None of This Will Matter a Year From Now

Short fiction

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I hated the bicyclist on the rainy street who skimmed through the red light. I hated the old woman in the pharmacy counting out pennies to pay in exact change. I hated the teenagers walking in a loud pack through the dying shopping mall. I hated the sports car driver who filled two slots to park his ridiculous machine. I hated the white homeless man with the sign, "Black Sabbath Matters." I hated the coterie of tech workers walking with their faces in their phones. I hated the Uber driver with his hazards flashing as he stopped on a busy street to drop his passenger. I hated the news helicopter, and the helicopter pilot, and the reporter falsely excited to be doing the traffic report before the big game. I hated the football fans wearing the jerseys of their favorite players. I hated the cars driving onto the passenger ferry. I hated the pedestrians strolling onto the ferry. I hated everybody who commuted by ferry. I hated the thought of becoming a person who needed to use a ferry on a daily basis. I hated the thought of becoming a person who needed anything on a daily basis.

I hated mirrors so I taped over the only mirror in my barren apartment, and pretended I was a Jewish man in mourning. I’m not Jewish and I wasn’t mourning the end of somebody’s life. I was grieving for my divorce. But I didn't know the Kaddish. So I invented my own.

I sang my personal Kaddish every day and I hated myself for doing it.

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"What kind of TV are you looking for?" the salesman asked me.

"Something the same size as a blue whale,“ I said.

“Biggest animal in history,” he said.

Great. He was Mr. Trivia. I hated him.

“Is this for your family?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “It’s a gift to myself. For my sobriety birthday. I haven’t been drunk in a six months.”

The salesman was confused. He didn’t know if I was being serious. And he probably wasn’t sure if six months of sober living was gift-worthy. Shouldn’t it be a year?

“How about this one?" he said and pointed me to a TV so large that Neanderthals would’ve worshipped it like a god. The image seemed five-dimensional. The stock footage of a butterfly alighting on a rose was so sharp that I got emotional. My voice cracked.

"How much is it?" I asked.

"Ten thousand dollars," he said and smiled. I hated his teeth. His smile said I know you don’t have that kind of money, you weepy bastard. I needed to prove him wrong so I charged the TV to my credit card and arranged for it to be delivered and installed.

When I got home, I went online and canceled the order. I couldn’t afford it. And I didn’t want to be yet another single man living in a studio apartment with an epic television on the wall.

"Don't be that guy, you hate that guy," I said to myself. I sang it, Kaddish-style, but it didn't sound right. I can sing in key but I don't have good tone.

My late father could sing.

He played piano, too. Well, he could only play Hank Williams songs. Or mostly he could play a series of chords and notes that almost sounded like Hank Williams songs.

Fuck you, Hank Williams, for dying young.

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In the pancake house, I pretended the waitress was in love with me. Then, when she didn't freshen my coffee for a long time, I could pretend that she'd broken my heart.

That is how divorce happens.

It's the small neglect.

Various neglects stacked like dirty coffee cups in the kitchen.

After I paid for my meal, I walked through the kitchen like I belonged.

Nobody gave a shit.

What danger did I present?

I was a sixty-year old man who’d lost his thirty-seven year marriage like some people lose their car keys.

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In the support group meeting, a man said, “I'm addicted to self-loathing."

So I said, "Don't worry, you're not alone, I loathe you, too."

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In a different group, a new member, a woman, said she’d never loved a good man. She said she doesn't even know what a good man is supposed to be. She said she believes in Sasquatch and UFOs more than she believes in good men.

That made me and every other recovering alcoholic in the room want to fall in love.

After the meeting, I left the group without saying a word to her but three of the other men walked over to say hello.

---

I'm not sober; I just don't drink.

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I go to church alone. Every Sunday, a different denomination. Last week, two young Catholics got married during Mass. They were Mexican-Americans. Both named Cortez. I wondered if she would hyphenate her last name. That made me laugh. Esme Cortez-Cortez. Was that racist of me? I don’t think so. I would’ve also laughed if the bride had been a white woman named Abigail Ratowski-Ratowski. I didn't know that people could get married during a regular Sunday Mass. But what do I know? I’m not Catholic.

The mid-Mass marriage felt subversive. It was like the beautiful young Mexicans were somehow eloping. A small elopement, as it were, eloping from the front pew to the front of the church. Elopement with Eucharist.

I cried.

I was so happy for them.

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In another meeting, the Native American man said, "I couldn't get sober until the day I realized I had to forgive the biggest monster in my life. I had to forgive the biggest liar, the biggest abuser, the biggest asshole. I had to forgive the cruelest bastard in my universe."

He said, "I had to forgive the United States of America."

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I have this recurring dream. A nightmare, I guess. I have nightmares so often that I just call them dreams. And, in this dream, I’m kicked out of my house, again, and then I'm kicked out of my bachelor apartment. And I have no money. And I'm too ashamed to call my friends or family. So I walk down to this place under the freeway. For years, I'd seen the same red tent pitched under there. You can only see it when you're traveling from north to south. And only if you're an inattentive driver or an attentive passenger.

I’m my dream, I walk up to that tent and knock. And by knock, I mean I say, "Knock, knock," aloud. And nobody answers. So I pull open the tent flap. It's breaking and entering, I think, by homeless people law. By the law of basic human decency. But the tent is empty. There is no human smell. Just old plastic holding the memory of a thousand rain storms.

I crawl in and sleep in the dark.

Then, the next morning, I go panhandling. I stand at the freeway exit begging for spare change as everybody I know in the city drives by me.

They are all shocked and sad to see me so debased.

With each shocked and sad face, I age one year.

So after a few hours of this, I'm old enough to die.

Then my ex-wife pulls up to the stoplight. She's still young. She hits a button that automatically slides open the door. The car is clean. It smells of pine trees. So many pine trees. Like the pine forests of my youth.

"Get in," she says.

"Okay," I say.

Then we're at a funeral.

My funeral.

She kisses my forehead as I lay in my open coffin.

"I always thought you'd come back to me," she says.

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Our parents had died long ago. We had no siblings. We were both an only-child who married another only-child. We didn’t have kids.

Our marriage, our husband-ness and wife-ness, were the only two strings that needed to be unraveled.

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In residential rehab, they taught me how to walk the labyrinth made of stones.

"Pay attention to each step," they said.

But I couldn’t walk that maze. There was too much silence. So I learned how to pay attention to my face when I'm shaving. I learned how to count each stroke of the blade.

"To get sober," the therapist said, "you have to pray.”

Lather, scrape, rinse.

Lather, scrape, rinse.

Lather, scrape, rinse.

My chant. My prayer.

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All of us have destroyed somebody else’s spirit. We’ve all been the worst person in somebody’s life. We've all been somebody's devil.

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Sometimes, I lie in bed and think about physics. I think about alternative universes. Somewhere, on the other side of the firmament, I’m still loved by my wife. By the woman who loved me best.

I know she isn’t coming back to me. I don’t contact her in any form. That’s her wish. I leave her alone. Such a bizarre absence. I saw her nearly every day for almost four decades. And now I’m banished. I don’t think I’ll ever see her again. The last time we talked, she said she was probably going to move to a new city. She’s gone.

But I’ll stay sober to honor the ghost of our marriage. I’ll stay clean until I’m a ghost.