I'm Thinking of Ending Things(2)

WHY CAN’T I REMEMBER ANYTHING about the last road trip I took? I couldn’t even say when it was. I’m looking out the window, but not really looking at anything. Just passing time the way one does in a car. Everything goes by so much faster in a car.

Which is too bad. Jake told me all about the landscape here. He loves it. He said he misses it whenever he’s away. Especially the fields and sky, he said. I’m sure it is beautiful, peaceful. But it’s hard to tell from the moving car. I’m trying to take in as much as I can.

We drive by a deserted property with only the foundation of a farmhouse. Jake says it burned down about a decade ago. There’s a decrepit barn behind the house and a swing set in the front yard. But the swing set looks new. Not old and rusty, not weather-beaten.

“What’s with the new swing set?” I ask.

“What?”

“On that burned farm. No one lives there anymore.”

“Let me know if you get cold. Are you cold?”

“I’m fine,” I say.

The glass of the window is cool. I’m resting my head against it. I can feel the vibrations of the engine through the glass, each bump in the road. A gentle brain massage. It’s hypnotic.

I don’t tell him I’m trying not to think about the Caller. I don’t want to think about the Caller or his message at all. Not tonight. I also don’t want to tell Jake that I’m avoiding catching my reflection in the window. It’s a no-mirrors day for me. Just like the day Jake and I met. These are thoughts I keep to myself.

Trivia night at the campus pub. The night we met. The campus pub isn’t somewhere I spend a lot of time. I’m not a student. Not anymore. I feel old there. I’ve never eaten at the pub. The beer on tap tastes dusty.

I wasn’t expecting to meet anyone that night. I was sitting with my friend. We weren’t really into the trivia, though. We were sharing a pitcher, chatting.

I think the reason my friend wanted us to meet at the campus pub was because she thought I might meet a boy there. She didn’t say that, but that’s what I believe she was thinking. Jake and his friends were at the table beside us.

Trivia is not something I’m interested in. It’s not not fun. It’s just not my thing. I’d prefer to go somewhere a little less intense, or stay home. Beer at home never tastes dusty.

Jake’s trivia team was called Brezhnev’s Eyebrows. “Who’s Brezhnev?” I asked him. It was loud in there and we were almost yelling at each other over the music. We’d been talking for a couple of minutes.

“He was a Soviet engineer, worked in metallics. Era of Stagnation. Had a couple of monster caterpillars for eyebrows.”

This is what I’m talking about. Jake’s team name. It was meant to be funny, but also obscure enough to demonstrate a knowledge of the Soviet Communist Party. I don’t know why, but this is the stuff that drives me nuts.

Team names are always like this. Or if not, then they’re blatant sexual innuendos. Another team was named My Couch Pulls Out and So Do I!

I told Jake I didn’t really like trivia, not at a place like this. He said, “It can be very nitpicky. It’s a strange blend of competitiveness veiled as apathy.”

Jake isn’t striking, not really. He’s handsome mostly in his irregularity. He wasn’t the first guy I noticed that night. But he was the most interesting. I’m rarely tempted by stainless beauty. He seemed a little less part of the group, as if he’d been dragged there, as if the team depended on his answers. I was immediately attracted to him.

Jake is long and sloping and unequal, with jagged cheekbones. A little bit gaunt. I liked those skeletal cheekbones when I first saw them. His dark, full lips make up for his underfed look. Fat and meaty and collagenic, especially the bottom one. His hair was short and unkempt and maybe longer on one side, or texturally different, like he had distinct hairstyles on each side of his head. His hair was neither dirty nor recently washed.

He was clean-shaven and wore thin-framed silver glasses, the right arm of which he would absentmindedly adjust. Sometimes he would push them back up with his index finger on the bridge. I noticed that he had this tick: when he was concentrating on something, he would smell the back of one hand, or at least hold it under his nose. It’s something he often still does. He wore a plain gray T-shirt, I think, maybe blue, and jeans. The shirt looked like it had been washed hundreds of times. He blinked a lot. I could tell he was shy. We could have sat there all night, beside each other, and he wouldn’t have said a word to me. He smiled at me once, but that was it. If I’d left it up to him, we never would have met.

I could tell he wasn’t going to say anything, so I talked first.

“You guys are doing pretty well.” That was the first thing I said to Jake.

He held up his beer glass. “We’re helpfully fortified.”

And that was it. Ice broken. We talked a bit more. Then, very casually, he said, “I’m a cruciverbalist.”

I said something noncommittal, like “huh” or “yeah.” I didn’t know that word.

Jake said he wanted his team’s name to be Ipseity. I didn’t know what that word meant, either. And initially I thought about faking it. I could already tell, despite his caution and reticence, that he was exotically smart. He wasn’t aggressive in any way. He wasn’t trying to pick me up. No cheesy lines. He was just enjoying chatting. I got the feeling he didn’t date all that much.