This is the first entry of my (perhaps foolishly ambitious) project to write one short story a week. This is the type of content you can expect to see here going forward. I hope you enjoy and I look forward to your feedback.
The apartment had a big window overlooking SOMA and the Bay. In the morning light, you could see the bridge already filling up with cars— the working professionals making their way to the city. People were going to work. Lena should be going to work. Instead she was here, inspecting the enigmatic mess left by Jaime.
There were records on the ground, some in their jackets, some not. The turn table was still mindlessly spinning the last album played, the needle grinding on the dead wax at the center of the record. Lena lifted the needle to stop the staticky sound. She picked up the record and looked at it. Miles Davis. Bitches Brew. Jaime had played this for her once. She could not understand it at all. It was just one chaotic mess of sounds, nothing she could possibly follow. Just pure, uncut jazz. She understood that it was probably a masterpiece that people had good reason for liking. With Jaime she was not so sure. She was never sure if he actually liked the things that he liked or if he just said that he liked the things that were impressive to like. He valued an artist’s status over their work. Although he must have got something from this album. She imagined him in his intoxicated haze laying this record down on the turn table, which he always did as if it were some sort of religious ritual, and standing by the big window as the music began to play. What was the music telling him? And what— what in God’s name was going through his mind?
He was probably smoking a cigarette as he looked out the window and listened to the music. The place reeked of the things. The butts were more or less assembled into ash trays, although by the window there were several stamped out on the hardwood floor. There were two empty packs on the coffee table. It could have been he just ran out of cigarettes and went out to get more. Say it was late, he was drunk, he said the wrong thing to the wrong person, and that person stabbed him and hid— no, that was not what happened. His disappearance did not seem like a random homicide. He had wanted to go for a long time. Where and why was always unclear. He just wanted to go. He wanted to drop everything. He hated everything. Hated it. The question he could never answer specifically was where exactly he wanted to go. And that was the question Lena immediately had to answer now, for he was gone. Wherever that vague place was, he was now there.
Next to the empty packs of cigarettes— and next to the likewise empty box of Hot & Spicy Cheez-Its— was a journal. This was useful. She sat on the couch and opened it. The handwriting of first few pages was orderly enough, although the dates were sporadic. He’d write three times in one day and then not write for three weeks. He never was someone who could establish his own, regular routine. In any case, all order went out the window when she got to the latest entry. Lena could barely read the words. “Electric … [illegible] … for to … [illegible] … over … [illegible] … in cases of foreign … [illegible] … TOWERS.”
Lena tucked her hair behind her ears and tried to decode the writing. There had to be something here. “The Western Zhou … [illegible] … in dances. Vueltas y vueltas. [Illegible] … to give GRACE … [illegible] … to give LIGHT.” Chinese history. Spanish. Jaime was all over the map, as usual. Lena felt quite confident he would never actually go to China or a Spanish speaking country. He loved studying cultures from around the world. Lena remembered that he was particularly enamored with Joseph Campbell’s idea of the Hero’s Journey— that stories from all cultures share the same story structure. He was convinced that there was some secret that lay behind the Hero’s Journey— that if you linked the mythologies from all cultures together you could uncover a concise message that unlocked the secret to life. But as with everything in his life this secret was something he was always frantically grasping for without ever actually making any progress.
Which might be what Lena is doing now, investigating his scribbles for keys to his mind. But she should at least make it through the end of the journal entry. For the sake of thoroughness. “ [Illegible] … parties of uninvited people … [illegible] … dances. Far away … [illegible] … probably impossible … [illegible] … but we try, do we not?” Lena smiled. Yes Jaime, we do try. Come on now, there must be something. “In any case … [illegible] … water. I am the water.”
Hold on. That was something. “I am the water.” This was like something he had said to her before. “I am the water.” Except no, it was not quite “I am the water.” What was it? “This is water.” Yes, this is water. That was from the David Foster Wallace commencement speech. He starts it with a joke about fish. Two young fish are swimming along when they see an older fish. The older fish says, “Morning boys, how’s the water?” The younger fish nod and swim away. Then one of them turns to the other and says, “What the hell is water?” Wallace uses this as an analogy for life. We’re so caught up in ourselves that we don’t even recognize the water we’re swimming in. We forget that everyone swims through the same water, the water of life, and we think that our own problems are so uniquely important that we forget that other people have problems too. That’s putting it simply. Lena remembers being struck by the idea when Jaime showed her the speech. When was that?
