What it Tastes Like

WHAT IT TASTES LIKE

Before I forget, there is Jenny.

    It is not taking me long to bury the truth. It has been less than one hour and already I have hidden it in deep corners of my body. One piece, a white-warm lump of memory—this I set down gently in a narrow, vacant recess of my lungs. I have forgotten which one. Another piece, a viscous fluid inside a thin blue membrane—I cannot remember where I hid this. Behind some small organ near my stomach? In the hollow space of my pelvis?

    It is easier this way. To forget these things, this truth, to bury it. There are nights of hot tears and cold beds coming and I will not let them blacken my heart, my memories of her, of us. This truth does not deserve to be tarnished like that, and it does not deserve to be thrown away. And certainly, it cannot be left unwatched, roaming my mind, growing, rousing me in the night because it needs a warmer blanket or a glass of water to white wash its thirsty throat.

    By the time Will picks me up from the police station, it is 3 a.m. and everything is hidden, entombed in the depressed spaces of my body. Will reaches across the passenger seat to push open the door. I have never before seen him this tired. He must have been sleeping. He is a good friend.

    I am carrying papers with me. One is white, for next week’s court appearance. Another is yellow, with ‘Police Report’ on the top and Jenny’s name and my signature at the bottom. Another is blue, informing me of my rights as the accused. Will sees them and he doesn’t know what to say, and neither do I; we don’t know what words there are for this. “You need to talk, man?” he asks.

    “Let’s just drive for a bit,” I say. I need some time. Two turns and we hit the highway. I roll the windows down and chew on a fingernail. The fog is thick, but we plow through it with fishbowls for headlights. The road is empty. Even the roadkill has gone home for the night, fleeing into the darkness of trees on either side of the highway. The painted lines on the concrete pulse and the wind is loud; I am getting the time I need.

    My ears are ringing. I don’t know if they ring because she hit me there, or maybe they ring because I hid a piece of the truth in the hollow space of my eardrum and it is making itself known. Maybe they just ring from the wind whipping through the car.

    You are too loud, say the trees that fill the darkness.

    We are quiet as we can be, I say.

    I am talking to the road, say the trees.

    It is not our fault, we did not build ourselves, say the rocks that were crushed to make the road.

    There are none of us left that can even remember what quiet sounds like, say the trees.

    It is not our fault, say the rocks.

    “Will, thanks for picking me up.”

    His eyes are on the road and he doesn’t tell me that I don’t have to thank him. He just nods his head. Will knows me, respects me, loves me as young men love their friends, and that is why he is here and does not need to be thanked. Will was probably drunk, warm, normal in his bed with Melissa, and after a vibration on his nightstand and a few words into the phone, he sobered up, pulled on jeans, and entered the cold, strange world I called him from.

    The papers are in my back pocket and I am not running from her. Will is my friend but he cannot help me escape from this and I wouldn’t ask him to try. I just need this time. The lines start pulsing again, faster  until they flow as one. We haven’t seen another car yet and our headlights are alone but not lonely. We are flying, not fleeing and both of us know this. We are fearless and scared of the fact we are. We are moving fast, fast, fast, and the windows are down.

    And then we brake. The lines on the asphalt pulse slower and slower until I can see each one as it is passes underneath our headlights. We’ve reached a tollbooth. “I didn’t bring my wallet,” says Will.

    “I did, but I don’t have any small bills,” I say. I only have a fifty tucked behind my driver’s license for emergencies.

    “Do you want to keep going?” Will asks. He will drive through without paying if I ask him. He is willing to knock down obstacles because he is my friend. But I have had the time I need, so we turn around and head back to town.

    "I need coffee anyway," Will says. I know he doesn't really need coffee, doesn't want it, but he has a good heart. He will take me to the diner so I don't have to go to sleep just yet. There is still fog on the road and we don’t talk much because I don’t have much to say. The air is cold, my mind is empty, and we are on our way back.

    Then, in the distance, something bright, growing brighter as we approach. A light so orange, so intense, something so different from our headlights it seems impossible the same word describes both things. Will and I both see it, but we wait to say anything about it; to speak it acknowledges its existence and I cannot do that yet. We are silent and upon it within a minute and the moment I see it I think of Jenny, and then that thought is gone.

    It’s a burning car in the grassy median. This was not here when we passed this spot twenty minutes ago. The pulsing lines slow again as we brake and Will stops the car but leaves it in drive.

    “What the fuck?” I say. I’ve never seen anything like this before. It is so bright. It lights up both sides of the highway, steals the darkness from the trees.

    “What do we do?” asks Will.

    “I don’t know.” I bite a nail.

    “A drunk driver, maybe?”

    “I don’t see anybody.” I expect a charcoal silhouette slumped over the wheel, or a lump, maybe four stumbled paces away from the car, smoldering in the tall grass.

