“So, how’s it going?” Neither noticed that ten silent seconds had elapsed.
“I’m fine. I’m tired. Shelly was just over here.” There was a soft pitter-patter against the screen door. Jaresh set the phone down carefully and snuck his way towards it, and let the cat inside.
“-glad to hear you’re doing okay because you know I really feel bad about the whole thing,” Mora was saying into the phone when Jaresh picked it up again.
“Yeah,” he said, blinked, watched seconds pass on his phone’s call timer.
“Do you want me to call back?” she asked in a deadpan, irritated voice.
“You’re not getting any pity, you’re just fishing.”
Mora exhaled with an audible growl. “Do you want me to go?”
“What are you doing? We’re done. You know it. You wouldn’t have broken up with me if you didn’t want to.”
“Unless I made a mistake.”
They were silent. Jaresh squatted and ran his hand over the cat’s spine. “There’s a good little fuck-o.”
“What?” Mora snapped.
“I was talking to the cat.”
“This is hopeless, isn’t it?”
“Look, I want to get along. You know that. I would like to see you again, let’s just…” Jaresh paused. For reasons he couldn’t articulate to himself, he was suddenly wondering if Mora was grinning. “Let’s just be real.”
“The hell,” she said. “Do you want to go eat tomorrow?”
Jaresh looked down and realized he couldn’t see the floor. The kitchen light was off. He turned it on.
“Alright.”
“What?”
“Nothing. It’s fine. Give me a call tomorrow.” He stumbled, righting himself just before falling. “Call me tomorrow. We’re too drunk to think right now.”
“Of course you are. Good night.” She hung up.
Jaresh sighed, and then shuffled into the living room and turned some music on.
That’s why when the lights came up/I told you no/I could not/I could not go with you/because there in your melody/were the same tail lights/I watched disappear last year/so I ran/so I ran, his speakers sang.
Harrison Faraday was a noisy smoker. When he exhaled, he closed his lips and blew the smoke outward with sufficient force that it appeared as a linear stream. When he inhaled, he would open and close his mouth several times because of some theory he had developed as a younger person about recycling smoke, about purifying it by mixing it with air, and when he did his lips would smack together, loud and wet. He could no longer recall the specifics of the theory.
He woke up at seven that morning and admired his girlfriend’s warm body for about five minutes before getting bathed and dressed. While he was eating breakfast, she bathed and dressed, waving goodbye to him before going to work. It was that kind of relationship, where once the week got going they didn’t have to give each other a have-a-good-day kiss. They just waved.
Harrison Faraday’s day got off to a poor start because of the used copy of Fifth Business he was reading. Whoever had given it to the thrift shop had begun underlining passages about halfway through the book. Not just passages – entire paragraphs, entire pages, and they had done so with a ruler so that each line was perfectly, jarringly straight. It threw off Faraday’s eyes because they were so confusable for part of the printing. Because the underlining was so common and so arbitrary, and there were absolutely no markings in the margins, Harrison’s mind constantly wandered, trying to assemble a reason why all those lines were there at all. Clearly, whoever had sold this book to the thrift shop, Fifth Business had changed his or her life.
Dunstable was about to discover Leola’s suicide attempt when the phone rang. This was a fortunate coincidence, because if Harrison had been reading for exactly two more minutes he would’ve had to answer the phone while crying over something embarrassing like a dramatic scene in a book. As it was, his stomach was tied tight – how he hated Boy Staunton, but how hard it was to keep lit a candle for the pathetic Leola! Class commentary escaped Faraday, who was not part of any working class, per se.
A teacher at a local school called and asked if he was in town, and he said Yes, and then the teacher gave a long, hurried but thought-out spiel to the effect of asking him to come to his classroom and talk about his work. He said, We have been particularly looking at your piece Making Fire, and Would you be interested in talking about that one?
Faraday had become preoccupied with ideas for a piece about magicians and repressed sexuality because of Fifth Business, but when he heard Making Fire he quickly agreed on the date and hung up the phone. Making Fire was his best work and he was eager to discuss it. Because he was young he did not yet understand the concept of being a one-shot artist.