Oh, I remember when that was.
Their parents had died. That was their sob story. Lena was 18. Jaime was 22. It was a car accident in the fall, in that window between Thanksgiving and Christmas. They’d both come home for the funeral, which Jaime arranged with the help of a family friend. They didn’t have family anymore, their grandparents dead, their extended family estranged. They both took a leave of absence from school to deal with the mess.
That Christmas, Jaime had the idea to go up to their family cabin in the Sierras. If they could not be with their family at least they could feel like they were with their family. Lena thought it was a good idea too.
They got up there a few days before and arrived at a frozen old cabin in the snow. Jaime set about starting a fire. Lena set her things down in the guest bedroom and dressed into the warmest clothes she owned. She carried two fur blankets into the living room and found Jaime looking through the liquor cabinet. He pulled out two glasses and a bottle of whiskey. He showed her the label.
“They put these barrels on a ship and age it on the open sea. The churning of the waves helps mix the flavors. Dad let me try this once.”
“When was that?”
“I was… 16?”
“You were drinking whiskey when you were 16?”
“Yeah,” Jaime laughed. “I thought it tasted like shit. But dad really liked it so I tried to figure out why.”
He poured a finger into each glass.
“Have you ever had whiskey before?”
“I’ve had shots of Jack.”
“Well that’s a different kind of whiskey. This is the slow drinking kind.” He handed her the glass. They cheersed and put the glasses to their lips. Lena gagged.
“What do you think?” Jaime asked.
“I think it tastes like shit.”
Jaime laughed. “You’ll get used to it. Just drink it slow. Really tiny sips.”
Lena got her Gatorade from her backpack and washed the taste out of her mouth. “Can I mix it with Gatorade?”
“It would be a crime to mix it with Gatorade.”
“I can’t drink this.”
“Just keep the Gatorade with you. You can use it as a chaser if you need to but try to enjoy the whiskey straight. It’ll get easier.”
Lena heated up some water for instant ramen while Jaime sat by the fire looking into the flames. Lena brought two bowls out for them and they ate them sitting cross legged on the floor.
Jaime pulled out his phone and started doing something with it. “Now, I don’t want to get all… you know… deep or whatever. But I listened to this speech in one of my classes and I think it’s really helped me with the whole situation. Maybe it will help you too.”
“Okay.” Suddenly Lena was about to cry but she didn’t want to right now.
That was when he pulled up the David Foster Wallace commencement speech. He set his phone on the ledge of the fireplace and played the speech. They sat there listening to it, looking into the flames, sipping the whiskey. She got used to the taste of the spirit and it warmed her along with the fire. The speech had a similarly warm effect on her. Her life felt like chaos but now, for once, it made sense. It felt a little more comfortable. She smiled.
When it was over, Jaime refilled their glasses. He asked her her thoughts about it and she said she understood why that speech had helped him. Then they were both quiet and Jaime pulled a plastic bag out of his pocket.
“What’s that?”
“Shrooms.”
Lena smirked. “Where’d you get them?”
“You know Skunk?”
“Like John Fineman Skunk? Skunk from high school?”
“Yeah.”
“I didn’t even know you talked with him.”
“He’s an interesting guy.”
“You wanna do shrooms this trip?”
“Why not?”
“Aren’t you supposed to be in like a good mental state to do shrooms?”
“Yeah, well…” He held the plastic bag in front of him and stared at it. “They also say it can help with trauma. It can help you approach your emotions with less judgement. They use it in therapy sometimes.”
“But we’re not therapists.”
“Yeah. I don’t know. It’s an idea.”
