

Tuan was sitting in front of a small square window leading into a fenced in backyard. The sun cast shadows on his face and beamed in to capture dust swimming slowly in the dry air. There was a bird feeder in the yard filled with plants and rain water. The fence around the square plot was high and old looking, and I watched a squirrel balance on the wood grid and bounce playfully in the bright of the sun, disappearing fast into a neighboring lawn. The wholeness of Tuan's voice made each word hold validity that permeated the moment. Even the simplest of his details propelled me into a contemplation of much bigger proportions.

He said that he had a lot of money in Chicago. He'd lost it all in his divorce, which he accepted. "I'm rich, I was rich, I'm poor, I'm rich, I was rich, I'm poor," he said. "The moon changes, but that's okay," he said.

Wheeler asked him more questions about his trip to America.

"We had 1 bowl rice a day on the boat," he told us. "And when you had to take a shit, you leaned over the edge of the boat!" He had a gleaming smile on his face, but it wasn't slightly moronic or arrogant, it was just unburdened, and perhaps innocent.

"People fell in that way! I saw TWO people die," he said. He held up two bold fingers.

"Shit," said Wheeler.

Tuan opened more beers and lined them up on the kitchen table.

"I think about that, man. Dying," said Wheeler. He took a long drink of his PBR and slouched deeper into his chair. "Well, not dying I guess. I just have this fantasy, like, sort of just sneaking out of my skin. Just kind of tip-toeing away from my skin and my bones and my body and stuff. You know? And just floating off as a-- well a blob, or a puff of smoke or whatever. You know what I mean? God that sounds crazy, man. But do you know what I mean? Just sort of escaping. Not into nothingness though- just as me, without... this." He made a circular motion around his body.

Tuan looked thoughtfully at Wheeler for a moment and then burst into a real laugh. I thought about the idea, and I could see a certain appeal in the fantasy. I too, felt somewhat trapped inside my skin sometimes. I hated to agree, but I understood.

I Do This I Do That- Chapter 24

XXIV. Get Your Bruised Butt Up

Something that should terrify me more than any mystery in the world, any stranger on the MegaBus and all of the pending atrocities on full moon nights- is the lapse of time I am faced with the morning after a blackout drunk. On this particular morning, I woke beneath a canopy of scarce branches on a bed of dewy grass. Without possessing anything of remote commercial value, the only assets I really have to keep intact are my legs, my face, and my lungs. My legs were cold and wet, but fine. My face felt blemished, but I could still see and smell and smile. My lungs were working, however they did feel slightly beaten up from an overdose of smoking.

We were in a barren park. The sun was struggling to peak towards the world from behind a few relentless clouds. They were white and sweet looking, but malevolent things. The rays squeaked between the billowed edges, but were constantly rebuffed. I wanted some warmth but there was none to be found. I leaned against the trunk of the tall maple tree and looked out into the empty park. There was a swing set a few hundred yards away. Trees were sporadically planted on beds of wood chips and sod.

The grass had crisp linear patterns in it from careful mowing. I could smell the remnants of the last mow and it made me think of childhood. That creeping feeling of being tiny and dirty, playing outside and taking full breaths of spring air dawned on me, as memories do. I could almost see the mirage of my father in the distance, stooped over and driving our dinky lawnmower forward, sweat dripping down his face and a cigarette hanging from his lips.

I could have died last night, and I really wouldn't have noticed, I thought. Dying seems to be the part of life when every cognitive realization, every part of the brain, every corner of the soul is elevated to a conceptual understanding. Of all the moments and of all the epiphanies, the sensory overloads, dying, I imagine, is the apex. I would have missed the whole hoopla. I would have surpassed the grandiose production and just keeled over, drunk. "I suppose I should thank you, for keeping me around to find out what it all feels like," I said. I was looking up, towards God, or those malevolent clouds, or that poor sun on the offense.

The last thing I do remember is being kicked out of Hobo Sam's. After we concocted the most organic reception of love that I have ever been apart of, we sabotaged it just as fast. The engagement had made Wheeler, that bumbling idiot, palpably irresistible to all of the local ladies. It's disgusting really, the way our humanity pushes us to desire the things we cannot, or should not attain. Moments after our eloquent loop and over dramatic kiss, Wheeler was getting eye fucked from every corner of the bar. It was happening to me too, but the guys weren't as openly disrespectful to each other as the girls happened to be.

The sequence of sabotage began like this...

Tan man walked back over to us and struck up a conversation with me. It was all garbage. More reiterations about how amazing Wheeler and I were. More talk about promotion. More bullshit bullshit recollections of our love. Meanwhile, Wheeler had begun talking to the brunette who had asked us "Why Hobo Sam's?" earlier. At least a half an hour went on like this. I continued to sip drink after drink. As tan man talked, I studied the skin on his face. The dark organ was stretched out in astounding proportions, defying my imagination. I started to look at him like a talking briefcase. I'd laugh where no laugh was due.

After many moments of crap, I left for the bathroom to maybe puke or poop. There were blood stains on the tile, and a great crack down the center of the mirror divided my face into two jagged halves.

I puked a little in the toilet, and assured myself afterwards by saying, "It had to be done." The strange girl who I directed the comment towards offered me a mint from her purse. It was peppermint.

I left the bathroom and walked back towards the bar stools we'd claimed. Tan man was gone, but standing next to my empty stool was Wheeler, making out with the brunette. It was all spit and tongues were everywhere. The only way it could have been more graphic, would have been if he'd ripped off his shirt or lifted her up on top of the bar. The people around them, those who were still remotely coherent, were struck with awe. Some stared intently. Others appeared to have been scanning the room for me, his supposed fiance.

Soon he noticed me standing there, and he gently removed the brunette from his mouth. We had successfully condensed all the melodrama of a long term commitment into the span of two gloriously public hours.
"How could you!" I announced, with calculated gusto that sent a wave of silence through the bar. The words churned in my stomach and I wanted deeply to laugh and laugh and laugh.

"It's okay! It's okay everyone. It's okay. We're not really engaged. We've only known each other a week. It was just a joke! That ring? I bought that ring for a quarter in that machine over there. It's all good everybody! No need to get upset," Wheeler reached for the brunette's arm. She slapped him and the party resumed.

Everything after that is somewhat of a blur. It was definitely not okay, by the standards of everyone who'd spent a buck or shed a tear on our behalf. We were usurped from Hobo Sam royalty, and literally kicked out of the bar. I couldn't tell that morning, but I had a giant bruise on my butt from the kick. After that, we'd evidently wandered intoa park to sleep.


--------
Wheeler appeared from behind the maple. His hair looked electrocuted, and his face had strands of creases in it from a bed of grass. He looked genuinely homeless, and I was not entirely convinced that he wasn't.
"How's your ass?"
"Sore."
"See what happens when the moon is full?" He sat down next to me.
"Or when you are just a giant fucking idiot, rather."
"Come on...That was incredible! We single handily created love and then crushed it! I feel like my parents."

