“I’ll talk to you later.”
“We’ll see, J. We’ll see.”
Then she hangs up.
J puts the phone down before it can do any more damage.
He can’t figure out if his relationship just fell from the sky, or whether it’s been at the bottom of the ocean for weeks now, and nobody bothered to tell him.
Some people would drink in response. Get stoned again. Put a fist through a wall. Sob.
J paces. Back and forth through the apartment, back and forth. Tiger in a cage, pendulum with a loose leash. It gets him nowhere.
He thinks about calling back and then tells himself calling back will only make it worse.
He paces some more, his footsteps beating out a tune forWhat-is-happ-en-ing? What-is-happ-en-ing?
He decides he needs to distract himself. Might as well rehearse Celestia’s song a few times before the wedding. He picks up his guitar, starts to sing—and doesn’t make it pastpoodles.
So that’s not going to work.
What do I feel? he asks himself.
Then:What do I want to feel?
Then:How can this be saved?
He still has the guitar in his hands.
He stops pacing. He sits down.
He stays up another seven hours.
Then he sleeps for seventeen hours.
He misses the wedding rehearsal. Which means that when he wakes up there are seven messages from Mikhail and none from V.
He looks first to social media, imagining he’ll find lots of ecstatic posts from V, dancing in celebration with her colleagues. But there’s no word there, either. Possibly because she’s still hung-over. More likely because Secret Project has to remain a Secret Project.
Then J listens to Mikhail’s seventh message—he sees no point in listening to the first six—and texts him back, assuring him that he’ll be on time—early, even!—for the wedding the next afternoon.
After some coffee, he checks his phone and finds a six-hour-long voice memo, confirming that last night he crawled into the dark cavern of his most morbid creativity, and decided to record whatever came out.
There is a lot of wallowing in the key of gibberish. There is some profanity. There are many questions. At one point, there is a lapse into a bastardized version of Celestia’s wedding song.
At this point, panicked, J checks his call log, and he is relieved to find there is no record of any contact with V for the last twenty-four hours.
Amidst the doggerel and the bluntly articulated misery, there are a few phrases that stick, especially one he implores over and over:We’re working on a script.
Meaning: This isn’t over.
Meaning: By being honest with each other, we’re finding our way.
Meaning: Even if our way is rocky right now, that’ll only get us to the smoother terrain.
After the six-hour-long voice memo, there is a much shorter one, only twenty minutes long. The phrases are gathering now. It’s shapeless, rambling, with a few da-da-da-da’s for lines he hadn’t yet written. It’s about that first big fight in a relationship, how unsteady it makes you on the balance beam, wondering if all it takes is one big wobble to make you fall off completely. It’s strange that J can’t really think of a major fight that he and V have had before—they’ve bickered and been temporarily nasty to each other, but never on the level that calls the whole relationship into question.
J picks up his guitar again and starts to shape his thoughts.
