Sometimes All the Time

The
moon tonight was bright enough that it cast shadows, the most distinguishable
of which was the lifeguard chair, elongated and stilt-like against the
blue-hued sand.

Jonah
improvised constellations from the airplane warning lights atop the
far-off buildings and thought about how much he missed or didn’t miss
Jenna. Also, he wasn’t sure whether he felt big or small. Big because
he felt somehow trapped, shrink-wrapped from the inside, in substance
kind of like the electric humidity before a storm, but the emotional
equivalent of this and confined in his throat. Small because he was
observant: he could see the sky and see it was large and had learned
that the universe was even still expanding, whereas Jonah knew he’d
stopped growing two years ago. Physically he was average – a little
hairier than most people, but he shaved, usually, anyway.

Behind
him, in the sand, Rabbit was rolling on his back on a dead fish.

"Don’t,"
Jonah said.

"Okay,"
said Rabbit, in his way, and went on rolling.

Water
seeped into Jonah’s sneakers, and he took two steps back from the
shore, automatically, seeming not to have noticed, even though it was
November and the lake was cold. He shifted his weight from one foot
to the other in a semi-conscious dance. Astronomy vexed him. He’d
never been able to superimpose mythical images onto the skeletal-at-best
configurations of stars, could not see crustaceans or heroes or bears
or measuring cups. And he couldn’t navigate by them, the stars, instead
using highways and numerical and alphabetical street names, and feeling
useless for it, somehow ineffective or inadequate. He dreaded Sunday
night’s field trip, when his class was going gazing down by Minnehaha
Creek.

The
coldness of his feet reminded him he missed Jenna, but that was maybe
only because he was waiting for her to come over. He didn’t like the
thought that she might ever sleep next to someone else as easily as
she had next to him, and with the same half-smile and even half-consciousness
that allowed her to answer the questions he asked her when she was dreaming
("Did anyone call?" "Where’s my wallet?" "Are you asleep?").
He was pretty sure that she hadn’t wanted to break up with him, and
he hadn’t wanted her to, but both had understood or at least sensed
that, after he’d slept with Becky, and after Jenna had found out by
reading about it in Jonah’s astronomy journal, ending their relationship
was somehow obligatory. Everything now seemed to be a continuation of
this instinct: propelled by a fiercely irrational force, they spent
long, damaging hours together, speaking in whispers, not knowing why.
Actually, no – this instinct had started earlier, probably when Jenna
had first read Jonah’s journal: she had been compelled to, Jonah knew,
because she’d sensed there was something in there that she shouldn’t
know but had to.

Maybe
their entire relationship was based on contradicting their impulses,
from the summer nights in high school when they dry-humped in his Honda
Civic, always a little ashamed; to staying together through college,
wondering at their missed opportunities with other people, and occasionally
sating their curiosities by making-out with drunk strangers in fraternity
basements; all the way to the present – right now Jonah wasn’t quite
sure he wanted to be with her, which made him confident that he should
be.

"What
do you think of all this, Rabbit?" he said. He never had to explain
his thoughts to his dog, because he knew Rabbit could read his mind,
and obediently listened to his inner narrative, following it as pointedly
and with as much interest as he followed the scents of squirrels.

"Jenna
never drops the leash," he said. "But Becky won’t let me smell
her crotch. I feel like I don’t know her, is what I guess that means."

"She’s
allergic, is all," Jonah said. "Jenna let you smell her crotch?"

"Well
her underwear was always everywhere."

"Oh."

"Your
crotches smell the same, actually. Smelled the same."

A
month from now, the lake will be frozen-over, and the snow will be cleared
from its surface and a hockey rink put up near the buoys that Jonah
was absently focusing on. He thought he might feel a slight throbbing
in the back of his throat, and was reminded of the time Jenna got the
stomach flu just after they’d moved in – he’d caught it from her,
and it had been kind of nice, he remembered, to lie in bed together
for a week with the same sickness, their breath smelling like Tums.
From his jacket pocket he took a Percocet. Seeing that Rabbit was watching,
he took a bone-shaped chicken liver treat from the same pocket, and
tossed it to the dog. Suddenly, the stars – or the lights on the buildings,
maybe – clustered into shapes.

"You
probably shouldn’t have slept with Becky," Rabbit said. "That’s
the way it seems now, at least."

"I
know," said Jonah.

"And
so you shouldn’t be still sleeping with her."

"But
she’s on Prozac or something."

"Still,"
Rabbit said. Then he did that thing where he licked his own teeth.

Later,
Jonah will think more abstractly about emotions in general, and how
maybe if emotions didn’t have names we would confuse one for another,
which would eliminate probably a lot of sadness, but a lot of happiness,
too. No one would be able to say, ‘you’re making me angry’ or
‘you’re making me sad’ – just ‘you’re making me tremble’
or ‘you’re making me cry.’ We’d go around with our chests throbbing
and our throats wetly clogged up, touchy as lightning rods but not knowing
why.

He
turned around and they began to walk home, Rabbit holding his leash
in his mouth.

"Jenna’s
coming to get you tonight, just so you know," Jonah said.

"I
hate that," said Rabbit. "Her mom makes me sleep on the porch now.
I don’t know if I’m inside or outside. I pee and I get yelled at,
but there’s all those smells."