He pulled out the map from his backpack.
"Honestly I don't have a fucking clue where we are now. We walked for at least an hour after the bar last night, so we're definitely going to have to take a cab or get a ride to Hackett house number one," he said.
"I hope it's our Cait Hackett," I said.
"I kind of hope it's not. I'm not ready to be done with this. I've got nothin' to go home to."
"I just want to find her."
"Well, get your bruised butt up and let's go then." He dusted dirt off his pants and helped me to my feet.

I Do This I Do That- Chapter 23

XXIII. Mi Mufasa es Su Mufasa

I transcended between dream and reality as the bus jolted and rumbled and dimmed. Wheeler's bony butt was practically on my lap for a moment or two, and I plastered my side to the window, perpetually shoving him over with my knee. I kept dreaming nonsense, about some dragon bathing in what looked like canned ravioli. I'd wake and then find myself mentally searching for the exact spot in the orange and red valley that I left off. I was just sort of perusing around a warm valley, and this dragon was dipping it's mouth in the goo and then spitting the marinara looking sauce all over itself. It never saw me. I was completely alone, I thought to myself in the dream that it might have been hell. If Cait had been with me when I woke up, I'm sure she'd relay some highly inaccurate interpretation of what it all meant. I personally found no significance from any of it, but the vividness was undeniably haunting, as usual.



The outside world began to brighten and it seemed we'd arrived in something urban. It was just after 11 p.m. I'd slept for much longer than I'd thought, which I realized with utter relief. The trip was ending, and we'd arrived in Minneapolis, just a tad behind schedule. After the various stops, less than half the passengers remained on the bus. Hot Cheetos was gone, and the Amish trifecta had also departed. The skinny tough guy and his babe still sat ahead of us, and they yawned and then giggled then kissed in the dark. "I think we're here, babe," he said.



We turned down South 3rd Street and stopped on the corner of 3rd and Chicago. The lights came on and the bus beeped and lowered. "Well folks, almost 8 hours later and it looks like we're back to Chicago," joked the driver over the intercom. Silence ensued, and it seemed that the fat nut in the back had exited the bus while we slept. We retrieved our backpack and left into a sea of parking lots. There were parking lots on every side of us, and low yellow street lights made continuous shadows down the cement blocks.



Few cars passed, and the other riders faded into cabs or cars or shadows. Wheeler and I made no plans for lodging, and we sat on a brick ledge in one of the many parking lots to contemplate our next move. The air was idyllic, and faints of summer warmth moved in a steady breeze calmly moving west. It smelled like flowers and dirt in the lot, and I took notice to the likelihood of the moon actually being full. It appeared to be, but truly full or not, it was certainly brilliant above us regardless.



"Hey, you know where the term 'lunatic' comes from?" said Wheeler, leaning back against his wrists and turning his wide eyes towards the sky.

"No I don't."

"The prefix 'luna' means moon. People are supposedly more crazy when there's a full moon. More murderers, more accidents. Even Aristotle thought so."

"You know the most useless shit."

"Depends on what you consider useless I guess!"

"So what are we supposed to do now?"

"Find a watering hole and stumble around until morning. Then we'll go to this Hackett house first in the morning," he pulled out a scribbley map with a triangle drawn over outspread Minneapolis streets. He pointed to one of the corners.

"Alright," I said.

There was a star on the map about 8 blocks southeast of where the first Hackett house was. "We're here," said Wheeler.

"I feel sort of like a pirate with this map, looking for treasure."

Wheeler concluded that we should head towards the first house, and stop at whatever bars we collided with on the journey.

After 5 blocks towards the first Hackett house, we came to a slightly busy slew of low buildings with cheap looking fluorescent signs and stirs of amplified music inside. The gutters surrounding reeked of sewage and mud, and there wasn't anything or anyone remotely pretty in sight. There was life though, and booze, and we settled with that.

The first bar on the left was called "Hobo Sam's". The crowd was surprisingly young. I knew nothing about the demographics of the area, but I did know how confoundedly ugly it was outside. Usually young people congregate in pretty little places, but there must have been a college nearby, I thought.

Wheeler hung around me like a belt, and it was only by extremely aggressive shoves that I got him to remove his arm or arms from my waist. He went to the bar and squeezed between a very dull looking group. I sat at a tall wooden table on the left side of the room and surveyed the variance, feeling quite tired and greasy. He looked back towards me periodically, with a happy drunk grin on his face, as though we repeatedly shared a discreet moment that words could not necessarily convey. There was no moment though. No connection, and I actually quivered in disgust at the sight of his elongated gazes.

He was wearing a snug navy t-shirt with a picture of Mufasa on it from The Lion King. It read, "Mi Mufasa es Su Mufasa," in white cursive font. Mufasa was the father in the movie. Did the shirt mean, my father is your father? Crazy fucking Wheeler, I thought, as I watched him stand there, all lanky and British looking. Those big buck teeth and high cheek bones were nothing short of laughable. The expression on his face was one that indicated he desired and deserved attention, attention from me no less. However, I could never reciprocate that look he was giving me. No matter what we'd done together or what we were going to do, I would never even remotely care about him on any romantic level. Any sexual encounters we had were merely consequences of apathy, not attraction. What was most palpable to me in that moment, was that I lacked even the smallest amount of remorse for the entire debacle. His feelings were his own problem.

He came back to the table with a pitcher of beer and two quality plastic cups. The beer tasted like apricots, and the plastic was thick, nothing that I could bite through.

"Nice," I said.

"The bartender only had fucking quarters for change. You mind if I go blow them on those machines over there?" he pointed to a little area by the foyer where there was an abundance of kiddie looking machine games. "I think there's a jukebox too."

"Yeah, go."

He reached over and squeezed my hand before he got up, just before I had a sufficient chance to remove it from his range.

The other tables around me were quickly occupied, and I was suddenly filled with an overwhelming feeling of familiarity. I could be in any college bar in any city in the country and find nothing remotely different, aside perhaps from a variation in the nightly specials. The three guys behind me were wearing blue and black and tan, and their names were probably Chad, Chris, and Tom. There were four girls behind them. They were probably talking about relationships or the trivial details of their daily affairs. All of the noise around me struck me in such an exasperatingly daunting way, that I could do nothing more than chug the pitcher to suppress my anxiety. I drank and drank until the apricot beer deflected in burps from my full stomach, back into the noisy air.

Wheeler popped back over to me just as I finished the last drink of the apricot beer.
"I won this in a machine," he said, pulling out a small black box from his pocket. Inside was a fake gaudy diamond ring with a thin faux-silver band.
"I also won an alligator stuffed animal, but some dude bought it from me for $1.25."
"Weird."
"I'm gonna do something now, and you have to go with it. No matter what, just go with it. Okay? Trust me."
"What are you gonna do?"
"Just trust me."

He walked over towards the bar and disappeared in the accumulating crowd.

Some big girl in a table perpendicular from me was leaning too far forward and her shirt was far too short. The blatant sight of the crack of her ass made me almost want to throw up the apricot beer. Also, I'd been extremely malnourished in the past few days, and the impetuous pitcher chug left me feeling unsteady in my chair. Thanks to the beer, time was sort of easier to endure though, which was a feeling I could not deny liking. I wished for a minute I had a napkin to crumble, or a paper straw wrapper to toss over into her crack. I had nothing though, and just cringed flagrantly in her general ass crack direction.

