SAM.
Sam opened his eyes. His phone was lodged between his cheek and his mattress, optimally positioned for face-cancer transmission. He grabbed it. The screen was black and inert. He lifted his cumbersome, seemingly sand-filled head to see where his charger was. The room swung. His eyes narrowed on the tiny white cube clear across the floor. It might as well have been in Guam. Never mind that plugging the cord into the tiny hole on his phone would be about as easy as refueling a jet engine in midflight.
“Why?” he asked the empty room. He wished someone would at least come over and turn out his light. Maybe pass him the bottle of Wild Turkey that he’d left by the door. Actually, no. He didn’t want that at all.
His phone was dead. At least he noticed when his phone died. If Sam died no one would care. He rolled onto his back and closed his eyes while the room sloshed around him. Thank God he was home. He might have been an idiot, but at least he’d had the foresight to keep his freak-out contained. He took off his shirt. Then he kicked off his stiff pants like a petulant child.
Sam wanted to take a bath. Actually, what he needed was someone to bathe him.
It was still dark out, and the streets were quiet. Sam stood up, steadying himself against the wall as the blood flooded out of his head. He grabbed his towel and pushed off the wall by the mattress and stumbled to lean on the wall by the charger. He was an inelegant trapeze artist. Spider-Man three sheets to the wind. It took him a few tries before he eventually got his phone set up.
The thing about living where you work is that calling in sick was tricky business. So far he hadn’t attempted it. For a while he’d call in a couple of times a month, or else have to stick his toothbrush down his throat to expel some of the liquor before going in still drunk. That hadn’t happened since he’d moved in. Al hadn’t made any sweeping declarations about rules, but as with everything with Al, they were implied—keep your nose clean and don’t bother him.
Sam tipped his head up and gawped at the popcorn stucco before grabbing the doorframe for support. He wondered if there was asbestos in the ceiling silently killing him. It would serve him right, mooching off of Al like this. A hot tear slid down his cheek.
So that was it. He and Lorraine were properly over. Huzzah and good night.
As he’d learned yesterday (and bless any day that you learn something new) there was such a thing in the world as a chemical pregnancy. A knocked-up limbo. There’d been enough hormones (HCG, Sam had researched it later) in Lorraine’s pee to trip a few sticks and that was it. Liar had miscarried only technically since she’d only been phantom pregnant. When she waltzed into the coffee shop to deliver this fascinating science lesson, she appeared unequivocally euphoric. She’d known for four days and stayed for exactly forty seconds and had thought to tell him in person solely because she had a hair appointment next door.
It took almost a week for her to tell him. That was how much he factored into any of this. They’d only briefly been parents to a teeny-tiny smudge of a suicidal sea monkey, yet Sam felt bereft. He’d been tense for weeks waiting for an answer, and when he knew definitively, his profound relief spiraled into a type of mourning.
So he got wasted.
He catapulted from the bedroom wall to his most death-defying act of bravery yet—to hurtle down the entire length of the hallway and into the bathroom. The air in the bathroom felt cool. He clung to the sink with both hands and rewarded himself with a long slug of water, which he promptly heaved into the toilet, along with the battery acid that bourbon turns into after you toss half a bottle of it down your throat.
Late period count: negative five days. Or was it six?
Days it would take to get over Lorraine (this time): twenty-eight (or maybe fifty-six to be safe).
Days it would take Sam to stop hating himself for drinking again: two million.
Sam ran the tub and sat in it. The heat prickled. An army of pins and needles on his skin. The sun was coming up. The water rose around his bony arms and hollowed stomach, and in the muted light he decided he was ugly. Decorating his skeletal figure with tattoos perhaps hadn’t been the best idea.
God, he was depressed. Sam couldn’t recall the last time he felt joy for any number of days he could string together. He pictured himself at Lorraine’s birthday dinner two years ago, a potluck with enchiladas, and the fight they’d had for no reason other than being so shitfaced off fireball shots because there were no mixers and zero ice. When April got her GED last summer they’d had her graduation at the bar, and for Labor Day, when Gash got alcohol poisoning on a tubing trip, they’d dropped him off at the clinic and continued drinking.
Sam thought about how it felt to talk to Penny and how dark their darks got sometimes.
EMERGENCY PENNY
Wed, Oct 18, 2:13 AM
Do you ever feel dead?
Tired?
No
Deceased
Um no?
What?
Sorry
I’ve been having the craziest dreams
ME TOO!
You first
OMG and it was a death dream!
I was buried alive
Textbook anxiety nightmare
It wasn’t a nightmare tho
Not really
I wasn’t scared
I was in this coffin
Someone knew that I was still alive
Because there was this IV of blood
That was dripping into my mouth
Well that’s just a tube
doesn’t count as an IV
You’re the worst
Lol it’s true
Fine A TUBE
I must have been a vampire
Because it was nourishment
And there was also this tube of oxygen pumping in
Complicated setup
All I know is that I could breathe
Wait
Someone you knew buried you?