    “Should we call someone?” asks Will. He rolls up the window to keep out the smoke. There is nothing special about the way it smells—no gasoline, no flesh. There is really nothing at all remarkable about the flame aside from its brightness. It is so bright, so orange, and like all flames, it blossoms, fails, blossoms, and fails again.

    “Yeah. The police?”

    “I don’t have my phone,” says Will. I can see him leaving Melissa asleep in bed, leaving his phone and wallet on the nightstand. She is probably still sleeping now. I have taken Will away from her, here, to this bright orange thing that reminded me of Jenny.

    “Ok.” I pull my phone out. “911? What do I say?” I ask but Will doesn’t answer. He is staring at the car with his tired eyes, and then, quickly, he puts the car in park and opens his door. He stands up but doesn’t step any closer. I dial, but wait to call.

    “See anything else?” I ask.

    “I still don’t see anyone. I can feel the heat. It’s so hot.”

    “Can’t it explode or something?” I ask.

    “Maybe it already did.”

    “Are the windows broken?”

    “I can’t tell.” Will doesn’t step any closer to the car. “Is the fire coming out of the windows? It’s too hard to see. It’s too bright. Why do you ask?”

    “I remember something about if the windows are there then it could still explode. Does that make sense?” I don’t know where I’ve heard that. I’ve never seen a burning car before.

    “Did you call?” Will asks.

    “No. Should I?”

    “I don’t know. What can anyone do?” Will asks. I look again but see no movement in the car.

    “The police officer told me to go straight home. I’m not supposed to be here.”

    “Right. Well, we could call it in and then leave before anyone got here. We didn’t do anything wrong.”

    “Yeah. But use my phone? They have my number. They might make some connection.”

    “You think they’d recognize your number?” Will asks.

    “I don’t know. Would they need us as witnesses?” I don’t want to go back to that station.

    “We should call it in. We’ll call in a few miles.”

    “Ok,” I say, but we don’t and Will doesn’t say anything as we take the exit back to town.

    You are too loud, say the trees that fill the darkness.

    I am as quiet as I can be, I say.

    The streets are empty. The diner is a few blocks away from the police station. Will parks alongside a meter. A wind picks up as I open the door. The weather must be getting colder, or perhaps the concrete streets always chill this late at night.

    “Do you have any quarters?” Will asks me for the second time.

    The answer is still no. Just the fifty in my wallet for emergencies.

    “Isn’t parking free this late?” I say.

    “Oh. Probably,” he says. Definitely.

    There’s one other seated booth. A couple, wearing coats over their pajama bottoms, sharing a plate of diner hash browns. They are happy. They are tired all over, tangled, greasy, exhausted everywhere but their eyes. Their eyes are awake, the energy ricocheting between them over their plate. Their eyes are alive and full. It is 4 a.m.

    We take an empty booth by the window so we can watch Will’s car and I look for a waitress but see none. It’s quiet. There might be a way that these things should be brought up, but I don’t know it and neither does Will, so I just start. I tell him everything that happened after we left him and Melissa at the bar.

    I tell him about the words she said, about the words I said that made her hit me, hard, on my ear. And I tell him the words she said as she hit me a second time, this time with a fist on the other side of my head. I tell him how words lost meaning at that point and that there is a blank spot in my thoughts and that my ears stopped hearing, I was only seeing. The look on her face as she hit me a third time, again with a fist. This one hurt. I tell him how my hands looked, like they were too far away from my body to be my mine, how they pushed her and how time kept moving at its normal speed through all of this, never slowing down. I tell him how I pushed her—how I shoved her hard, shoved her away from me and how right then the thoughts came back and the words started making sense again and the sound returned and time still hadn’t slowed down through all of this. I tell him how I heard the noise over the ringing in my ears, how I heard the noise, that noise, that horrible noise of her forehead hitting the corner of my bedpost. The noise. That distinct noise.

I don’t tell Will about the way she looked at me before the blood started flowing. I don’t tell him about the way I looked at her. I don’t tell him about the truth and how I buried it and forgot it so I could protect it.

    I have stopped talking and I am staring at my hands. I can feel Will staring at them too. He is quiet but he is listening and understanding.

    “Oh, sorry.” The waitress appears.

    “Don’t worry about it,” I say.

    “I’ll just have a cup of coffee,” Will says.

    “Me too.”