The lights became a tad brighter, and the music stopped playing mid song. It was hours before closing time. Several fat and thirsty college beasts looked towards the bar, bewildered. Others were too drunk or distracted to notice. However, all mouths and eyes halted when suddenly the bartender hopped on the bar. He sharply whistled with two fingers in his mouth, a skill that awed me and commanded the room nearly silent.

"Hey! Everybody. Listen up for a minute!"

A congregated group by the bar parted for an emerging person. It was Wheeler. Goddamn Wheeler. He walked out from the group and moved towards me. He had a look on his face like a man who'd just born a child. He seemed completely meek and utterly amazed. 'What the fuck is he about to do?' I thought. Thankfully I was feeling a bit loaded, and the bright lights in the room were fuzzy enough to keep me calm. I remembered what he said, "No matter what, just go with it." Go with it I would, for the sake of sparring a likely brawl, but I was nervous as hell as he approached me.

The people in the room formed sort of a half-moon crescent around us as he cleared his throat.

"Paigebrook," he said, so loudly that I could almost feel the vibrations of his voice.
"I have loved you since the first time I saw you." Pause. Oh God. Oh God. What the fuck is he doing? I put my hand over my heart, and the other over my mouth, worried I may puke or laugh, and the hand could stop both.

"Every day that I've heard your voice and seen you smile, has made me happier than the day before... You've stood by me through these past 8 years. Through my drug problems, through the cancer... You've given me strength that I never knew I had in me. Sometimes, I just look at you and my whole life just makes sense. You are my best friend, and the most beautiful girl I have ever. ever. seen." The long lustrous pauses were filled with perceptible intensity, and I could see that around the room girls and boys alike were beaming with receptive happiness. A blond girl sitting on a stool wiped a tear from her cheek.

Wheeler took a deep heartfelt breath and got down on one knee. 'Oh God,' I thought. The crowd around us jeered with more enthusiasm than I remember seeing at any baseball game, any track meet or 5k road race... Tough boys with deep voices cheered from the depths of their lungs. Tiny girls 'wooed' with high pitched yelps, and the fire in the room pulsed with genuine intensity and support. Even I felt like crying.

"Paigebrook, Esmerelda.. McGillicuddy. Make me the happiest fucking guy in the world," He pulled out the black box with the ring that he'd won from the quarter machine. "Will you, marry me?" He opened the box. The room sort of held it's breath for just a moment, and I found myself nodding uncontrollably, 'yes', I moved my hand away from my nearly laughing mouth and said, "Yes, Yes, Yes!" Every one went bizerk; clapping and jumping and cheering wildly. I got up from my chair and Wheeler picked me up in one brisk motion, spinning me around in an eloquent loop.

I heard joyful crying from the table of boring broads I'd noted earlier. There was the sound of champagne popping, and before I knew it, I kissed him, in the heat of the brilliantly contrived moment. We had parted The Red Sea. We had turned water into wine, and everyone in the room wanted a piece of our miraculous asses. True love had been witnessed, at least in the perception of these dopey Minnesotans.

I couldn't believe how badly every one wanted to be apart of it, to believe it, and to support it with every type of alcoholic salutation I'd ever consumed. It was like my goddamn twenty-first birthday, on steroids. Never had I been treated better in my life. Before we knew it, we were Hobo Sam royalty. Bottles of champagne were opened in our honor. We took shot after shot after shot. We were holding hands and Eskimo kissing our way into being given the bar itself.

We were becoming quite good at being engaged. Our story became bigger and more concrete as the night went on.

"So, why'd you pick Hobo Sam's?" asked a relatively cute brunette, who didn't buy us a drink but came over to our celebrity stools at the bar. It was a reasonable question.
"This has been our place for the past five years," said Wheeler.
"Yeah that's right, we come here all the time," I said.
The bar was a dark dusty square with old looking pool tables and bathrooms that reeked of shit and murder.
A tall gump in a backwards grey hat, with borderline cross-eyes overheard our response and chimed in. "You know, I've seen you guys in here so many times. You always look so happy and so in love. Makes me want to get a girlfriend, man," he patted Wheeler on the back.
"Nothing beats love," said Wheeler.
"Wow. That's just great. I'm so happy for you guys!" said the brunette. She then ordered us two shots.
"Five years? How fucking old do I look?" I whispered in Wheeler's ear. He laughed and kissed me on the cheek. "Love you too, honey!" he said.

A short guy with dark hair walked over to us. He looked and smelled like he'd just popped out of the tanning bed, and he held out his hand towards me with enthusiasm. "Congrats guys. Really. That was incredible. I work for Minneapolisbars.com, and I actually caught the entire thing on my iPhone. I'm gonna put it up on the website tomorrow if it's cool with you both."
"Oh yeah, absolutely. I can't wait to see it!"
"I've never seen anything like that. It was seriously, really amazing. I've seen you guys in here before, and I gotta tell you, I've noticed how happy you are together."
"Hear that dear? How nice," I said. I smiled drunkenly at Wheeler. I felt like an aspiring actress with my first big break.
"Hey and if you guys need anything, like a promo for your wedding, promo for your bachelor parties, seriously let me know. I also video tape, too," he said. He handed us his card. It had his face on the front of it.
"Also I'm gonna give you guys this V.I.P promo book. There are drink tickets in there, coupons for restaurants and hotels, party discounts, limo discounts.. lots of good stuff," he handed it to Wheeler.
"Excellent man. We really appreciate it," said Wheeler. He kissed my forehead.

The plastic ring was entirely too big for my ring finger, and it slid around in circles and dropped down onto the ground from time to time. A boy glanced skeptically while Wheeler retrieved it. Wheeler picked up the ring and leaned into the boy, "It's my mom's engagement ring man. I love the woman, but she's bigger than a house," he said. The boy smiled and moved in towards the bar.

"Bartender! Two shots!" he said.

I Do This I Do That- Chapter 22

XXII. Utopia

I rested my head on the thick warm glass as the bus wielded through traffic intermittently. As we accelerated and switched lanes, there seemed to be a slight delay of movement from the bottom half to the top half of the bus, and the sensation made me somewhat woozy. It was such a heavy thing, with all of the people and bags and wheels, and I thought about how common it would be for us to just topple over into the medium, or drift into collision with some unassuming truck or tree. For as statistically dangerous driving is, becoming a bus driver should be a difficult process, and obtaining an operator's licence should really be regarded as a prestigious achievement.

I could hear Pancho Villa telling a man sitting behind him about the various public places in Chicago that used to permit inconspicuous drug use.

