After the cars emptied out of the street, and the bottles of beer were drained into the sink, I still didn’t leave the party, and Maurice didn’t kick me out.
“I need a smoke,” he said.
“Have at it.”
We went into the garage. A shower curtain hung close to the door, separating a sink from everything else. We had to pass through the curtain to sit down. There was barely room for two chairs. My feet, at times, hit the car that Maurice was converting into a truck, and my elbows knocked against benches crowded with tools. I got the sense that one false move would bury me in muddy work boots, splintered baseball bats, greasy rags, and so much more.
“This must be what it’s like to sit in someone’s mind,” I said.
Maurice nodded and blew smoke. “Yep. Mine’s full of junk just like this.”
“Really? Like what?”
“Oh, you know…my neighbor playing his keyboard too loudly, and my pants feeling tighter even though I eat less, and someone obstructing my path no matter where I turn on the street. Get it?”
“Yeah,” I said. “But what’s wrong with that?”
“I should be smarter. It’s the same crap every day, every week – variations of it. And no matter how much I try to ignore it, this stuff bothers me. It’s petty.”
“Maybe you don’t need to ignore it. Maybe you should accept it.”
“Accept it?” Maurice scoffed. “How can I accept, you know, tighter-fitting pants when that means I’ll have to waste money on more? And what does that say about my health? Of course I have to live in a time when everything I eat makes me fat, with all the highly-processed sugars. I can’t escape it.”
Maurice went on for quite a while, I must admit, and I simply nodded along, maintaining eye contact. At first, I was interested in hearing what he had to say about his weight, since my own had troubled me at times, but then Maurice kept talking, raising his voice, punctuating his venomous thoughts about himself with drags on his cigarette.
When Maurice got so angry that I thought for sure he would hit me, just for a release, an idea flashed in my head: Tighter-fitting clothes allow for a wardrobe change, a makeover, a style upgrade, a new you.
Not too long after, to my astonishment, Maurice stopped seething and, in a very relaxed manner, said nearly the same thing: “But I can buy some pants that are more stylish. I haven’t gone shopping in a while, actually.”
I wasn’t sure what to make of it, so I sat quietly as Maurice shifted to another topic. Now he was going on about his keyboard-playing neighbor. As he plumbed the incredible depths of his anger towards the music, a thought crossed my mind: The neighbor has a cat. I bet he plays midnight lullabies to his little kitty.
In a short while, Maurice said, just like before, “But I’m going to believe that my neighbor is serenading his cat, and that they dance to the music like cartoon characters.”
I was curious, then, if the pattern would hold true when Maurice broached another subject. This time, he was telling me how much he hated walking around his neighborhood. Sure enough, when his vitriol towards pedestrians and cars alike reached a fever pitch, I thought: You live near so many people. You can’t feel alone. And you can see new places when dodging traffic.
As if on cue, Maurice said, “But I like taking different paths because I notice new businesses and parks.”
After that night, I always stayed at Maurice’s house after the cars emptied out of the street and the bottles of beer were drained into the sink.
While I sat next to Maurice behind the shower curtain in his garage, he talked, and I listened. And with everything he mentioned, he always reached what I had come to describe as “the turn,” or that moment when his anger was completely exhausted and he found a way to accept his situation. Because I would say the solution in my head, and not too long after Maurice would say the same thing, I thought that I might have some kind of hidden power, such as telepathy or reverse mind-reading. But ultimately, I realized that Maurice and I were simply more alike than different.
Since we made such a perfect combination, I never considered that Maurice and I might not sit in his garage like we usually did. But there was an evening when I didn’t hear the solution in my head and Maurice never said one. I was preoccupied with something that Maurice had said recently: “You’re not much of a talker, are you?”
The question repeated in my head as he spoke, rattling my understanding of the garage. I kept wondering if now would be a good time to interject. But I never took the leap into the conversation. Instead, I felt a resistance that was impossible to overcome. I opened my mouth. I shifted around in my chair. But I never said a single word.
I eventually stopped hearing Maurice, to the point that I had to ask, “Can you repeat that?”
“Never mind,” he said, stubbing out his cigarette. “It’s getting late, anyway.”
We had been sitting for less than an hour, but I understood. Off nights happened. I left him alone and looked forward to our next meeting.
When the night came, I noticed a figure behind the shower curtain, like a killer in a movie, which was one of my worst fears. I pleaded with my eyes to Maurice, hoping he would tell the person to get out, that the party was over, but he said, “Scott’s sitting there.”
The shower curtain was thin and clear, yet it was frosted enough to obscure the body. I could only see a pair of blue eyes, so striking that they would never allow this man, Scott, to truly hide.
I waved at him, but he didn’t wave back.
When Maurice started talking about his neighbor again, I felt like I was competing against the blue eyes, so I listened as intently as I could. However, something happened that I could have never anticipated.
Right at the point when I imagined “the turn,” a throaty “Ha-ha!” pierced through the shower curtain, sailing past me and striking Maurice like a knife to the heart. He paused, assessing the blow, and then continued speaking with a twisted grin.
“If my neighbor isn’t going to respect me, then I’ll return the favor. I’ll bang on his walls all night. I’ll tap on his bedroom window.”
“Ha-ha!”
“Even better, I’ll dust off my old keyboard and play the song back to him, one wrong note placed in front of a correct one, confusing him.”