And the next morning they did them. Lena wasn’t sure why she agreed to do it. It seemed like a really stupid idea. But then there was something else that felt so right about it. A brother and sister doing shrooms at their family cabin. What better way to do psychedelics for the first time? And it really was amazing— at first. It was a sunny day. They hiked up a trail just by the cabin that led up, up, up through the pines. There were birds chirping in the sun and the snow lightly melted off the trees, making a sound like thin rain. Then Jaime took her on a path she had never been on before, at a turn they’d often passed by but never tried for whatever reason. And this trail went up even higher until finally it crested and they looked down upon large lake that Lena never even knew existed. She was really on shrooms now and she fell to her knees on the snow and laughed, laughed, laughed, until she was crying, and then she was crying, really crying, because they had no parents and they had no family and she would never be able to hug mom or hug dad or tell them she loved them or just be with them, just spend time with them, just spend a few seconds with them— could she please God just spend a single second with them?— but she never, never would because they were dead, dead, dead.
Jaime was kneeling by her, rubbing her back, and then he was crying too, burying his head into her shoulder. Then they adjusted so that they could both sit down and hug each other and cry. At some point she thought she heard Jaime whispering something through his tears, and she quieted her sobbing to listen. “This is water.” He was saying. “This is water.”
Lena pulled from him. “Why are you saying that?”
Jaime collected himself. “Because this is water. What we’re going through, it’s all water. It will pass like water.” He stood up. He raised his hands to the lake. “This is water!” He gestured to the snow surrounding him. “This is all water!”
Lena laughed. Jaime wiped a tear off his cheek and showed it to her. “These tears are water! I am water. Humans are 60% water. I am water. You are water. It’s all water Lena!” He waved his arms as if he were standing in a lake and splashing water all around. “It’s all just harmless, fluid water!”
Lena was laughing now, mostly because Jaime looked ridiculous flailing around. It was enough to get her out of her funk, and the rest of the trip went well. They came back to the cabin and soon came down. When she was pretty much sober again, she thought back to that moment of him flailing. She realized then that what seemed like a profound thought at the moment didn’t actually make sense when she thought about it. What did he mean by saying he was water? She could kind of understand it but it was something different for him. He meant something by it and she didn’t know what.
“water. I am the water.”
John Fineman, the “Skunk” from whom Jaime got the shrooms, had been sort of a weird kid in high school. Disheveled. Cargo shorts and torn t shirts. He was from the Hills— the area in the outskirts of the local school district that had a reputation for being a little lower class, a little hippy-ish. Mostly he hung out with the weird kids, other people from the Hills. But you’d also see him strangely talking to the popular kids who normally wouldn’t give someone like him the time of day. That’s because he was a drug dealer.
Was it possible Jaime still got his drugs from him? It had been over ten years since they’d graduated high school. Jaime was almost 30 now. But then again, who else would Jaime gotten drugs from? He sold CRM software to corporations in San Francisco. He wasn’t in the types of crowds that had a whole lot of drug dealers.
Skunk was easy to find on Instagram. His posts were sporadic and low effort. He’d have year long gaps between some posts and then suddenly he’d post five times in a single week, all of them poorly lit and cryptic. A lot of them were of a dog whose breed was beyond anyone’s guess. One of those was of the dog standing on his hind legs with his front paws on a bong, wearing what appeared to be a decorative fascinator often seen on the heads of royal British women. His bare belly was covered in tumors. “He’s a regular Duchess of Cambridge,” the caption read. The post had 12 likes. Lena smirked. God, she can’t believe she is laughing right now.
She began sending him a message and stopped herself. Was she crazy? How would she come off if it turned out Skunk had nothing to do with Jaime, if he had in fact not seen him for years? Or say Skunk took this as some sort of signal that she was interested in him? What kinds of DMs would he send her?
No, just do it. Skunk probably had weird shit happen to him all the time. This would blend in with everything else. And worst case scenario, she could deal with a few creepy DMs from him. She’d dealt with the worst of DMs before.
“Hey Skunk, I know this is totally random and you can just ignore this if you have nothing to do with it, but have you by any chance seen/spoken to Jaime recently? He’s been missing and he might have been on shrooms or something and I know he’s gotten shrooms from you before, so I thought I’d ask. Anyways, hope you’re doing well!”
She hit send. She shook her head and put her phone in her pocket. If he’s seen him, he’s seen him, if he hasn’t, whatever. She looked around at the chaotic room before her. She didn’t want to be here anymore. She should get to work. If this lead went cold she could come back another time.