"It was before all the goddamn socialists took over. Remember that? I remember when the frats in Lincoln Park used to sell speed at the door instead of plastic cups. Me? No I never went. I ran around with a group that went to the frat houses though," he said. "All the goddamn democrats got up and took over though. Now we can't even smoke a goddamn cigarette fifty feet from a building. You don't think ther'll be another prohibition? There sure as hell will be, if Obama has anything to do with it. Goddamn socialist. They're taxing soda that isn't diet, you know that? Vice laws. I used to be able to smoke weed right out in the open. Right in the middle of the goddamn park. Now I can't even smoke a cigarette outside." He coughed from the depth of his lungs and glanced periodically in the rear view mirror at the babe sitting behind the man he spoke with. The man wore a khaki brimmed hat and leaned towards the driver with his right arm perched up against the back of his seat. "I hear ya," he said, "Tell me about it. No shit. I hear ya."

In my ideal Utopian society, becoming a bus driver or a cabbie would be one of the most prestigious endeavors. I'm sure if Sir Thomas More was alive and created a modern revision of his book, Utopia, he'd likely agree with this priority. The bus driver would be the economical equivalent of the doctor or the politician. Even private citizens would undergo grueling tests to obtain a driver's license, which would have to be renewed every five years or so. Car accidents would then be as socially shocking as plane crashes.

More's Utopia valued agriculture and simplicity, which mine would also uphold, but I would add that the public transporter is one of the most socially undermined positions. Also, More's world implemented slavery, which is pretty fucked up. My Utopia would not have slavery, or name tags, or romantic comedies starring Matthew McConaughey, or the "Twilight" series, or acrylic nails, or Twitter, or Miley Cyrus, or Nicholas Sparks, or Oprah. Most importantly, my Utopia would not allow small talk of any kind.

Art would be valued, college would be free, there would be no vice laws, and dogs would be strictly prohibited from wearing clothing. There would be tax incentives for those who didn't obstruct justice, who promoted goodness, who befriended their neighbors, and for those who displayed general perspective and humility. Of course the reality of the world is not close to my ideal, and if the babe's chicken leg was remotely visible to the boisterous driver, the MegaBus and all of the ugly people inside would probably crash into opposing traffic.

Wheeler was listening to the driver and laughed under his breath after certain comments. He turned towards me.

"You know," he said, "every time I've ridden on a coach bus in the last couple of years I think about that Canadian wack who decapitated the dude sitting next to him."
"I didn't hear about that."
"Oh yeah. It was on a Greyhound. This normal looking guy just started stabbing the passenger next to him in the middle of the trip. Like 50 or 60 times or something. Then he decapitated him, and ran up and down the aisle eating the dude's flesh. It was one of the most fucked up things I'd ever heard about."
"That's horrible."
"Isn't it? How can people be that fucked up? And people are supposedly made in God's image. What about that guy, huh?"
He looked up and down the aisle. "It makes you wonder, right? Like everybody looks so normal, but you never know what's really going on inside. Hot Cheetos over there might be a real psycho and we'd never know by looking at her. Or the Amish dude. Maybe he's leaving the city because he was just on some serial killing spree!"
"I doubt that," I said.
"There are so many mysteries in the world, in the universe. You know? Aliens, the Bermuda Triangle, God... I think we're the biggest mystery of all though. Fucking people. Who knows why people do what they do.We'll never know either."
"I don't think it's that mysterious. I think people are just selfish. That guy on the Greyhound just wanted to do that."
"Yeah you also said you pride yourself with not knowing things." He smiled and the western sun hit his face, making his teeth look bigger and more bucked than usual.
"I still have an opinion. It's probably wrong, but I still have one."

We stopped at a McDonald's about 40 minutes north of Janesville, Wisconsin.
The driver got on the intercom, "Okay folks, we'll be here for 20 minutes. 20 minutes. If you're not on here in 20 minutes, we're leavin' without you. And if anyone wants to buy me a big mac, no mustard please."

The guy in the back with the deep laugh lost control, and every body's heads turned towards him.
"With that laugh and a few more stops at McDonald's, he's gonna have a heart attack," said Wheeler.

I stayed on the bus while Wheeler went inside to get us food. I buried my head in my lap while the chicks walked past. After the bus refilled, Wheeler was the last to return. He didn't have a McDonald's bag, but instead he carried two cucumbers and a plastic knife.

"I went across the street to the dairy store," he said, "This is better than nasty burgers and greasy fries."

Everyone around us made loud noises with their red and white paper bags, and the smell of fried meat and pickles doused in mustard lingered between the royal blue rows. Wheeler struggled to peel the cucumbers with the bending knife. He took the peeled scraps and rubbed them all over his face.

"It's good for you," he said, handing me a piece of green skin. I rubbed it on my face then held the used scrap in my hand.
"That does feel nice," I said.
When he was finished he ate the pieces he'd used on his greasy face.
"Are you gonna eat that?" he pointed to the one I'd rubbed on mine.
"That's really gross." He took it out of my hand and ate it.
"You're so much like Cait, and you don't even know it."
"Cait Hackett? Or Cait Finn? We don't even know what she's like," he said.

It was getting dark outside and the babe was now sitting on the skinny tough guy's lap. The bus smelled like burger fart, and Wheeler revealed yet another pint of whiskey from his other sock. Pancho Villa watched the babe deviously in the rear view mirror, and I kept imagining the MegaBus veering off into a perilous catastrophe because of it.

A vision of scarce trees blended into a green line as we moved forward, and I couldn't help but notice how plain it all was. Every mile looked the same as the last. I tried to percieve the dusty gravel road and the patchy green fields beside it as beautiful or interesting, but I could not lie to my own instincts. It was all ugly, every single mile. The sunset was brilliant though, as it arguably always is. No matter the place or weather, the setting sun is always beautiful. As long as there is a sun, there will always be two distinctly beautiful moments in every single day; the sunrise and the sunset. The light began to hide beneath the ugly green fields, and I closed the window shade to block the intensity.

"Is it okay if I put my head on your lap?" said Wheeler.
"No, no, it's not at all okay actually."

Instead, he curled himself into a ball with his back toward me. I tried to sleep but couldn't distract my brain from the monotony of M*A*S*H, and the reoccurring vision in my head of toppling over into a ditch. My Utopian bus driver wouldn't resemble Pancho Villa at all, I thought, but would be someone cool and distinguished looking, like Anderson Cooper or Gregory Peck. Yes. Gregory Peck, in fact. Gregory Peck would be the absolute ideal representation of my Utopian bus driver, I thought...

I Do This I Do That- Chapter 21

XXI. "You're Ignorant! You're Ignorant!"

The driver descended from the MegaBus door and stood in the gutter next to the accumulating line. He smoked a cigarette and periodically pulled his sagging gray slacks back on top of the slope of his protruding waist. His dark eyes looked like dirty pebbles, heavy and small. He had a thick Pancho Villa mustache that was almost comically primped, turning down at both sides. He watched the shallow ducks daintily heave their bags into the storage compartment below the bus. People in line looked at him like he ought to help. He spat in response.

Wheeler and I held back while the bus filled, and I peeked between the bobbing heads and made a note of where precisely the chickadees had sat. They were third or fourth row up from the rear.

The front half of the bus was still scarcely sat, and from behind the line I eyed an empty spot on the right side close to the front. I positioned Wheeler ahead of me to ensure I was adequately hidden.


