Skinny Love (4)

-4-

Skinny Love

 

Come on skinny love just last the year

Pour a little salt we never were here

-Bon Iver

 

 

“Meeguk, meeguk.”

The taxi driver thumped Cale on the knee several times before he pulled himself up against the beaded back seat, reeking of stale smoke, sweat, and hard liquor, his whole self swimming in heavy water from the night’s abuse.

“Drink many?” The taxi driver laughed and tossed back a couple of air shots before tapping the screen with the price.

 Cale wasn’t amused. 

“Here.”

He handed over the cash and crawled out of the taxi while everything spun around him like the inside of a coke can rolling down a hill.

“Nay, Nay.”

Cale slammed the door shut and the taxi pulled off, leaving him alone in the middle of the street with the half-moon dripping like a busted tin of white-out and his thoughts pin-balling between the memories and the moments, the rational and irrational, the conceivable and the perceptible.

“That’s how the whole show is, love and everything, eh? Straight fucked.” Cale grinned as he panned through the bits and pieces of what he could remember Max saying.  It was all true.  We’re kicked out into this world with all these preprogrammed natural desires and infatuations that boil into needled obsessions and addictions and desperate bids to simply feel content in being until, finally, we hit the wall and find out there’s no waking from this nightmare.

“Damn the whole show.” Cale kicked a crushed coke can into the gutter and hopped up onto the sidewalk. He staggered passed an old Korean bird who shot him a look of fugitive resentment as she chucked a bag of crab shells onto the sidewalk before disappearing back inside her skinny hole-in-the-wall joint.

Cale wound around the corner a block down and slipped into the car park below the double flat he shared with Aden.  He punched in the key code and barely made it up the three flights of stairs before crashing through the door and collapsing against a corner in the foyer.

“What the hell?”  

Cale couldn’t tell if it was fury or black surprise in Aden’s voice, so he just sat there with a shot smirk, his mouth half-hanging like a wastebasket chained to a street light, squinting and trying to catch Aden’s face through the buzz and the dark.

“Aden, Aden.”

“It’s nine and you’re wasted.”

Cale laughed. “Nine and I’m wasted.”

He slapped the corner and tried to pull himself up before slipping back onto the floor and laughing.

“You know Aurora has been calling you for the past hour?”

Aden wasn’t entertained.  He’d just spent an hour buying time for Cale, telling Aurora he was out trying to find extra work only to have Cale come crashing through the doorway, sloshed out of his mind and in no condition to talk to anyone, especially Aurora.

“Yeah, well, she could- she could have called me for the past hour the day before, or the day before that, or, or the week before that, because that’s how long I’ve been waiting, that’s how long.”

“Yeah, well she’s calling you now.”

“She never tells me when, she just calls here, there, and all I do is wait and wait.”

Aden rolled his eyes.  He saw this coming, gradually, even though Cale hadn’t said a word.  He knew Cale long enough to understand how he coped with a problem, through denial, by bottling it up and painting it over with constant optimism, like someone sitting in the desert with a dry mouth swearing over and over again it’ll rain.  

“You’re not even making sense.”

“Yeah.” Cale mocked and pulled himself up, sliding his body against the wall. “And it’s nine and I’m wasted.”

The flares first went off a few weeks ago when Aden noticed Cale and Aurora talking less and less while Cale toyed with the notion of running home more and more.  Aden was afraid he’d skip home like a desperate pauper with a scattered mind and end up begging for Aurora’s affection instead of going home with his proper crap together.     

The bomb blew over lunch when Cale mentioned marriage.  Aden knew Aurora would be caught on her toes with that one and if she tried to reason with Cale and ask him to wait until she was done school he’d take it as black feedback.  Cale just wasn’t in the right mental state to sift through it all right now.  And Aden certainly wasn’t right in his own stead to be in a position to really help Cale think it over. 

He’d wondered since lunch if he’d handled it correctly, but now, staring down at this mess of a body, he knew the walls were crumbling and he was beginning to feel guilty, knowing it could have been something he said- knowing it might have been something he said- that caused Cale to slip off the ledge. 

“You’re going to talk to her trashed?”

“Don’t be a hypocrite.”

“How am I being a hypocrite?”

“You’re criticizing me.”

“I’m not criticizing you.” Aden stood against the doorway, arms folded, eyes bent. “I’m just pointing out the obvious, you’re blitzed out of your mind and you talking to Aurora probably isn’t the best idea right now.  I can tell her you’re still finishing up and it’ll be better in the morning.”

“You’re always trashed, what do you know.” It wasn’t a question.  And that’s what grilled Aden the most.  It was true. Aden drank far too much all the damn time, always to drown out the color in the world, to pillowcase the pain, and wade in his own self-pity.  So who was he to charge Cale? To tell him getting s****y wouldn’t save a thing? That’s what he did, that’s how he coped.  But Aden wouldn’t give in, he couldn’t stomach watching Cale become him, a shadow without a body, aimlessly consuming shallow ground.