She took the elevator downstairs and exited out onto the busy streets of SOMA. Market was that way. She could catch MUNI and get to the office in Embarcadero in a half hour. 11 AM. That was not too late. She hadn’t told her boss why she’d be late. She’d left it at a vague “family emergency” without saying specifically what was going on. She hadn't told anyone what was going on.
She boarded the late and packed bus, having to stand holding the overhead bars. The bus rattled and swayed, pressing against the people around her. He could be anywhere. He was the person who understood her the most. Skunk would not find him. Why did she think that was a good idea? This wasn’t some story. This was life and nothing worked so easy in life. She wasn’t a qualified detective who could solve this case. There were professionals for this. She should just file a goddam police report and stop scouring the world like an idiot. Yet the police were not responsible for him. She was responsible for him. And she’d let him fall through her fingers.
The bus rattled as if it were going to collapse into pieces, so loud that she had to plug one ear with her finger. Just then her phone dinged. She pulled it out of her pocket.
“Hey Lena! Yeah, I seen him. I guess we should talk.”
Lena pressed the stop request button.
She almost missed the turnoff for Skunks house, hidden as it was behind. But there the number was, carved into a small wooden sign, 224 Madrone Drive. The dirt driveway led far off the road through a small forest. Her sedan was ill suited to its sudden and frequent dips but soon the forest cleared and the drive leveled out, revealing an old wooden bungalow.
There was someone holding a gun in front of the house. She stopped suddenly. He wasn’t pointing it at Lena, thank God. He was pointing it towards the trees on the left. But he could point it at her at any minute. The figure didn’t move. Then she recognized that it was Skunk, much older and heavier than when she’d last saw him, and also much older-looking than anyone she knew his age. Then she realized what he was pointing it at: a dog, the same dog from his Instagram, again standing on its hind legs. My God, was he going to shoot the dog? What? Why? Why now? It seemed like he loved this dog. Was there something wrong with it? And then she realized the dog was in fact holding a red ball in its front paws. But Jesus Christ, he wasn’t actually gonna try to shoot that ball? Surely he wouldn’t—
And he shot it. The ball popped. The dog went sprinting in circles. Skunk pumped his fist in the air and shout “Woohoo!”— the way only someone who says “Woohoo!” very often can say it. He turned to Lena and gestured with his unarmed hand, as if to say “See that?” She smiled nervously and he motioned towards where she could park.
Lena got out of the car as Skunk turned on the safety and set the gun on the porch. He walked over to Lena while calling to the dog. “Come here boy. Good boy.” The dog zoomed up to him and he rubbed his side. He looked up at Lena.
“Welcome to my home,” he said. “Just doing some target practice. This is Skunk.”
“Skunk is the name of your dog?”
“Yeah. Skunk and Skunk. We’re buddies.”
“I see.”
“Come on in. I’ll make some mugwort.”
They went in the house, the dog running in with his buddy Skunk. Inside was about what you would expect to see in an old wooden bungalow in the Oakland Hills. Shag carpet. Threadbare couch. A cluttered bookcase with, inexplicably, a pair of muddy hiking boots on the top shelf.
Skunk filled a pot with water and lit the stove.
“I don’t mean to be rude,” Lena said. “But I am a bit eager to go look for Jaime.”
“Oh yeah, this will only take a moment. It’ll calm your nerves. Help you think straight. Makes it better to look for someone.”
“Can I take it to go?”
“Oh yeah. All our cups are to go here.”
Which explains the stacks of paper cups littered all over the counters, Lena thought.
Skunk leaned against the wall. “So you’re close to Jaime?”
“Oh yeah, real close.”
“He’s a bit of a worried guy, huh?”
“Worried?” Lena thought. “I guess I never thought of him as worried before.”
“You know, like, he just doesn’t let go.” Skunk mimed as if he were white knuckling the wheel of a clown car. “It’s just all bunched up with him, making sure everything’s perfect, making sure everyone likes him.”
“Well I think some times he lets go. I mean, he’s certainly letting it go right now. He’s letting it all go.”