"You don't want them to see you? Just come here," said Wheeler, putting his arm around my neck like I was about to be the victim of a noogie. He quickly pulled his t-shirt over my head. His abdomen was damp and salty against my face and I struggled to walk down the aisle without hitting what felt like chairs, or arms, or bags. Wheeler laughed gaily and popped me out into an empty seat.

"You're ridiculous. And disgusting," I said.

"That was just as obvious as what you were doing, hiding behind me like a little kid. Who the fuck cares if you know those girls?"

"I can't explain it."

He put his backpack up above the seat and sat down next to me. He scratched his nails on the chair by his lap, tracing the multicolored laser-like dashes seamed into the thick royal blue fabric. M*A*S*H was playing on the small TV in front of us, and the familiar theme song competed with the hushed sounds of slow classic rock coming from the driver's personal radio.


Three Amish people settled in a few seats behind us, and I wondered how fascinated they were or how shameful they felt over all the exposed knees everywhere on the bus. I imagine that to Amish people, the bluntness of all the exposed knees and shoulder blades would be the equivalent of me walking onto a bus with butts and boobs abounding, with no apologies or complaints.

I heard a program on NPR about an Amish boy who took a spiritual sabbatical on his 18th birthday. He left his community for 6 months, and at the end of the sabbatical he could either choose to return to the Amish way of life, or dissent into mainstream culture forever. He ended up getting addicted to meth.


These three looked meth free, and they were only an arms reach away, which excited me. I could faintly hear the sound of their conversation. Their possible topics for discussion filled me with curiosity. I figured they may banter over homemade furniture, or jam, or cornfields, ears of corn, religious paraphernalia, sin, buttons, maybe... hats. If I was raised Amish, the lure of meth (or anything shiny or sharp really) would likely be my demise too.


Everyone else around was boring and ugly. Across from us, an overweight black girl was talking on the phone with one hand and eating flaming hot Cheetos with the other. She had long fake pink nails with detailed white designs etched on them. She had a backpack sitting on the seat next to her, even though the bus was nearly full.

I remember one time when Cait and I went for a walk through Lincoln Park, we happened to be slightly drunk and we walked straight through a kid's soccer game. It was clearly a huge interruption, and an angry dad ran after us, screaming, "You're ignorant! You're ignorant!" That's all he said. I suppose he was right, but at the time the complaint lacked so much specificity to me. For some reason the vision of this big girl eating hot Cheetos and not giving a damn about taking up two seats made me think of that screaming dad.

There was an old woman standing in front of the big girl who had a look on her face like she knew she was old and everyone else should care. She waited for someone to help her put her bag into the upper storage compartment. The big girl didn't get up. I nudged Wheeler and he noisily got up and made a big fuss over her. He called her sweetheart. I thought for a moment that he may slap her ass, but thankfully he just faked the motion when she wasn't looking.

I looked back to see the Amish people's reactions but they were stone cold serious. I could imagine the Amish man thinking about corn or buttons to distract himself from the mainstream buffoonery.

Wheeler sat back down and tried but failed to put his arm around my shoulder. I pushed him off of me like a reflex. The bus was already running 30 minutes behind schedule, but we remained outside of Union Station. The doors were still open and the driver still stood on the curb, smoking and grinning beneath that Pancho Villa.

A couple walked on, a skinny looking tough guy, and a sort of pretty, short girl with blond hair and pale chicken legs. "Right here babe," said the skinny boy. His voice was out of context, full and deep, like someone important and strong. He was damn skinny though. They both were. She handed him her bag and went into the window seat. "You want this babe?" He pulled out a magazine from the bag pouch.

"Hopefully this 'babe' shit doesn't go on for seven whole hours," I said to Wheeler. Again I imagined that soccer dad, screaming and running after us, "You're ignorant! You're ignorant!"

The tough kid's chest was sort of puffed out, and he took a snarled glance around the bus before sitting down next to his babe.

"You wanna get fucked up, 'babe'?" Wheeler pulled out a pint of Jack from his sock.
"Sure, why not."

We turned towards each other and took turns drinking from the small bottle.
"Don't worry. I have reinforcements too," he said.

The driver got on the bus and closed the door. He situated himself in the seat and got on the intercom, "Afternoon folks. Thanks for choosing MegaBus. We're a bit behind schedule today, but we'll still be making stops for breaks and dinner. We'll be getting to our final destination, Minneapolis, about an hour later than planned. But don't worry, we'll leave the light on for ya." He looked into the rear view mirror and winked, as though he anticipated some laughter. However it wasn't funny, not even a little bit. Some big nut in the back killed the silence and laughed like he may explode or die from hilarity.

I hit my head lightly against the window.

Wheeler nudged my arm with his elbow. "Hey, if I get drunk enough, will you give me 10 dollars to grope hot Cheetos over there?"

"You're Ignorant."

I Do This I Do That- Chapter 20

XX. Fucking Small Talk

Downtown the late afternoon sun ricocheted from building to building and the rays felt most concentrated on the top of my head and the bottom of my feet. We stood in the middle of the line to board the bus, behind two girls I recognized as my former college peers. Both were average height, but taller than me. One had mousy blond hair that blew wildly in the southbound wind. The other was brunette and chunky. Her denim shorts pinched the back of her legs, making a fold.

I'd met them, more or less, freshman year. I'd passed them on campus and in between classes. We'd waved to each other at bars. I began to sweat at the idea of engaging in small talk of any kind. I tried to hide behind Wheeler. Please don't look at me, please don't look at me, I thought to myself over and over and over again.

"Wheeler," I whispered, crouched down behind him in the line. "I know them," I pointed. "Please don't say my name."

"I wouldn't know what to call you even if I wanted to," he said, failing to adjust his tone for discretion.

They laughed to each other like little birds, and I imagined their conversation was about some bullshit social scenarios, some crappy details about their vacuous activities, or the stupid phony entanglements they considered relationships. This was going to be a long ride of hiding behind my seat. Yuck, I thought. I couldn't fathom the thought of the simple banter I'd have to partake in if they recognized me to my face. The whole garrulous production, the dialogue, the smiling. It was more precarious to me than the likely trauma of several physical endeavors. I almost thought of retreating from the entire mission just to overt chatting with these shallow ducks.

My elaborate distaste for common social interaction was intrinsically deeper than me just feeling dim for not having normal adult preoccupations to discuss. It was the idea of being identified that I hated. I could travel anywhere new, comfortably, as long as I didn't already own a formed persona. The moment someone recognized me, I became afraid of encountering them ever again. The more people who knew me or knew of me, the worse my fear became.

When I met Cait, she became an armor. I could go anywhere if she was there. She protected me. Her fearlessness was captivating, and it radiated off of her like light from a lamp. With Cait, not only was I not afraid of discussing the weather or my plans for winter break as usual, but I just knew the small conversation that I detested could never take place. She was too outlandish. She was unapproachable and impervious to the phony pretences the dialogue required. Wheeler served no similar function, and I regarded his presence more as a gaudy anchor or an un-coverable blemish than something remotely empowering.

