Losing Schwartz

by Maxwell James

Part VI

conclusion

I knew when it started working.

The face filled me, the face and the place it stared at me from. I moved through another universe where everything was where I’d always yearned for it to be. Each step was perfect as my guide held me close and we skipped along through places too colorful and abundant to be real.

I felt tears running down my face, still feeling my palms grasping the arms of the chair, like shackles. It shone so bright that I had to squint. When it darkened I felt a panic so intense that I was certain I would die the moment it extinguished entirely.

But then it was the roar of the fans again, and the musty scent of her apartment.

I was still trembling as she pulled the headset off of me.

Her long hair hung down her long, slender back, and was as disheveled as it always was when she was working. Backlit by fluorescent light, the disparate strands created an exploding halo that shot from her head like the creation of a new universe. The bits of light that snuck through hit her at just the right places.

Though her face was odd-shaped, seeming a bit too round at the cheeks, and her arms seemed too long and thick for her body, and her curved thighs seemed a bit too wide, there was something unique and unrepeatable about her that I’d noticed from the first time I’d seen her at the bar. Her rumpled cargo pants, her soiled sweatshirt and the frayed T-shirt that snuck underneath didn’t fit her, as if she’d taken over someone else’s body, and it was this contradiction between her and her world that was most fascinating.

But as I trembled and looked at her now, I knew things were different.

I’d seen what she could never approach.

I felt the puffy softness around my eyes.

“Nothing happened,” I said.

“That seems hard to believe,” she answered, “you look pretty rough.”

“Yeah, it was intense,” I said.

“So, obviously something did happen.”

“Yeah... but... it was all inside,” I said.

“Well, that’s something, isn’t it?”

I just sat there. With effort, I released my palms, feeling the wetness on the chair arms’ surface. I didn’t want to stand up. The hardness between my legs was embarrassing. My body was inundated with an energy more powerful than electricity. But she would assume it was all about her. I realized for the first time how much she shared my fixation with her and how all this time, by believing she was more than she was, I’d fueled her narcissism.

She pushed her chair over to me and sat down. She looked at me like she expected something. I looked around at the neatly marked and taped wires and cables, and the modules arranged side by side on the far wall.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

For the first time, I found her presence annoying. I wanted to be alone with the inside of my head.

“Yes,” I said.

I was slowly detaching. I didn’t want to. I wanted to crawl inside myself and find that place I’d run through, and nestle there forever.

Except it was already going.

“You look upset,” she said.

“Just a minute, okay?” I snapped.

She got that hurt expression she always got when she was challenged. “Well, you don’t have to be so sensitive...”

“I’m not being sensitive, I just need a moment, okay?”

“Well, I was just trying to see if -”

“Shut up,” I said.

The look on her face was typical: utter shock that anyone would dare speak to her that way. Even through her troubled childhood, she’d managed to maintain that girlish sense of entitlement to status.

“What the hell’s your problem?” she asked.

It went farther.

“It wasn’t that bad, was it?”

Farther.

“You should know,” I said.

Gone.

“Why is that?” she asked.

I exhaled and turned to her.

“You used it, right?”

The look on her face enraged me before she even spoke.

“Well... no,” she said.

My insides exploded.

“So you experimented on me,” I said.

“Well... no... but -”

“But what? You were too afraid to use it on yourself, so you thought you’d call up your favorite dumbass, huh?”

“I didn’t mean -”

“To hell with you,” I said.

But I ruined my victory by standing and bumping my head on the headset. I heard the soft clatter of the pins through the sharp pain.

She walked to me and put her hand on my shoulder. The buds of frustrated tears were made worse. She never missed a chance to be maternally demeaning.

I swiped her hand away. “Get off me,” I said.

“But you just -”

“Yes, but I’m fine.”

“You bumped -”

“Yes, I know,” I said, “but I said I was fine, didn’t I?”

I stormed past her, through her work room and out into the living room. I made sure not to trip on anything. I walked to the table, and sat down. Our shot glasses sat on the table, along with the bottle. The books were still neatly stacked on the table next to her notebook. I stared at the green background of the webpage on the computer screen.

I heard the fans shut down. She followed me out. I didn’t look at her. I felt that sense of total dissatisfaction with my surroundings that came rarely but always seemed the realest. I kept looking at the thin film of light-brown whiskey, and the computer screen’s headline: “SMALL COMMUNIST FACTION RUINS LARGEST-EVER ANARCHIST GATHERING.”

She sat Indian style on the pillows against the wall. I rubbed my head and tried not to look at her.

“Are you alright?” she asked.

“I said I was, didn’t I?”

She was quiet. I realized I’d snapped at her, but didn’t care to apologize.

“What a waste of time,” I said.

“It seems to have had an effect on you,” she said.

“Yeah... but just inside,” I said.

“And you don’t think that’s worthwhile?”

“No,” I said. “Because everything will go on like before, but now I’ll have the most pristine sense I’ve ever had of how wrong it all is.”

“But don’t you think there’s something you can do with that?”

“Yeah, be even more miserable than I’ve ever been before.”

“Oh, come on -”

“You don’t understand.”

“Well, no,” she said, “not if you don’t explain it to me better.”

“You like to ding me, call me ‘mopey,’ say I’m self-absorbed and negative, right?”

“Well, you are -”

“And I’ve tried over and over again to explain where that feeling comes from, and I know there’s no hope. I’m stuck expecting the world to work opposite to the way it does, and I’m always playing catch-up with people like you. And now I’ll be even more out of it than I was before.”

“But don’t you feel like you can do something with that -”

“Do what?”

“You know, help people see what you believe is wrong -”

“Oh, come on. I’m past the point where I expect that to work. People are stupid.”

“Don’t you think you’re just being defeatist?” she asked in that same measured tone that started our argument.

“No, I’m being realistic,” I said, doing my best impression of it.

“No, you’re molding reality to fuel your own view of yourself as somehow beyond it, so you can get out of taking part.”

“That’s ridiculous,” I said.

“I don’t know,” she said, pointing towards the computer screen. “That’s just my opinion. I mean, what about the Gathering? More people than ever, but you left in disgust on a day when most people are excited.”

“But people didn’t really know why they were there; they were blindly following leaders. When the Communists got on the police bullhorn, they managed to convince people right away -”

“But, still, come on, years ago this would have been unheard of. It’s something.”

“But people don’t really know what they’re supporting.”

“Well, how do you help them know?”

“You can’t. It has to exist inside them.”

“I think you’re asking a bit much.”

“I don’t think you’re asking enough.”

“Oh, very clever.”

I scowled and turned away. “It’s useless talking to you,” I said.

“But don’t you even want to try?”

“I’ve spent my whole life trying. Where does it get me?”

“I don’t know,” she said, “how can you be sure you haven’t affected the world in ways you don’t know? How can anyone know what they have or have not inspired in people? The possibilities are endless.”

She was quiet for a while. I looked over at her. She had leaned back against the wall, and was staring up at the pipe-riddled ceiling of her apartment, towards the fluorescent light fixtures, maybe even past them. The look on her face seemed puzzled, as if her eyes refused to focus.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Thinking,” she said.

“About what?”

She shrugged. “Oh, lots of things.”