Sinner

Probably it would have been insufferable if he hadn’t also had a very comfortable-looking sofa and an orange bust of Beethoven and all of the woodsided old speakers he’d brought to the very first episode.

“I like this place,” I told him, because the way he took his shoes off and walked around barefoot and proud through the house made me think he’d like to hear me say it.

“I do, too,” he said.

“You’re dating Star,” I said.

“I am.”

“She got hot. How long’s that been going on?”

“Two years.”

“Wow.”

“You were gone a long time, Cole.”

I abandoned the bag of beans in the kitchen sink and we headed back outside and downstairs to wait for Star. As we stood by the lattice overgrown with red roses, he explained how he’d bought this house with his last NARKOTIKA advance, and now he gave the money to Star to pay bills and make sure the taxes were sorted out and he worked band gigs when she said they needed more to keep things on the level.

“She takes all your money?” I asked. A hummingbird zoomed by my head.

He looked at me. “I give it to her.”

Basically, what was happening was this: I had gone away for almost two years, and when I came back, Jeremy had grown up and gotten a house and gotten happy — no, he’d always been happy, now he was just happy and with someone — and I had instead come back and become myself as I always was.

My face throbbed, or my heart did. I was so tired of being alone, but I was always alone, even with people around me. And I was so tired of being surrounded, but I was always surrounded, even when I was by myself. There was so much talk about how everyone wanted to be goddamned special. I was so tired of being the only one of my kind.

“I don’t think I can do this,” I said.

Jeremy didn’t say what? He just rubbed the edge of the dusty, busted Mustang where it poked out into the evening sun.

The hummingbird I’d seen earlier zoomed by again. It paused by the roses, but they weren’t what it was looking for.

“I don’t think I can go back out on the road. I don’t think I can take it.”

He didn’t answer right away. He climbed onto the hood of the old Mustang and sat on it crosslegged. The bottoms of his bare feet were very dirty and he wore a hemp anklet, which he plucked at. “Are we talking about tour, really?”

“What else would I be talking about?”

He said, “Is it really going on the road you can’t do? Or is it being you?”

I looked at the grass at the edge of the tiny, sun-bitten yard.

Tire prints marked the gravel and dirt. Star had taken the pickup with my phone in it. Possibly not taken. Possibly Jeremy had given her the keys.

“Cole, I think we have to talk about this.”

“You don’t want to know, Jeremy. You really don’t.”

“I think I already do, though.”

I stared off down the dusky street. Way, way down the street, a little boy was tooling around on a faded blue bicycle.

What a safe place this neighborhood seemed like. It was somehow more like California than the rest of L.A. More like the land itself. Like the dry stucco and faded wood houses and the dust-covered cars had slowly been pushed up from the dry landscape by generations of heaving quakes. It wasn’t that I liked it better than the rest of Los Angeles. It was just that it seemed like it required less work to keep it looking like this.

It seemed like a place that wouldn’t notice you as much if you had a day off or got old. It seemed like a place where it might get dark at night.

Jeremy said, “Do you know what makes it bad? It’s that you do it alone. It’s that you lock yourself in a bathroom. It’s not the thing itself. It’s that you make it secret. It’s that you only do it when you’re upset.”

I didn’t move. I just kept staring at the little boy making uneven circles at the end of his short driveway. I felt as if the world was being crumpled like paper around me. Even if I could figure out how to open the sheet back up again, it would always be wrinkled.

“There are other ways to be unhappy, Cole. There are better ways to cope than just pulling the plug on your brain.”

My voice was rougher than I expected it to be. “I’ve been trying.”

“No, you’ve been happy. You haven’t had to try until now.”

I didn’t answer. There was no point arguing. He knew me as well as I knew myself. He’d played bass for my thoughts for three albums.

“Victor’s dead,” I said.

“I know. I guessed.”

“It’s my fault. The whole thing. I got him into it.”

“Victor got himself into it,” Jeremy said. “We were all kids from New York. I didn’t follow you down any rabbit holes.

Victor would’ve gone without you.”

I didn’t believe that. I was very persuasive.

“How do you do it?” I asked.

“I just live, Cole. I don’t go away in my head. I deal with the crap as it happens, and then it’s gone. When you don’t think about it, it lives forever.”

I closed my eyes. I could still hear the little boy riding his bicycle down the street. It made me think about the boy on the roof, the one who had crashed his plane because it wasn’t about the landing, it was about the flying.

“I always thought you’d be the one who died,” Jeremy said.

“I kept thinking one day I’d get the call while I was sleeping. Or I’d come to get you in your room before the show and I’d be too late. Or I —”

He stopped, and when I turned to look at him, still crosslegged on the hood of the Mustang, his eyes were shiny. He blinked, and two tears shot down his face, fast and shiny as mercury.

It was possibly the worst and best that I’d felt in my life. I didn’t know what to say. Sorry? I hadn’t meant to hurt anybody else?

“Nobody told me it would be this hard,” I said.

“Why is it always harder for you?”

I shook my head. I didn’t even know if it really was harder for me, if I was just a flawed model. I wiped my nose with my arm and pointed to the Mustang beneath Jeremy.

“That’s a thing,” I said.

“Yeah,” Jeremy said, his voice much different. “Yeah, it conveyed with the house. It came with a trash compactor, too, but Star broke it.”

We both sighed.

“There she is,” said Jeremy as his pickup truck appeared at the bottom of the hill. It stopped beside the little boy, and the kid came over to talk to Star through the driver’s window. I saw her long brown arm hanging out of the side of the truck, bracelets hanging around her wristbone, and I saw her hair hanging in hanks on either side of her face, and the kid on his busted bike keeled over talking to her with his hair all scruffed up.