I remember during the second semester of my freshman year in college, my immense hatred for small talk was severely affecting my grades. I'd lost points in my classes for truant attendance, a policy I always thought was complete bull shit, but could not successfully avoid. Some days I spent hours fighting with myself at the door to my building, debating on which route to class was least clustered. I wore headphones and hid the unattached cord in my pocket. What made matters worse was the size of my building. I lived in a twenty story dorm on the eighteenth floor, but could hardly force myself to take the elevator instead of the stairs.

If I was remotely tardy, I wouldn't attend class at all, specifically to avoid being looked at. I could only imagine the peril of that interruption...bumbling through desk rows and loudly retrieving my books. The professor would roll his eyes. The students would watch me move across the room. How awful! How embarrassing. I could not bear it. When I told my academic advisor about my social condition (after two missed appointments), she suggested I see a counselor.

The grad student counselor was a pretty Italian girl with olive skin and long, carefully groomed hair. She was polite, but a tad inarticulate and flushed. She spoke softly, and struggled a great deal with spouts of dry mouth between words. She had an ugly wound on her lip, caked in concealer and hid slightly by a few hanging curls of her hair. Was it a disease? Was it a blemish? Was it a cut from some domestic dispute? Perhaps it was herpes. I couldn't stop staring at it. I kept picturing her heading to the bar right after our session, or being the center of dozens of skanky poses on Facebook. She probably picked psychology as a major on a whim. She probably went to grad school because she wasn't quite sure what to do with her frivolous undergraduate degree. She probably had no fucking clue what she was going to do or who she was going to be, like everyone else I knew. She was only a few years older than I was, after all.

She flipped through a white binder full of paper. The room was like a closet with two modern desk chairs facing each other and a small side table against the wall. The window faced towards the shoreline of Lake Michigan, where beauty was inescapable, where nothing too warm or too cold could ever be imperfect, and no shade of day looked remotely dull. I watched the waves beat against the rocks while she cleared her throat and neatly sorted out her things. The water moved like music; low and subtle towards the lake and crashing unpredictably towards the shore. While she was busy setting up a tape recorder, I kept thinking about the notes and the octave jumps the water would create if it moved on scales and not sand. She tested the recorder dumbly.

"This is just a requirement from the department. Is it okay with you if I record this?"
"Sure," I said, too nervous and distracted to think it over.

She too would likely become a contribution to this progressing condition of mine, I thought. Look at that thing. That thing on her lip. I pictured myself seeing her and her lip thing in public. I'd sweat, ignore her, run away...At the very least I'd walk past her at a very fast pace. Consequently we only had 3 sessions total, even though I was recommended to see her for the remainder of the semester. I was at least a good sport for the first one, which was something.

She asked me simple questions. I nervously answered, explaining my hatred for small talk as logically as I could. I kept hearing my own voice and feeling completely crazy. The permeation of it all was reiterated with the circulating recorder. The tape moved around and around and around in the machine.

"So. You just...don't like small talk? To...anyone? You... don't like people seeing you?"
"Um yeah, not exactly. But, yeah."
"Hmmm," she said.
"Have you heard of something like this before?"
"Well...I've read about something...similar."

I hated that. This girl didn't know a goddamn thing. What was wrong with her? Not her necessarily, but with this institution? She has the professional standards to be my counselor? I could have looked up a better response on Wikipedia.

The second session went worse. She came in, set up the recorder, sifted through the binder like she'd done before, but this time she pulled out a handful of literature for me to look over.
"I got these for you. I think they may be a big help," she said.

In bold black font on a neatly folder pamphlet were the words: "12 Tips For Making Small Talk."
"Now before you say anything, I'd really just like you to read it. This may be a huge help to you. I really think so."

As crazy as I believed I may have been in session one, there was nothing crazier to me than this pamphlet. The tips were not only irrelevant, but the fact that she was so completely off base was infuriating.

'Be the first to say hello.
Think of three questions to ask before any conversation.
Listen.
Stay focused.
Use names frequently.
Have interesting contributions.
Use confident body language.
Maintain eye contact.
Offer a business card, a favor, or a cold beverage.
Draw from current events and popular culture to break the ice.
Have a compliment ready to go.
Be prepared to make a courteous exit.'

I couldn't decide if I should scream furiously, or laugh hysterically. All I could do was muster the word, "Fuck."

"I know. It seems like a challenge, but a lot of introverted people get over their social fears. I think you should take it all with you, read it, and practice it in the mirror. When you wake up in the morning, practice saying 'hello'. Smile at yourself. Compliment yourself. Work with your body language. Then try it on a roommate or a professor. It will take time, but I think you have it in you. I believe in you."

I left, with little else exchanged between us.

The third and final session was...almost unmentionable. I walked in. I sat down. She spoke to me.
"Nice to see you. Have you practiced your small talk in the mirror since last week?"
I said nothing.
"Laura?"
No response.
She cleared her throat a few more times. After a few minutes...
"Are you ready to talk?"
I remained completely silent for the duration of the session. I watched the waves crash against the rocks. I pondered over the blemish on her lip. I coughed, twice. I could hear the deft sound of the tape turning in the recorder.

Thankfully my academic advisor never followed through with her about the sessions, and consequently my fear and hatred for small talk actually became worse. I couldn't imagine the type of person who would honestly appreciate the 12 tips I'd learned from the packet. Fucking weirdos. I continued to skip class, and spent probably the accumulation of one month's time over-walking my routes.

In fact, in retrospect I could argue that any and all gaps in my education, aside from the consequently low standards of my reputable institution, could all be attributed to small talk...it's likelihood- balancing sickly on the lips of my recognizable peers...it's standards- typed up in neatly folded packets...the weather and celebrity gossip, the plans and routines, the majors and minors and part-time jobs, the bars and the drunks and the Saturday parties, the articles and elections, the wind, the fucking wind, the traffic and the train, the traffic lights and cross walks and lack of cross walks, the pieces of paper and pens and sweaters and shirts and ties and busses and carpets and tiles and windows and doors and feet, the beer brands and wine tastes and the landscapes and the tests and tests and tests, the garrulous, the deplorable, the pending, fucking small talk.

I Do This I Do That- Chapter 19

XIX. Money In The Bank

We resolved between the hours of 2 and 4 a.m that discovering the true identity of Cait Finn superseded our immediate need for sleep and the mesmerizing lure of late night infomercials. Like intoxicated explorers we staggered gallantly to the foot of her door. Her bedroom- the nucleus to all that was Cait. Wheeler dramatically kicked it open and streams of aroma crept out of the breathless room. Sweet candy and cigarettes, sweat, burnt embers and ash, sex and damp sheets; all footprints of Cait's perversity. We stepped into the world of madness.

Every space from the drawers to the shelves inhabited random accumulations and grotesquely selected artifacts. In fear of encountering nudity and beyond, I'd rarely ventured into this world without the native herself. There we were, unrestrained by sobriety or integrity, sifting through her definitive junk.