But was keeping you alive?
Exactly
Interesting
And the crazy thing is
I think it was you
Why tho?
You must have deserved it
It was strangely comforting
Are you harboring any desires to bury me?
Not yet
Haha
Kk back to my thing
Do you know what Cotard’s syndrome is?
That was the first time he’d heard of it. Penny was a trove of oddities and inexplicable phenomena. Cotard’s syndrome, or Cotard’s delusion, was a rare mental illness where the afflicted person was convinced they were dead. French neurologist Jules Cotard had first described it as the delirium of negation. (Sam pictured someone in a monocle saying no, no, no, no while cackling hysterically.) In an early case, a woman had believed that as a corpse she no longer needed food. Unsurprisingly, she died of starvation.
Sam wiped his wet face with both hands.
He rewound the tape to before he saw Lorraine. Penny’s face when she’d come in with her mom. There. Stop.
Sam had been happy then. He hadn’t been thinking about Lorraine at all. He hadn’t been worried or angry. His brain wasn’t gnawing on his one thousand failings or the people in his life he’d disappointed most. He was simply enjoying how the person he liked best—the one who usually lived inside his phone—walked over to ask for almond milk.
And then Lorraine swooped in, scrambling his receptors. Right before his shift ended. Again ruining a rare moment he was completely in repose. As she left she told him to keep her computer. Or to “donate it to charity.” As if he would ever be in the position to give away something so valuable. Sam was gutted.
Everything was falling apart again. Hands numb and head throbbing, Sam closed up shop, pulled himself an espresso and then another. He sat on the porch swing with his sneakered feet dragging on the boards, heart thundering in time to his thoughts. What was this feeling? This loss? He felt hollow and bruised, scraped out from the inside. Sam moved to the steps, hitched his elbows on his knees, and let his head hang.
You do not get to have a panic attack because you’re not having a baby, he’d told himself. Still, he was wrecked. The irrational hope died, the baseless idea that a baby would have somehow helped. That its appearance would mend at least part of what was damaged about his life. He’d get a do-over. The next chapter could begin. It would be new. Not perfect but different.
In his daze, he’d heard Fin say good night and felt a familiar tightness at his shoulders.
Sam was alone. Horribly, undeniably alone.
He reached for the phone to text Penny—no to call, as he’d said he would—and faltered. What could she possibly say to make this better? He was setting her up to fail. There wasn’t a sane person in the universe who would say this wasn’t great news, but Sam couldn’t bear to hear it. He was grieving. Could he grieve things that weren’t real in the first place?
The unease at his shoulders merged in his throat. He was thirsty. He needed a drink. He began planning where he would get one. Not one. Twenty. By himself.
Sam came up from the water for air.
Sifting through the wreckage of the last six months, he tried to be methodical about assigning the right feelings to the appropriate experience. Without Penny to play emotional Sherpa, he’d have to concentrate. Rage was easy to identify. The anger was quick and bright.
But as fast as the fury came, it dissipated rapidly too. Lorraine wasn’t the villain, as convenient as that would have been.
Mostly he felt stupid.
He remembered back to when he’d first realized he was in love with her. They’d been dating for two months. She’d picked him up, and they were driving around wasting gas and making out. When an old country song came on the radio station, instead of clowning how cloying it was, she surprised him by turning it up and knowing every word. Crooning in a hammy manner about rivers, old men, and changing the “hers” to “hims” and talking about the light in his eyes, he realized that Lorraine under the rancor, the eyeliner, and the hair was his person. She also happened to be a person who was meanest when she believed she was under attack, which for Lorraine was all the time.
And this Lorraine—every Lorraine—didn’t need Sam anymore. She simply didn’t want him.
The tub was cold, so Sam got out.
It wasn’t like Sam knew how to be a dad. He had zero worthy role models, and he was arguably a shitty uncle to Jude. It’s that Sam, for whatever reason, had been looking forward to figuring it out—reprioritizing. He’d promised himself and his new family that he’d finish things he started. As dumb and stereotypical as it sounded, he wanted a chance to man up—a shot at a sense of purpose.
He padded back into his room and lay down on his side by his phone. No new messages. He checked his outgoing calls. Yep, there it was. Call to Liar 2:17 a.m. She hadn’t picked up. Thank God.
His alarm chimed, reminding Sam of how different his life had been when he’d set it. He dried off slowly and threw on a black T-shirt that only vaguely smelled bad. Then he deposited himself into his jeans, grabbed his smokes and sunglasses, shuffled on his sneakers, and stepped outside.