    “Right. Be out in a second.” The waitress disappears and so does my need to tell the rest of the story. There’s not a lot else to say, anyways. The police at my door, handcuffing, seeing Jenny get into a car to go to the hospital, then the police asking me questions, first in my room, then in the station, me agreeing to answer anything, having nothing to hide. What is your relation to Jennifer Mara? She is my girlfriend. How long were you dating? Three years. And did you hit her? I pushed her. You didn’t hit her? No. Have you ever hit her? No. Is there any history of violence, is there blood on your hands, do I need to check for blood anywhere else? No, no, no. I don’t tell the officer that this is my Jenny.  I don’t tell the officer that this girl he was asking me questions about, that girl that just left to go the hospital, the one with eye lashes and hands and perfect teeth—she is the girl I love. That one. Why I would I lie? Jenny is the girl I love.

    The waitress returns with our coffees and disappears again.

    “There’s no sugar,” Will says. His eyes are still tired and he seems annoyed about the sugar. He exhales and slumps into the torn leather of the booth. I am surprised at his anger. This must be getting to him. It is exhausting.

    I see sugar and cream on the table the couple are spilling their love over. I hate to disturb them, to take anything away from them, but I have to. Will takes sugar with his coffee and I owe him this simple thing because he woke up and drove me to the diner even though I’m the only one that has seen blood tonight. As I approach, I see how happy they are, the way they glow and laugh, the way the dirty yellow light falls differently on them.

    “Can we borrow the cream and sugar?” I ask. He nods, still laughing at something his girl had said. “Thanks. I’ll bring them back,” I say. Her pajamas are flowered.

    “That’s ok, you don’t have to,” he says, and I don’t.

    Aside from stirring sugar in, Will doesn’t touch his coffee. He probably still has plans for sleep at some point. I imagine Will crawling back into bed behind Melissa, feeling that warmth, her stirring, smiling, pushing hips into his, then falling back asleep and not remembering it in the morning when Will tells her why he had gone. I wonder if Jenny is out of the hospital now, back in her own bed for the first time in weeks. A pair of her sheets cover my bed. They have yellow and blue flowers. I wonder when she’ll ask for them back. I wonder if she needed stitches. I’d kiss every one.

    “I never liked her name,” I say.

    “Yeah?”

    “Yeah. Jenny. I never liked it.”

    “I guess you don’t have to worry about that anymore,” Will says. It comes out like a joke, but I know that wasn’t how he meant it, so I ignore it. “What made you think of that?” he asks.

    “They were calling her Jennifer tonight. She never wanted me to call her that.”

    Will says nothing.

    “She said that’s what Joe used to call her and I didn’t like her thinking of Joe.”

    “So you called her Jenny.”

    “Yeah. And I never really liked it.” I normally don’t drink coffee because I don’t like the taste, but tonight I pretend like I do and stir in some cream. I tell Will, “I had half a mind to tell the police officers that she wouldn’t like them calling her Jennifer, putting it down on all the paperwork, but I didn’t think it was relevant.”

    “Probably wasn’t. Probably a lot of things don’t seem relevant now.”

    I stir the coffee again, sip it, but don’t really taste it. There’s not a whole let else to do or say. I wish there was something to do with my hands. I wish there was somewhere else to be, something else to do. I think of Jenny, of having sex with her. The last time: nine hours ago, her in her thin white dress, on my bed, under yellow and blue paisley flowers. It was fast and hard and good for both of us. I waited until she bit my shoulder to come—one of her ankles pulling me into her, my hands on top of hers, hers gripping the sheets.

The couple in pajamas, having had their fill, walk to the cashstand. The waitress appears again and he has to let go of his girl’s hand so he can fish for his wallet in a coat pocket.

    “I thought of the strangest things tonight, Will.”

    “That’s normal. It’s a strange thing to begin with.”

    “No, like really strange. Like fucked up. They sat me in a room for a half hour while they did the paperwork in the room next door. It gave me time to think. I thought about a lot of things.”

    “They just left you alone?” Will wants something to do with his hands. He stirs the coffee he hasn’t tasted.

    “Yeah, well not completely. My left hand was handcuffed to the chair.”

    “I see.”

    I find myself laughing. I want Will to ask why I am laughing, but he just stares at his coffee, so I answer without him asking.

    “It’s kind of funny. I bit all the nails on my right hand because the left was cuffed to the chair. Every nail. Look.” I don’t know why I show him, maybe to prove I haven’t lied on top of everything else that I did. Will looks at my hands and then at his own.

    “I kept biting them. I bit hard and deep until there was blood. And here’s the strange thing—I was worried the police officer was going to think that it was her blood. You know, that I had been hitting her and gotten her blood on me. He had asked me already to see my hands. He checked for blood.” There was none.

    “Jesus.”

    “Yeah, I was worried so I sucked my blood out of the crevices of my fingers.”

    The waitress is clearing the table where the couple sat. She eyes our coffees to see if we need refills. We don’t.

    “Will.”

    “Yeah?”

    “When I sucked the blood out, I could taste her.”

    Will looks at me and doesn’t say anything. I haven’t washed my hands.