“Ha-ha!”
“I’m not going to live my life always wearing headphones. I’m not going to drown out the world over one asshole.”
“Ha-ha!”
I kept waiting for “the turn,” but Maurice continued, sinking deeper into his rage, and all the while, the “Ha-ha!” grew louder, longer.
“Isn’t it funny?” Maurice eventually asked me.
“Sure,” I replied, not knowing what else to say. Of course, I wanted to tell him “the turn,” that he and his neighbor should play together, but I couldn’t get it out. I couldn’t bear a “Ha-ha!” directed at me.
Fortunately, my response provided a release. Maurice then said, “I guess it’s nice to have a musician living nearby.”
I wished that the night could have ended right then, but Maurice ventured into another topic. He was still upset about his tight-fitting clothes.
Once another “Ha-ha!” burst into the air, my thoughts drifted from Maurice to my fear of the shower, or more precisely, my fear of someone ripping open the curtain and mercilessly stabbing me. The physical pain, no doubt, would have been awful, but the worst of it would have been standing there naked, completely at ease, and then being attacked suddenly. Letting my guard down felt dumb, naïve. Then I was reminded of something Maurice had said on the first night: he thought he should have been “smarter” than he was. Being smart, in his case, meant ignoring petty annoyances. Yet, for both of us, we wanted intelligence to shield us. Instead of learning how to react, we wanted to avoid reacting altogether. Such numbness felt like the ultimate power, but it was impossible to attain. We simply had to cope.
Maurice was now talking about his body.
“You can see the fat here,” he said, pulling the skin on his jawline. He then patted his stomach. “And this gut. All thanks to Corporate America. Addictive, sugary food.”
“Ha-ha!”
“It’s either burgers or hardboiled eggs – that’s my choice.”
“There are plenty of choices,” I blurted out. “There’s a whole produce section, straight from the earth.”
Maurice froze. I froze too. What had I done? I thought. I wasn’t supposed to say “the turn.”
A “Ha-ha!” broke the silence, but even that felt off: more rote than cutting.
Still, it allowed Maurice to respond: “They’re covered in pesticides, so they’re not any better.”
“You wash them.”
“And they have been genetically engineered.”
“That’s natural breeding.”
Each part of “the turn” spilled out of me. I didn’t have a chance to check any of it.
“I can taste the chemicals,” Maurice said. “And it’s not natural to have apples that never turn brown.”
“Ha-ha!”
I didn’t know what else to say, so I remained quiet. Maurice shifted topics, and for the rest of the night, only the “Ha-ha!” followed his words.
During the next meeting, I spoke only once, right at the end. The blue eyes had returned.
The “Ha-ha!” reverberated in my head, repeating so much that I couldn’t help but rip open the curtain and say to the blue eyes, the face, the person: “Everything is real funny, huh, Scott?”
This moment was perhaps the equivalent of a stabbed corpse rising from the shower tiles and asking their killer why they were attacked. There was nothing to be gained from the killer’s response, only from the catharsis of having questioned evil, of having asserted oneself.
“It is,” Scott replied with a big grin.
Maurice agreed. “Life is just one big, fat joke. Nothing more, nothing less.”
I knew then that the garage would never be the same. But I didn’t know where I would fit into it, if at all.
The next time we met, Maurice launched into a tirade about walking at the market.
“Groups clog the sidewalks,” he said. “And any time I try to pass them, I manage to step into the one hole that catches me off balance.”
Immediately, I turned to the curtain and asked, “How do you deal with crowds, Scott?”
“I don’t,” he replied, laughing. “I always step into a hole when I try to pass someone.”
“Scott knows about the hole,” Maurice said. “You probably step into it and have a picnic. Isn’t that right, Charlie?”
“No,” I said. “I slow my pace in crowds.”
“Not everyone has time to waste.”
“Well, you sure waste a lot of time complaining.”
The room went silent. I waited for a “Ha-ha!” that never came.
Maurice took a long drag of his cigarette. “Look who’s talking.”
“What? Me?” I replied.
“You love hearing this stuff,” Maurice said. “You live for it. Don’t pretend that you’re better than us.”
“But it’s always the same. Don’t you get tired of it? Don’t you want to get over it? Isn’t there something better to worry about? And if not, isn’t there a way to be happy?”
“No,” Scott said, laughing.
I turned to the shower curtain, then back to Maurice. “That’s right,” he said. “Anyway, if I’m not complaining, then I’m spending all my time convincing myself that there’s no problem. But the truth is, there’s always a problem.”
I didn’t reply.
For the rest of the night, I sat quietly, listening to Maurice go on and on about walking, about the omnipresent hole. He never said “the turn.” He simply wore himself out, smoking an entire pack of cigarettes. The only other sound in the garage was the “Ha-ha!”
Ha-ha!
Ha-ha-ha!
Ha-ha-ha-ha!
The same thing happened in the meetings that followed. I didn’t say a word. I just sat beside Maurice while he talked and Scott laughed. I was helping Maurice in some way, I told myself. I was helping Scott, too.
Ryan Bender-Murphy received an MFA in poetry from the University of Texas at Austin and currently lives in Seattle, Washington. His fiction has appeared in 3:AM Magazine, Blue Mesa Review, Four Way Review, Maudlin House, and Red Rock Review, among other publications. Find him on Instagram at ryan.bender.murphy.