“Yeah but that’s the thing. You’re always going to need to let go. And when you try to never let go, when you keep everything all bunched up, eventually you will let go. And that’s when you let it all go. That’s when the real fucked up shit happens. That’s when you let go in the wrong way.”
Lena took a look at the place. Skunk was certainly one to let a lot of things go. And it wasn’t like it he really let things go in the right way.
“Yeah, well, our parents died so we don’t really have a whole lot of guidance in life,” she said. “He has to do what people think you have to do. He has to keep on the ‘right track,’ you know, whatever that means. Get the 9-5, save for retirement, don’t do anything too stupid and all that.”
Skunk waved his hand. “Yeah but people’s parents die and they find a way to let go.” Then the water was boiling and he started fixing the tea.
Watch it there Skunk, Lena thought, You don’t know what it’s like to have your parents die.
He filled two cups with the tea and water, lidded them, and handed one to Lena.
“Let’s go then,” he said.
He led her outside, the dog following them. He took her around back of the house to a trail leading up into the woods. Soon the small trees gave way to redwoods and the path kept leading up, up, up. It was overcast on this side of the Bay and the ground and the air were cool and damp. The hot mugwort tea warmed Lena and Skunk was right that it did help her think a little clearer.
“He called me like three times that night,” Skunk said. “Then I finally woke up. He said he needed to get his hands on shrooms right now. He was already taking an Uber over here. It was like, what? People aren’t usually fiending for shrooms like that. It’s not that kind of drug. It reminded me of when I sold Adderall.”
“You sell Adderrall?”
“I sold Adderall. I stopped because— well, first of all, I realized I should stop taking Adderall, and second of all, everyone I sold it to needed to stop taking Adderall as well.”
“You quit Adderall?”
“Yeah. That drug is fucking whack.”
Lena knew Adderall addicts. She worked at a recruiting agency and it was surprising how many of her clients were obviously strung out on either Adderall or something similar, like Vyvanse or Ritalin. Mid-level managers, well paying jobs, good houses, a lot of times a family— and yet these people just couldn’t get off the stuff. Skunk didn’t seem like the quitting type. She figured you had to have your whole life in order. Structure, routine, resources, all that stuff, so that you didn’t feel like you needed the stuff to thrive. But maybe Skunk knew something she didn’t.
“You know, my parents are dead too, actually,” Skunk said.
Lena looked at him.
“My dad died when I was real young. Mom died when I was 18. That was rough. I had just become a legal adult and now I had to take total control of my life. It was the Adderall that did my mom in. That and Meth, towards the end. Alcohol too, of course. She started giving me Adderall when I was like eight. She thought it was a miracle medicine. I thought it was too. Then she died and I thought Adderall was the medicine I needed to keep my life afloat. It was all work work work, sell sell sell, clean clean clean. God, that stuff makes you crazy. Then one day my prescription ran out and the market went totally dry. There was a big bust and nobody had anything. I was fiending. I mean, it was really bad. Then one of my suppliers said ‘Look, I don’t have amphetamines, but I do have these shrooms. It could hold you over, I don’t know.’ I’d never done shrooms before because I was scared of having a bad trip. But I was desperate for something so I took them. And I took way too much. The come up was like a freight train and it was actually really fun. I was out here, in the redwoods. It was gorgeous, sunny, and I just remember the landscapes below the hills looking like the fucking Holy Land. But then it just kept going, kept getting stronger. The trees turned into these massive beasts stepping over me and then everything started, like, spinning and churning and I was all mixed in with everything. I had to lay down in the bushes. And then I totally lost myself. It was like I was in another dimension and I was never going to come home. It’s hard to explain. Total ego death, you know. And it was really scary at first and my withdrawals were probably making it even worse. I know I was screaming at some point but it must have been nobody heard me. And then suddenly it wasn’t really scary anymore. It just was. Everything just was and I just was. It’s all just being. And I opened my eyes. And the shrooms were coming down. And I looked up through the dark trees into the empty night sky. And it’s just emptiness, emptiness going on and on and not stopping. And I realized, I didn’t need anything. I didn’t need Adderall. I could just be.”