    “I could taste her. How intense, beautiful, tragic, disgusting is that?” I know he can’t answer. “After the blood, the snot, the tears, to still taste her.” I had to tell someone that. Will is a good friend.

    I start biting the nail on my thumb. Will looks at me, right at me, for probably the first time the whole night.

    “You should quit biting your nails,” he says. “It’s a bad habit.” This time Will is trying to make a joke, so I laugh.

    “I know. Jenny used to tell me that too. I told her that if I quit biting my nails, I’d be perfect, and nobody’s allowed to be perfect so I had to bite my nails. And then I did that thing with my shoulders and palms and the corners of my mouth that always made her laugh. She used to laugh so hard.” I smile. Will smiles too.

    “Jenny wasn’t perfect,” he says. “Nobody’s perfect.” He is looking at me again.

    I nod. “Nobody’s perfect. I never liked her name.”

    “Everyone makes mistakes,” he says.

    “I know.” I bite my nail. “I just don’t know if this was one of mine.”

    Will is a good friend, and he knows me, loves me as young men love their friends, but he is surprised. “Yeah, I don’t know.”

    You are too loud, say the trees.

    “It is not my fault,” I say.

    We did not build ourselves, say the rocks.

    “Will, I don’t think it’s my fault,” I say.

    That’s as far as that conversation goes. I can say it is not my fault, but I do not know for sure. I do not know what I deserve for this. I do not know what Jenny deserves. Our names shared love letters; now they’re in an officer’s handwriting on forms in my back pocket. This afternoon they were whispered together in my bedroom, into pillows and into the skin in front of ears, and a week from yesterday they will share a courtroom. The accused. The accuser. Me. Jennifer Mara. Jenny. I never liked her name.

    When I feel like Will has gone to the limits of what he is obligated to do as my friend, I tell him I am ready to go. We walk to the cashstand.

    “Thanks for this. I needed it.”

    Will nods. “No problem. You’re gonna be ok, man. Things work out.” As we wait for the waitress, I bite my nail and Will pats me on the back. “You’re gonna be ok.”

    “Yeah.”

    The waitress appears and I hand her the fifty.

    “I can’t change that, it’s 5 in the morning,” she says. I do not know if it is too early or too late to expect change for a fifty.

    “This is all I have,” I say. It is more than enough.

    “Well, I don’t have change for it,” she says shortly. She is not irritated by the fifty, but maybe she is generally an irritated person.

    “I don’t know what you want me to do,” I say. I wonder what truths she has buried deep inside her, whether she has the kind I have. Maybe she has let them sulk in her mind, pounding to get out, pushing out patience, leaving irritation. I don’t want to become like her. I don’t want to become a sad person.

    “You have nothing else?” she says. This irritates her now.

    “No. This is all I have. I’ll come back tomorrow and pay.” I imagine the waitress, her forehead bleeding. She should understand. She should have patience with me. I have lost tonight. I have buried truths tonight and I am tired, I am exhausted.

    “Tomorrow as in today? How do I know you won’t ditch? How do I know you didn’t plan on this?” Waitress, I did not plan this. I never planned this. I am telling you the truth. The truth is all I have. It is more than enough.

    It is not my fault, says the road.

    “Listen, I’ll come right back and pay. It’s just two coffees,” says Will. He is a good friend.

    “Ok. My shift is over at 9,” she says. She slams the drawer closed. I remember the noise. That noise. Like roadkill.

    “I’ll be back in twenty minutes,” says Will. I see him standing by his warm bed, grabbing his wallet and phone, kissing Melissa, her waking, tugging on his hand, asking him not to go, asking when he’ll be back, asking him to kiss her again and to wear a coat.

    The wind outside is gone and the streets are still empty.

    “I’m gonna walk home,” I tell him.

    “You sure?”

    “Yeah. I need some time.”

    “You have all the time you need.” He looks right at me again.  “You gonna be ok?”

    “Yeah.”

    “Tonight, I mean.”

    “Yeah. Will, thank you”

    “Don’t worry about it.” He grabs the ticket, gets in the car, and I am alone.

    The walk home is fast and my mind is empty. My door is unlocked. The bed is unmade. There’s two drops of blood in a field of blue and yellow paisley flowers.    I pull myself into bed, and I’ve never really hurt like this before. I sleep for a few hours and wake up alone. The light outside is too bright and my lungs ache like my heart has been pounding into them too hard for too long. I’m scared and I don’t want to be scared. I’ve been scared my whole life and I never knew why until this morning. I strip off my clothes, shower, and I don’t think about her. But—when I turned the water off, in the first moment of silence without the flat pounding of water on flesh and linoleum, I remember the burning car. I close my eyes and listen to the water drain from the tub.