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Chapter Eleven



Nick

I woke up with Jaymie asleep against me, her legs tangled in mine, hair splayed behind her on the pillow. I blinked my eyes repeatedly, trying to figure out what had awakened me. My phone was vibrating, I realized. I grabbed it from the nightstand. Jaymie groaned as her head rolled from my shoulder. I looked at the screen. Kevin.

“...’lo?” I mumbled.

“Well hello there,” Kevin said. “How are you?”

“Asleep.”

“At ten in the morning?”

“I had a long night,” I answered.

“What time is it?” Jaymie whined out from the pillow where her head had landed.

“So I hear,” Kevin said. He paused. “Hey, look, I got your text. Your cardiologist cleared you? Just like that?”

“Well after the general waiting period,” I murmured into the phone. Jaymie was battling the sheets to roll over, kicking at them. I shook them off her to end her struggling.

“Fuck, it’s ten?” Jaymie exclaimed, sitting up now that she was freed from the sheets. “Ayyyye,” she groaned as she climbed out of bed quickly and started plucking clothes up from the floor.

Kevin’s voice was low and mildly sarcastic. “Yeah, it sounds like you’re doing a great job with that waiting period.” He sighed. “Okay. Anyways. I’m calling to find out what you want to do with the tour. Call it off, reschedule?”

“I don’t wanna call it off,” I said.

After all, who knows, this could be my last chance to tour.

I needed to be able to say goodbye to the fans in a better way than having a fucking heart attack on the stage.

“Okay then. Get me an exact date from your cardiologist, we’ll talk to Eddie, get the dates rescheduled.”

“A’ight,” I replied.

“Thanks,” Kevin said. “Have a good day, man.”

“Uh-huh.”

And he hung up.

I looked around. Jaymie had disappeared into the bathroom. I stretched, my body aching, and the sheets, which were all in a ball after Jaymie’s attack on them, fell off the end of the bed. I got up and stumbled toward the bathroom. She was in the shower, so I just did my business and got dressed and went downstairs. Nacho followed along after me and scratched at the back door. Standing on the deck while Nacho ran around below, I stared out at the ocean as it rocked and rolled and took a deep breath of the ocean air. I missed Florida’s ocean, which was supremely superior to California’s in every way. But it’d do.

I’ve always found peace in the ocean. It’s so much like me. I say that because from a distance it seems really calm and together, like it has all it’s shit worked out, but really there are secrets only the ocean knows - dark, deep things. It’s so unsettled deep inside of it, where there are monsters lurking. It’s peaceful enough to rock a boat gently or to rip it apart and leave nothing but the broken pieces behind. I’m like that, too, with my tangled up, convoluted past. Sometimes, when I stare out there at the water, I imagine that it could play the part of fortune teller, too. Maybe it could tell me where I’m going if I wait long enough.

“You didn’t join me.”

I turned around. Jaymie was stepping out onto the deck, her hair wet and hanging around her shoulders, wearing a plain yellow sundress. She came out and leaned against the railing beside me, her back to the water. She raised an eyebrow at me. Below, Nacho was barking at seagulls that had the audacity to land on a log of drift wood.

“A lot on my mind, I guess,” I said.

“Who was calling before?” she asked.

“Kevin,” I answered. “Curious about if we were continuing the tour.”

“Already?” Jaymie looked disapproving.

I shrugged. “He wasn’t pressuring me. He knew I went to the doctor already. He was just curious. Probably management is pressuring him and he wanted something to tell them.”

Jaymie sighed.

“I told him I wanted to finish the tour,” I said.

Jaymie chewed her lower lip, “So… you’re going back then.”

“Yeah, not like tomorrow or anything, but soon.”

“That’s probably the best time for me to move out then,” she said, looking up at the house, squinting in the morning sun that was streaming over it. “While you’re gone. So it doesn’t, you know, interfere with your life any.”

I nodded. Mostly because I didn’t really know what else to say or do. I didn’t want her to move out, but if she was going to insist on it… I didn’t know how to tell her what I needed to. And really, maybe her moving out would be a good thing. It would help me distance myself from her. It was only fair, letting her out early. Before the grenade I’d become detonated.

“Nacho!” I called. He looked up from the surf, where his feet were getting wet and mud-caked as he barked at the birds, circling, waiting to be able to get back to their roost. “C’mon, Nacho. Let’s go.” He glanced back at the birds, barked one last woof, like a warning that he’d be back to get them later, and rushed across the beach and up the steps to the deck. The gulls came in and settled on the log the moment his back was turned. I opened the door and he ran inside, shaking mud as he went, leaving little pawprints. I looked at Jaymie, who was still leaning on the banister, and followed the dog inside.

Jaymie came in a couple minutes later. “Okay, so if we’re gonna find you the perfect woman, we need a list of characteristics,” she said, “Things to look for.”

“I can find my own women, Jaymie,” I said. I was opening the fridge to get a drink out. Nacho was spinning circles on his pet bed in the corner, about to take a nap from his exhausting excursion on the waterfront. “You might’ve noticed over the last seventeen years, I’m kind of good at it.” I popped the lid on a can of ginger ale and sipped it.