Post cards upon post cards, other peoples' mail, costume accessories, water balloons, batteries of every size, razor blades, containers of apple sauce, fliers for events gone and passed by 5 years, sex toys and calendars with meaty drag queens inside, silver spoons, neckties, and a jar of dead butterflies... Each item was likely obtained through some nihilistic predicament which she'd craftily exploit or deny.

Photographs were scarce. I knew she didn't own a camera, as she told me once that "cameras were an economic luxury that made vanity portable and insecure people jealous." The photos we did find were of indiscernible value to our quest. One was of three young boys in overalls, sitting on a stoop. Another was a woman in high waisted jeans standing next to a litter of kittens. On the back it said "Hacketts: 1992." Wheeler put it in the 'possible evidence' pile on the floor.

I fell over, physically depleted in the mess. Wheeler however kept digging with vigor, destroying the meticulous chaos of the room and violently trudging through Cait's world like snow.
Flinging himself from the inner corner of the closet, he screamed, "Alas!"
I twitched.
"Wake up," he said, "I found something." He shook my foot.
"I'm resting my eyes."
"Seriously, look."
I opened my left eye and Wheeler held a crayon drawing of what appeared to be a girl on a unicorn, stomping on several cats, a man, a woman, and 3 little stick figure boys. It said "My Family: The Hacketts," in young cursive writing.
"Money in the bank," I said, half asleep. Behind my closed eyes images were already intruding my subconscious and vying for my sole attention. There was a soft wind. There was my parents backyard before me. There were worms everywhere, making the ground a vision of motion. I leapt, and Wheeler became a pigment thousands of miles away.

Hours later he crept back in. He spoke boisterously. The high pitched ring tone of his cell phone setting off in intervals like an alarm clock on snooze shattered the pattern of my dream state escape. Visions of my wormy backyard and the sensation of cool breeze on my watered eyes dissipated to black and left me once again aware of reality. I'd considered falling asleep in my bed a serious accomplishment, which usually tended to be far less likely than the odds of me sleeping on the floor. Wheeler had put a blanket over me, which was notably nice. I found him in the living room.

"What exactly are you doing?" He was sitting in the middle of the floor with my laptop in front of him amidst piles of loose leaf scraps, doodled with what appeared to be nonsense.
"Researching! Discovering!" He'd put on a snug red t-shirt of mine and was fervently typing then writing then typing. He'd constructed "Hackett Graphs" on large sheets of paper that were taped to cookie sheets and rested on the couch. The graphs had listings of hundreds of cities in Minnesota, dozens were crossed out and several segmented to sub categorized lists of names and numbers. It was 3 p.m and he'd clearly vested hours into the operation and hours of research awaited.

It was incredible to me that the accessibility of the Internet had trumped skill, privacy, and profession. Wheeler had made this project his occupation of the moment. He was determined to discover Cait, or at least the identity she'd abandoned. But then what?
"Suppose you find her parents, Wheeler. What then?"
"Aren't you curious? She's gone. Maybe if we know where she's been we can find out where she's at."
It wasn't quite logical, but it did make sense in my heart. She'd always been elusive, but a part of me had been so certain that I'd stepped into her world in some way. I alone had climbed over her wall and nestled myself into her madness. I'd become apart of her, I thought. I'd defended her. I'd loved her.

I made Wheeler a pot of coffee and we searched on. We told every Hackett we called that their daughter, Cait, was the recipient of some impromptu prize money or the chosen candidate to be on an upcoming game show. Wheeler was extremely creative with it. He told Nan Hackett in Shakopee, Minnesota that her daughter, Caitlin Hackett, had recently recovered the missing dog of a prestigious Chicago entrepreneur and was entitled to a hefty reward. "Can you verify your daughter's permanent mailing address?" He'd ask at the conclusion of whatever concoction he spat. Sometimes the call recipients hung up immediately. A few times it was evident that they were manipulating the moment to receive our fake prize. Those instances were relatively clear to us though. The calls upon calls upon calls became more than just our 'project'. It was a game. It was a mission. It was an art.

By dusk the Hackett Graphs had spread into the size of a living room rug. The idea that the family was unlisted, or simply unreal was reserved in a far corner of my brain, buried beneath the hundreds and hundreds of calls we'd made and voices we'd heard. This quest had taken on a life of it's own, and regardless of success or accuracy, we were going to narrow it down to three Hackett's, visit them, and hopefully answer the questions we devised.

The three Hackett families we narrowed it all down to were within a 50 mile radius of Metropolitan Minneapolis. In 48 hours, we expended five boxes of cereal, four packs of cigarettes, three Sharpe markers, and several posters and sheets of paper for diagramming. The lack of sleep and sunlight had created somewhat of a traumatic effect on Wheeler and I, and the godforsaken circumstances of our confinement and mental states had fused us together. I'd read about it in Psychology...people who formed some sort of romantic union after experiencing a traumatic event together, like a plane crash or a car accident. There we were, a fucking case study of that deplorable psychological accident. My repulsion for Wheeler did not necessarily waver, but between temporary insanity and apathy, our relationship was so.

We mapped out our final Hackett Graph and planned to leave the following night. Wheeler had volunteered to pay for our MegaBus tickets, which I did not contest. Not only did I oblige due to my definitive poverty, but also because I'd harbored a bit of blame towards Wheeler for this entire predicament. I couldn't necessarily afford to miss my nannying shifts, which were Thursday to Saturday that particular week, but the mission came first, I'd decided. I texted Mrs. Lesnik and told her I couldn't make it. They had others. She'd replace me. She texted me back. "That's fine. See you next week."

I'd learned a few more details about my regrettable new partner, most of which was entirely unsought. He described himself as an entrepreneur, making three quarters of his modest income as a bike taxi driver, and the rest as a considerably unsuccessful drug dealer. Regardless of the source of Wheeler's menial economic status, the tickets were purchased and the mission ensued.
He'd become sort of like a stubborn zit or a noticeable skin discoloration. He was something unplanned and unattractive, but nonetheless apart of me.

We fell asleep on my bed together after the planning subsided. I curled into the wall with my knees to my chest like an infant, and Wheeler shifted behind me, using my hip as an armrest. At one point in the night I woke from a dream sensation of falling. My knees buckled and I twisted over in a convulsive spasm. Wheeler fell off the bed and landed on the floor. "Fuck!" he screamed. He made a sullen whimpering sound before retiring back into his breathy sleep.

In the morning he made coffee and toast that was so burnt it was almost unbutterable. The bathroom door was closed and I half expected Cait to emerge from the small room, groggy and naked or boisterously drunk. It was just Wheeler though, wearing a pair of my grey sweatpants and a t-shirt he'd likely retrieved from the fortress of Cait. I sat at the kitchen table and took the crust off of the burnt toast. It was now cold and crumbled like ash in a mess on the plate.

"You're beautiful," he said. He kissed my forehead.
"Okay," I said. I ate the lousy crust and coughed out crumbs.