He suddenly dipped down to grab a stick and toss it a few feet ahead of him. The dog came bolting out of the trees to retrieve it. When the dog got the stick Skunk grabbed him and rubbed his side. The dog reached his head up and tried to lick him but could only flap his tongue about in the air.
“And then somebody started licking my face out of nowhere, some random beast from the hills thinking I was some sort of treat. And that’s how I met this guy, isn’t that right?”
Lena laughed. The dog was really the goofiest thing she had ever seen.
“Anyways, that’s all just to say, I do sort of understand where you and Jaime are coming from. It seems to me he’s got some sort of alcohol problem. I don’t know what the shrooms thing is about. He insisted I not be there when he took them. I guess he wanted to find himself and start a new life. I only gave him a little bit though so he should be sober now. This way.”
He nodded towards a thin path leading off the main path that led up a ridge.
“I’m sorry all that happened to you, Skunk,” Lena said.
“Ah, it’s all right. I got a good job now flipping burgers. I got my dog. I got my parents house. And look at this place. It’s beautiful.”
“It is.”
Skunk stopped. They were at two large boulders which had a path between them leading to a lookout.
“This is where I left him. Technically, you’re not supposed to camp here but nobody would actually enforce that.” He looked left and right. “I guess I should leave you two alone. You know how to get back?”
“I do. Thank you, Skunk.”
“No problem at all. You finished with that?” He took her empty cup. “I’ll see you when you get down.”
He whistled for the dog to come to his side and made his way back down the trail. Lena watched him go. She felt like she should say something more to him but there was nothing more to say.
She turned to the path between the boulders. This was it. He was here. She stepped through them.
The landscape of her hometown stretched before her, small houses clustered in the valleys between green hills. On a patch of grass in front of this was a tent. On a nearby rock stood Jaime. He had his hands on his hips and he was staring out at the view. When Lena approached, he turned. He was not happy to see her.
“Hi Jaime.”
“So Skunk gave me away?”
She sighed. “I reached out to him and he told me what happened.”
He frowned and turned back to the view.
“We should go back to your place.”
He shook his head without looking at her.
“Can you tell me what’s going on? Why do you need to run away?”
He scoffed. “Why do I need to run away?” He turned. “It’s all nothing Lena. My life’s all nothing. I thought it would be better than this. I thought I would have some sort of thing I could call my own. Some sort of business or artistic oeuvre or a publication or something. But instead I just work for some company I don’t give a shit about and my friends are all idiots with no ambition whatsoever and there’s nothing I can do to change it. There’s no way for me to grab life by the reins and say, Okay, we’re going this direction now. Except for this.” He gestured towards the tent. “This is the way I can change my life. Throw it all away. Start fresh. This is all I can do.”
“You have a nice apartment. And yeah, I know your job sucks but it pays well and you can just leave it at the office. Life doesn’t have to be some grand thing. You can just enjoy it.”
He shook his head. “I can’t just enjoy it. You can’t just enjoy things. That’s not sustainable. You have to do something meaningful. You have to feel like you’re working towards something larger than yourself. That’s sustainable.”
“But you can be with people. You can focus on the people in your life. That’s sustainable, right?”
He turned back to the view. “Maybe that works for some people but not for me.”
“And what about me? You don’t want me to be in your life?”
He slightly turned his head but he didn’t respond.
“This is water, Jaime. Right? This is all water. Life is just water. Let it be. You can’t control the water.”
He spun around and pumped his fist in to his chest several times. “I am the water, okay? I am the water. I know what’s right. I know what life should be. Everyone else might be content with their stupid lives but NOT. ME.”
He squatted and covered his face with his hand. Lena went next to him. She squatted and put a hand on his shoulder. She saw that he was crying.
“Jaime, we can just let be, right? We can just let be. Life doesn’t have to be grand, I promise. You can just let it go.”
He took a deep breath the recollect himself. He looked at her. “If you really believe that, then you can just let me go.” He covered his face again. “Just leave me alone.”
Lena watched him for a moment to see if he was serious. Then, seeing that he was, she rose and went back to the boulders. She turned one last time in case he changed his mind. He was still squatting there, covering his face, determined to be alone. Life was not supposed to take your brother away. Not when the rest of your family was gone.
She turned and passed through the boulders to take the trail back down.