Jaymie pushed the inside of her cheek with her tongue, making her cheek bulge. She did this whenever I was annoying her and she wanted to say something, but didn’t dare to. She took a deep breath through her nose and shrugged, “Okay whatever then.” She came out to the kitchen and pulled a second can of ginger ale out for herself and mimicked me, sipping it, staring at me over it. “You know,” she said, her voice calculating, “I think there’s something you aren’t telling me.”

I laughed, “Something I’m not telling you?” I smiled. “Now that would be different, given our rules.”

Jaymie leaned against the counter, right where I’d been leaning the night before while she was making the pasta. “Hmm, no, not too different. Except that you’ve been different lately. And I feel like whatever it is that’s making you different is the same thing that you aren’t telling me.” She eyed me. “Call me crazy, Nick, but we both know something is going on.”

I ran a hand over my hair. I felt a pang - not of physical pain, but of some shadow of it, something just in my head, so to speak - when my hand traveled over the area the tumor was in. “Maybe,” I said.

“Well whenever you’re ready to talk about it, let me know,” she said. She put the can down on the counter, half finished, and walked away, out toward the stairs that led up to her apartment.

I sighed and put my own can down. When I heard the door close, marking her exit, I glanced at Mulder, who was just coming around the corner, tail twitching, seeking breakfast. I put my hand back on my head over the spot, and I closed my eyes, picturing it in there. I knew, only from Google Images, what actual tumors looked like, but still, in my imagination it looks like that illustration with all the twisty arms and stuff, like a tiny octopus all splayed out, fucking around with all my controls. I put the two cans in the sink, scooped some cat food onto a plate, which I noticed Nacho spying on with one half-closed eye from his bed, and went back upstairs to the desk, opening the laptop.

How do I tell my loved ones I have a brain tumor? I typed into Google search.

I scrolled through pages of search results, trying to find one with a summary paragraph that looked like it might answer my question. But none of them seemed to. I sighed and Xed out the page. I didn’t know how to say the words to them, didn’t know how to deal with the looks on their faces. I imagined throwing a party. Having a big cake shaped like a brain with like a tumor surprise center.

Somehow I had a feeling that would just traumatize them all against cake.

I couldn’t take cake away from them, too.




Jaymie

I opened my computer.

Symptoms: changes in personality.

The first five hits were Alzheimer’s.

I shook my head. That wasn’t it. I scrolled further. Borderline personality disorder. Brain tumor. Pick’s disease. Antidepressant side effects. I clicked on the last one, scrolling through it, reading lists of symptoms and that I tried to tie in with Nick and his recent behavior.

Any number of these could apply to anyone, though, I thought.

Fuck you, Internet.

I needed more information.

I closed the webpage and spun around from the desk in the chair, looking around at the stuff in the apartment, all the things I’d have to wrap in newspaper, box up, and carry away. I pictured the actual act of moving out, of leaving all this behind. I’d become more than a little spoiled since living with Nick. I’d grown up pretty spoiled, too, actually. I couldn’t imagine going back to a piece of shit apartment in the crappy side of Los Angeles. Maybe, I thought, I should leave LA altogether. But that would mean never figuring out what Nick’s big secret was.

And also, leaving Daniel’s grave behind.

I got up and pulled the cigar box off the coffee table and opened it for the hundredth time. This time, I went for one of the little folded notes in the bottom of the box, notes scribbled on math graphing paper with magic markers and number two pencils in messy nine-year-old script. I unfolded them until I found the one I wanted. The one Daniel had written to future me. We’d each written a note to our future selves and one to each others’ future selves.

Hello future Jaymie, he’d started, It’s 1989 right now. Maybe when you read this it’ll be the future, like after 2001 if the world makes it that far. You’re annoying me today. We fought about where to hide our time capsule. Anyway I hope you didn’t grow up too much and that you didn’t get annoyinger in the future. I hope we’re still best friends like now. Even when you annoy me you’re still my best friend.

We probably would still be best friends if he was around.

I would’ve had to tell him about Nick by now.

I wondered how Daniel would’ve reacted to knowing about Nick, how the two of them would’ve gotten along (if they would’ve gotten along). Probably okay-ish, at least until Daniel heard Nick was thinking about breaking up with me because he wanted to fall in love.

Speaking of which, it was kind of pointless for Nick to be breaking up with me for that. I mean, he was all gung-ho, rawr, he can do anything, but dude, seventeen years is a really long ass time to have invested in somebody without managing to fall in love with them. So how in the fuck did Nick think he was going to meet someone and fall in love in anything less than the seventeen years he’d spent with me? If he had any kind of intelligence level, he’d just spend a couple months working on falling for me and save himself the crippling blow of finding out he wasn’t capable of falling for someone else and doing the whole marriage thing.

I mean, not that I wanted to marry Nick. I didn’t.

I wasn’t lying when I said I didn’t believe in marriage.

It’s just I knew deep down Nick didn’t either, and if anyone was gonna prove something can exist it’d be two people that didn’t even believe in it, right?

And it was better if something implodes and falls apart when it’s something you didn’t really want than if you invest a whole shit load of extraneous time in it. By that I mean it’d be less heartbreaking if Nick and I didn’t work out than if he went and spent more time investing in this marriage scheme of his. Way less.

But how could I convince him of that?

And did I even want him to be convinced?

Not like it was any skin off my back if Nick went and got married to the wrong woman only to have it bust apart.

Not like I care what Nick does with his life.

That’s far too personal.