I Do This I Do That- Chapter 18

XVIII. I Know Couch, I Miss Her Too.

Wheeler took off his shirt and tied it tight around his head with the sleeves. He looked pale and gaunt in the nearly night light, and his body odor was unleashed like a radiating monster from his naked upper half. A palpable orb formed around his essence and penetrated me grossly. He sniffed and made a face like he knew it was bad. He walked loosely. His eyes seemed vexed and his mouth grinned tenaciously. It was clear by his apprehension of every horn honk, every shoe galloping by, and the train rattling all else stupid- that he had now applied his superb listening skills to the atonement of our day's mission.

The emos' backyard was trashed with red cups and up heaved chairs. A pair of denim shorts sat discarded on the stoop, and the kiddie pool that Steve had filled for the Flag Day barbecue was now nearly drained, except for a shallow pool of dirty water where a small dead bird was floating. "Sad," said Wheeler, looking down at the bird.

I knocked a few times on the screen door and no one answered. I peeked in the lifeless window and the unlit room looked empty. "Hey!" yelled Wheeler, banging on the door, "Anybody home?" There was a cough. A door slammed. Footsteps approached. Some unlocking of several locks, and the door flung open. Steve was in small white briefs and no shirt. He looked sleepy or drunk and I wanted him to say something classic like an actor in a 1930's gangster film. Like, "Say, what's the big idea!" Instead he gargled out a half yawn half yell, and fervently itched his balls for approximately 15 seconds.

"Laura? Shit. What's up?" I could see Wheeler in my peripheral view; thoughtful and confused. He'd never heard my real name. I gave him a remorseful glance and we all walked inside. Everything was creaky and old and unpolished. I sat at the table, which was etched and carved like the inside of a dirty bathroom stall. There were dicks and boobs, the word 'POOP' in capital letters, some dialogue of nonsense, erratic numbers, a sorry scene of a house and some stick figures.. Next to the numbers, '12 24 4003 11' was the question, "Who threw up in the freezer?" It was a distracting display of art and disgust. Wheeler studied it excitedly. Steve propped himself onto the counter, legs open. He spanked his belly a few times and yawned one final tired belt.

"Steve, this is Wheeler. Wheeler, Steve."
"My man," said Wheeler, saluting him.
He nodded back nicely.

We ritualistically lit our cigarettes and chatted briefly about Cait, skipping right to the part of her being missing and passing over the details of Beatrice and Wiley, of Whim Day and the abandoned van.

"You haven't seen her Steve, have you?" I asked.
"No. No I haven't. My roommate wants to kick her ass though. She shit in his bed, you know that?"
"I doubt that she did," I lied.
"Oh she did in fact. It was fucking disgusting. What kind of girl does that?"
Wheeler burst into a loud laugh.

We'd planned on only stopping by, but Steve went on an accommodating rampage, rummaging through the cabinets and refrigerator drawers for spirits and snacks. He offered us baby dill pickles out of the jar and a bottle of Spumante to share. Wheeler ate the pickles with his bare hands and slurped the pickle juice afterwards, as though it was milk in an empty cereal bowl. Steve didn't have any glassware to speak of so we drank from the bottle and passed it between us. The conversation was dull and erratic, until Steve found a bottle of gin hiding in the back of the pantry. Wheeler took it in shots and the juniper berries coughed out from his loud breathy tangents about losing Cait. Eventually his tangent turned into a libidinous description of their sexual encounter in the lake. Steve interrupted.
"Dude. I banged her too," He said.

I interjected the conversation for an exit. I was hankering to leave, in case Cait had gone home. I was now drunk and bored and vacuous feeling.
"Can I borrow five dollars?" I stood up towards the door.
Steve left and came back with dollars and quarters and nickels and dimes.
"I think it's about five," he said.
I thanked him and left, walking fast back into the crisp air and garbage smelling alley. The door slammed a few seconds later and Wheeler shuffled to catch me.
"I'm coming with you," he said.
"No, you're not!"
"I am. We're in this together." He put his hand on my back. I could smell the juniper and pickle concoction on his breath, and the b.o on his shirt-hat and chest. His fingers were sweaty and they felt small and sharp like hot needles. I leaned over and threw up on the pavement. The puke tasted bubbly on my throat from the Spumante. Wheeler withdrew his sickly touch, and I felt better, overall.

Inside the apartment was dark and arid, like the entries of a strangled corpse. The faucet in the bathroom dripped and echoed towards us, emphatically noting how strange the Cait-less world was. I felt like holding myself, in the same way I felt like holding myself the day my grandmother died. My apartment carried the same morbid lifelessness that I remembered sensing inside her house.

The day after they moved her soulless body from beneath the crocheted afghan on her bed, I went with my mom to collect important things. It was as though the whole house had reacted physically to her passing. We walked inside the foyer and the quiet floor creaked lowly under our feet. The window glass looked darker, the creme walls looked dirtier, the chairs and end tables looked uncharacteristically empty. In her bedroom the white and navy afghan was folded perfectly on top of her pillow. There was still a water glass on her bed stand with a red lipstick mark on the rim. I picked up the glass and held it close to my eyes. She'd breathed into it. She'd drank the water inside the kissed glass. The same smiling mouth that caught me as mesmerizing and wise was imprinted in front me like a relic from a tomb. I poured the rest of the water on my face, expecting to feel her in some way. I did, and I shook, and I sat on the floor and held my torso with my arms, pathetic and lame.

My mother attended me with comfort, as she was opportunistically benevolent and kind. She patted my back and did not discourage me from blowing my nose into her clean ironed blouse. It was a politeness not practiced, that she genuinely obtained from the pureness of heart genes of her mother, my grandmother, whose unfinished glass of water dripped down my teary face. The empathy gene had lamentably skipped me, like baldness or big breasts, cancer or an un-tamable spirit. I'd created outward reactions for tragic or miraculous events that I'd suspected were normal or obvious, but typically felt very little. This one instance with the lipstick stained glass was possibly the only genuinely emotional moment in my whole span of existence. It was painful I remember, and it happened to be real.

It was easy to fake most things, as my conjured tears or unapologetic frown usually resulted naturally from anger about lacking real human sadness, not from the event itself, whatever it may be. But I of course would miss Cait if she truly did not return. I could sense somewhere, if that realization was to occur, that another genuine emotional event could possibly take place. As much as my cognition persisted with positivity, saying, "Don't worry, she's unpredictable. She'll be back! She's Cait. She loves you. She's your best friend," my apartment living room brazenly disagreed. The walls seemed so sad lacking her presence, and just like my grandmother's house, my place reeked of genuine mourning, not merely of temporary absence. I looked at the couch, with it's face like button eyes, and flat stern mouth of detachable cushions, and it looked back at me sadly. "I know," I thought, "I know, couch. I miss her too."

I didn't air any personal inadequacies in front of Wheeler however, in fear that he would persist in a long philosophical tangent about dualism, or worse, that he'd hug me. I turned on lights, I splashed cold water on my face, I opened a future contribution to empty corner and drank small pulls. The cheap vodka brand, which commonly elicits a gag, was sharp and hot and panged my already burning throat. It burned the inside of my nose. It widened my eyes.

"Aren't you done yet?" asked Wheeler.
"No, because I still know what's going on."
He grabbed the bottle and took a medium size pull.