“What do I know? What I know is that you’re the a*s who swore this was it and that was it, but here you are trashed out of your mind, acting empty as I am.”

“Empty as you are? No, no, you’re far emptier than I am.” Cale grinned.

“So I am. Why fall into the hole with me?

“You don’t understand, you don’t feel, it’s easier for you.”

“Easy?” Aden lost it. He snagged Cale’s collar and pinned him against the egg shell wall. “I want just as much feeling as you do when it comes to something real, but unlike you, when I feel it, I won’t s**t it all away and get trashed out of my mind.”

“Don’t be a f*****g hypocrite.” Cale slapped Aden’s hand off his collar and scrambled to stand.

“I just don’t want to see you ruin it.  Come off it now, just go to bed, I’ll take care of Aurora.”

“No.” Aden tried to help him up but Cale shoved him back. “You want to see it shatter and it probably will.  You don’t give a s**t about anyone, anyone but yourself.  You say you might come back to be at our wedding but I know you, I know you won’t.”

“It’s not about you and I, it’s about you and Aurora and-”

“It’s definitely about you and I.”  Cale stabbed Aden in the chest with a cold finger, his other arm bracing his dead weight against the wall. “You dragged me out here, you!”

He was too torn to try and keep it together any longer and too drunk to filter anything.  Aden always acted like nothing he said or did hurt anyone else and he was sick of Aden dragging himself through the mud and pretending like it wasn’t cutting up anyone close to him.  He’d smash Aden up if that’s what it would take for him to finally feel some guilt and realize what he was doing.

“So it’s my fault?”

Cale ignored him, his tone becoming a battering ram, his body shaking from the rush.

“And you’re too damn, too damn caught up in feeling sorry for yourself to even help me when you know I’m in the ruts.”

“I’m trying to help you now but-”

Cale shoved passed him and stumbled down the hall toward his room.

“It’s too late.”

“Cale.”

Aden went after him but Cale shoved him back and stormed off to his room.

“F**k off.”

But Aden couldn’t let him go, he couldn’t let him do it.  He knew Cale was about to pitch himself before a firing squad and kamikaze his heart into self-invocated chaos.

“Cale I-”

He reached out and grabbed Cale’s arm, but Cale only stopped, turned slightly, and drilled two dog-star eyes straight through Aden like an edged typewriter head doused in petrol, punching a desperate human story clean through the paper.

“I said ‘F**k off.’”

                Cale left Aden lingering in the hall, his feet in separate doorways, wondering whether to let Cale be and shovel lead into his zeppelin or to dangle their friendship off the edge and keep him from talking with Aurora tonight.  He had no idea anymore, knowing only that these were the fragile seconds in which delicate decisions were made, decisions that settled like concrete and defined everything to come.

                But Aden only sighed and withdrew.  Better to let the red river run its course, he supposed, if it is, it will be.  But he knew in his gut that it was more an excuse, a mental alibi, but for what and why?  Was it fear, was it laziness, was he took weak to confront, was it too much to tangle with?   

                It didn’t matter anymore, he tried to tell himself, there was nothing he could do.  But those words were only a smoke screen of fixed self-conflict, behind which lingered a coward who closes his curtains at midnight when an old man is being beaten and robbed in the lot behind his flat.

 

                “Cale?”

                “Hey.”

                “Aden said you were out looking for work.”

                “Yeah.” Cale twisted his bed sheets and tried to steady himself against the wall behind his mattress.  “I, I went to a few of the bars downtown to see if I could get any paid gigs.”

                “I thought you were still teaching? Are you doing it for cash on the side?”

                “Uh-uh.” He lied.  She would flip if she was dunked straight into the truth. Cale knew he’d have to ease her into this, that or just surprise her and hope the moment would gun through.  She still had no idea he quit and was planning on coming home.  She’d made it clear time and time again that she didn’t want or expect him to, but Cale was never sure whether she really meant it out of guilt or selflessness or whether, underneath it all, she really wanted to see what would come first, his dreams or their love.

‘It’s more than me just missing you, the world will be here and I can see it when you’re done and ready’. ‘That’s not the point Cale. You come home you’ll see it’s not what you thought, you’ll come to hate it and then you’ll come to hate me, that’s how it always is.  Besides, you’re no different from Aden when it comes to this place, you know that.’  No different from Aden… did she know it lit his fuse or was he forgetting it was true?

Cale gambled for an explanation. “But I figured I have time so why not, I can make and save a bit more.”

                “Might as well, it’s a good idea.”

                “Hey, just a second, I got to adjust the computer.”

                “Ok.”

                Cale slid the laptop forward on the stand beside his bed, took a swig of water, and scooted upright to keep awake and stop the room from see-sawing.

                “Alright, back.  So I had to ring you on your cell, going somewhere?”

                “Emma’s.” 

It was a literal blessing in happenstance that Aurora was on her cell phone and not her computer.  He knew that if she skyped him and saw him on webcam he’d certainly look a wreck and sell himself out.

“Emma’s?”

