Born on the Edge of an Adjective
“I love you too,” I say. And when I start to tell him that he’s crazy–that he should leave this crazy woman who has put this craziness into him, who tells him cryptic riddles that sound more like horoscope readings, that he should come back from San Francisco immediately, that I will pay for a bus ticket, a train ticket, a plane ticket, even a boat, whatever mode of travel he finds necessary to bring him home–he hangs up on me. A few moments of silence, then the phone disconnects.
After I hang up I think, I should be worried. I should bite my nails, or pace the hallway. I should do something to make myself feel like I’m adequately caring, not numb to the situation. But I can’t. I make a TV dinner. I eat it watching TV. I sit in my armchair with my legs over one arm of it, and my head lolling off the other, and stare at the ceiling for a while, wondering if Neil is staring at his ceiling in San Francisco, too. I drink a bottle of Cabernet. I spill a spot of it on my carpet. But all I can manage in the way of worry for Neil is that I’ll soon see him on CNN making a fool of himself, connected with a cult happening. I hope they aren’t the sort of cult that take their own lives. I can deal with Neil making a fool of himself, but not with him being dead.
The phone rings the next morning, and when I answer, Harry, the pianist for “Winterlong”, tells me, “Well, hello, stranger. Why haven’t you returned my calls?”
“Sorry,” I say, and launch into reasons for my own self-imposed exile. “I’ve been sick a little. I’ve been working a lot,” I tell Harry.
“Excuses, excuses,” Harry says.
We make a date to get together. Do I have any new material? No, I don’t. I haven’t been writing.
“It doesn’t matter,” Harry tells me. “Just let’s get together. It’s been too long.”
“Any word on Neil?” he asks before we hang up.
“No,” I say. “None.” And afterwards I’m thinking, there never was.
I sit and wait in the kitchen, staring at the phone. I lie on my bed with my head turned towards the nightstand, and stare at the phone. I stop on sidewalks, near phone booths, and wait for them to ring, but they never do. Or when they do ring, it’s the wrong number, or it’s Harry, or whoever. It isn’t Neil.
I worry after a few days pass without hearing from him, so I pick up the phone and dial Neil’s cell phone. A pre-recorded message tells me the number is no longer in service. So I dial Margaret’s number, as Neil had called me collect from her house a few times and it’s on my phone bill. But again, a recorded message.
“This number has been disconnected.”
Another motto for Youngstown: If you can be happy here, you can be happy anywhere.
How to tally, to compose, to bring together answers? And what to do with them once they’ve been found? I could throw Neil into the air and disperse him, no more than stardust or pollen, a creature of light and lightness, not something with weight or gravity, to keep him down, to keep him here, with me. I could try to name him, define him, but for all my little words, something of him would still escape me.
“Let me lead you through the hall of mirrors,” I whisper in a caf� downtown, even though there’s no one near enough to hear me. I drink my coffee and begin to hum a new tune.
I imagine Margaret’s Victorian, light pouring through the bay window at this moment. It’s a beautiful morning in San Francisco. Her house is quiet. It smells like potpourri and furniture polish. Outside, a wind chime chimes, barely audible. But inside, no one is home.
Christopher Barzak has moved from Ohio to California to Michigan, and back to Ohio. His fiction has appeared in Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Nerve, Strange Horizons, The Icon, The Penguin Review and The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror.
“Born on the Edge of an Adjective” appeared in Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet #10 (June 2002).
Copyright © 2002 by Christopher Barzak.