“She was my roommate last year, she moved off campus with one of our suite mates… I talk to you about her all the time, she’s the one addicted to Nutella, who laughs like Diane Keaton in ‘Woody Allen’.”

“Right, right, yeah, I remember, I remember her.”  Barely.  Cale could never seem to remember anything when someone asked him about it, he didn’t know why.  If you asked him what his favorite film was on the spot he’d draw a blank until a few minutes later when the conversation had moved on.  Perhaps the drunk was also a factor. 

Or maybe it was beyond all that.  Emma was more like a fictitious character to Cale, a someone he recognized beside his girlfriend in a Facebook album, a name he heard in her stories, a body defined by all the quirks, obsessions, and moments we use to crayon one another.  She wasn’t part of his memory or his life really; she only existed in Aurora’s world miles from his own.

“She’s having a party tonight so-”

“I thought you went to her place last weekend for, for a party?”

“No, we had festival last weekend.”

“Right.” Blowing him off again. “You want to ring me in the morning?”

“Ring you in the morning? Cale I haven’t talked with you in a while and I just wanted to-”

“Right, just seems, I don’t know, I’m the one you call while you’re on your way from here to there just, just because-”

“Just because?”

“You talked to me for maybe a half hour last weekend before you went off to festival or whatever.” Cale grumbled. “Now you’ve got maybe another ten minutes to talk to me before you’re at Emma’s, you’ve been doing this for weeks.”

“Cale I’m sorry I’ve got classes, the time difference makes it difficult-”

“Funny cause I find the time here even with work and the time difference to write you, to wait, to call.” The words fell out of his mouth before he had time to properly sift through them.

“Cale-”

“There’s something else isn’t there?”

Her silence shattered against his being like glass rain.

“I’ll call in the morning, I’m almost there.”

“No, tell me now, I know you, I know when something is wrong, I know when you’re trying to hide something from me.”

“Yeah and I also know you.”  She began, her voice grainy as sandpaper, the pain slipping through the phone and flooding the room. “I know you’re s****y out of your mind right now and I know you haven’t been yourself for the past few weeks. “

“So what, I’m s****y? If I haven’t been myself for the past few weeks what difference would that make right now?” He scoffed and tossed his feet against the wall.  Damn if he’d take the pike alone on this one.

“Cale I won’t do this right now, it’s not fair.”

“Not fair? You’re telling me what’s not fair?”

She started to cry and Cale was caught off guard.  Aurora rarely let her feelings slip onto her sleeve and she never let herself break down in front of anyone.  He knew it had to be one of two things- either he was only confirming some doubt in him she had tried to drown beneath the everything, or the doubt she had in herself was sliding, like rain the color of a pale, out-grown face in a glossy mirror, down, down into the nail-ridden floor.  

 Cale was torn, a part of him wanted to board a plane tonight, to go home, to save her, to save him, but the other part reveled in the pain he was stoking in her.  Was it the drunk or subconscious sadism?  Or was it human to want those you love to feel the pain you do out of envy or despair? Damn being human, damn being alive, damn having to feel, to love. 

“Maybe.” The pause gripped onto vacancy like the silence between the drip and drop of a hemorrhaging  icicle over a sidewalk at the end of a forgotten Christmas afternoon.  

“We should take a break.”

How many times have those words been uttered?  How often has it been abused and gone from a temporary, soft-skin goodbye to permanent closure? How, Cale wondered, did it come to this?  Hours, days, and months of perfection, of laughter, of content, all shattered because of a few dirty minutes of conversation- or was it gradual? Was it erosion over time or was there a final screw that busted lose and brought the whole bridge down?

“Yeah, maybe.”  Was all he could stomach, was all he could manage, was all he could fathom.  How, he wondered- like we all wonder- does it come to this? Because love demands the heart and the being as collateral and a pound of flesh for the departure? We know the deepest scars come from love.  But how is it fair, this thing- love? Do we ever really recover from lost love?  Are we supposed to? Can we? Or do we just grow sheet rock, cement, and steel, gradually, over the sore spots where old love stuck and swallowed the surface of our being?  

Damned if I know, damned if you knew, damned if anyone knew really.

“I’ve got to go, goodbye Cale.”

She let her final crystal syllables drop before hanging up, the letters clattering like frosted rosary beads after hours of lost prayer against a worn altar, becoming ink stains in a notebook of poetry dedicated to the one you once desperately loved.

But isn’t that how the whole show is, love and everything, straight fucked, start to finish.

Cale fell back and let the white water of the moment pull him under.  He wanted nothing more than to drift away, to fall out and become a void, to slip into the current and sleep or screensaver for forever, because there was nothing left for him in this world, at least not tonight, at least not now. 

He shucked his heels against the bed framework and with a dry hand, lifeless as if crucified, kicked on the music.  It was something random, something on shuffle, something, anything that could smother the crux that was, for nothing in this world boxes out the shab and the s**t better than music- except silence.

He pitched his eyes into the ceiling and let ‘Skinny Love’ drip down the edge of what was and will be before sinking away, the love boat smashed.