Please Come Home to Hamngatan

Please Come Home to Hamngatan

I.
When Jenny left him, Ian had one scene left to write in his play. It was his graduate thesis, and she painted her nails in the bathroom before she did it. He could taste the polish, like some overripe fruit in his mouth before she even got into the living room. He was sitting cross legged on the wood floor, making edits to the first act with a blue pen.

Without looking up at her, Ian said, “I'm not sure about the dialogue here, would you mind reading through it with me?” and she said, “I'm leaving.”
II.

The man she left him for was named Robert. He was twenty three and loved records in a measured, delicate way, unlike most boys his age loved anything. He built his own turntables from kits he ordered in the mail and every morning, a half an hour before he needed to be up, he would get out of bed and put an album on. In bed again, he would sleep til the needle sung static to him from the smooth center of the disc.

Before she met him, Robert listened to one side of a record every morning. When she started sleeping over was when he started flipping the records over and playing the other sides so there was something to listen to while he made breakfast and she dozed in bed. It became one of her favorite things: watching, through half opened eyes, as he picked up the record and spun it between his two fingers, before putting it down on the turn table and dropping the needle.

III.
When she left, she didn't take anything. She had hardly anything at his place as it was. Still, Ian spent most of the day considering the things that remained. Her pipe, a few books, a binder full of CDs she never seemed to play anymore. When night came, he set them all outside to be collected with the garbage. Then he tried to drink himself to death. He chose gin, and barely made it through a quarter of the bottle before giving up, and falling asleep on the couch. At first, he dreamt of her, wearing the same clothes as when they first met, feeding some strange animal down by a lake in their home town. Then he dreamt he pulled out his hair, all at once, just by running his hand through it.

In yolky light of morning, he woke hungover, thinking he might have come up with the last scene for the play. He stumbled to his bedroom, wincing against the sound of his own footfalls, in pursuit of his notepad. It was not on his side table. He emptied drawers and tore through binders full of student work, occasionally stumbling under the weight of his nausea and the pain his head and, still, the manuscript was undiscovered. He cancelled the class he was supposed to teach that afternoon and spent the day laying on his hardwood floor surrounded by the contents of his cupboards watching the ceiling fan spin.

IV.
Three days later, he called her up. Their conversation was short, almost nonexistent. He was walking to the liquor store because he had finally finished off all the booze in his house. She answered the phone on the third ring with a hello, her voice lost somewhere crowded that echoed with laughter.

“Jenny?”

“Who is this?” she asked, the cacophony overtaking most of her voice. Ian swallowed hard at the sound and shook his head, looking down at his feet. Hung over for the third day in a row now, the sky pinwheeled and he rubbed his free hand over his puffy eyes.

“You sound lost,” he said.

“Ian? Is that you?”

“Are you coming back?”

“Ian? Ian, why are you calling?”

“Did you take my play?”

“What? No, of course not. Why would I take--”

He hung up, and vomited on the sidewalk.

V.
Cancelled two more classes, spent two days languishing in his house with eyes huge and glassy like fishtanks. Soon, there was a call saying he had to go in to teach or the graduate program would stop funding him. So, on a Thursday, ten minutes late, he showed up and paced the room like he had never seen it before. He blinked silently at the fluorescent lights. A few of the kids had already left and the ones who were still there shrunk away from him, exchanging glances like frightened animals. He studied their faces, trying to remember how he felt three years before, when he was sitting where they were. It was all gone, and he felt disfigured, washed ashore.

Standing there, with all of them watching him, he called her again. His fingers shook as he dialed the numbers, and he thought of all those times in which she had been the one to pump the water out of his lungs. Now, her voicemail picked up after the second ring, and the frightened kids watched as he sat down on his desk and sighed into her voicemail that she needed to fix what she had fucking broken and then when he hung up the phone, he stared at them as if they had sent him to the gallows and dismissed class.

VI.

When Jenny said she was leaving, he wanted to be tortured with the details. They were in the living room still, but now they were sitting on the couch. His hand was clasped in hers, set in her lap, but she wasn't looking at him. Her gaze ran past him into the twitching second hands of a clock on the wall.

He said, “Start from the beginning, I want to know why this is happening.”

She just shook her head.

“It's so complicated.”

“I want to understand,” he said.

“No, you don't. Why would you?”

He just stared at her.

“You just know me too well, Ian,” she continued, and he got up from the couch and walked the room like a tightrope, feeling as if the oxygen was leaving his chest directly from his ribcage. There was a sadness in the way she watched his movements, but it was muted by a more obvious exasperation.

“When did that become a problem?” he asked.

“I don't know,” she said. “It didn't happen all at once.”

“But, isn't that what love is supposed to be? Understanding someone. Loving them in spite of all their bullshit.”

She shook her head, grimacing softly.

“The only people who really love you are the people who completely misunderstand you.”

“That's some kind of contradiction.”

“Maybe,” she said, while he walked over to one of the walls. She watched him spread his fingers over the pattern of the wallpaper and she bit her lower lip before continuing

“I think it will make sense when it happens to you.”

“No, it won't.” he said. “Or, at least I hope it doesn't. That's not wisdom that I want to be a part of.”

“I never called it wisdom, Ian.”

He pressed both of his palms against the wall, as if he needed it to steady himself, and then let his forehead droop down to meet it. After a long time, he spoke, without moving.

“Do you want to know what my play's about?”

“I thought you wanted to wait til it was done.”

“Not much point in that now.”

“No, I guess not.”

“It's about that night we spent in the airport, trying to fly out to my Dad's funeral. That, and the night before, when you took that train back from your conference in Boston just to sit with me and watch TV.”

She flashed him a small smile. Slowly, she said, “that must've been hard to write. You didn't say much of anything that whole time.” She let the joke hang for a second, before returning her gaze to the ground.

“Jenny.”

“I'm sorry, Ian,” she interrupted. “Really,” and then she hesitated a moment before getting up and walking to the kitchen to pour herself a glass of water.

VI.
Two weeks later Josh, a classmate from school, wanted to have a party because he had finished his dissertation. Ian offered up his house. He was tired of quiet, and wanted new footprints to obliterate the traces of Jenny that were still left everywhere. There was more company than expected. By midnight, the house was suffocating with the burgeoning crowd.

A little past one o'clock Josh found him in the kitchen with Stephen in tow. Stephen was fucked up on something: he kept letting his jaw go slack, and whenever he realized he was staring into space he would let out a strange laugh that seemed disconnected from all traditional concepts of sound: two sharp chips, and a long quavering whinny.

Josh was in the middle of a sentence when Stephen interrupted, practically shouting.

“Hey, where's your girl, man?” he said before letting out another ethereal giggle.

Josh winced hard, and pushed Stephen away. He disappeared into the crowd nonchalantly, as if he had never been there.

“I'm sorry about that, dude. He's been barred out all night.”

“Hey don't worry about it,” Ian said, and excused himself to make another drink.

VII.

He did some lines with a pretty girl in the bathroom, and she wanted to fuck after that. She pushed herself up onto the the faux marble counters, placed his hands on her thighs, and smiled the type of smile dental insurance buys. His finger was in his mouth, rubbing the powder around his gums. The bulbs above the mirror were huge, gaudy things and he had to squint just to look at her. Her eyes and hair were this chestnut color, but the rest of her was white as milk straight from the fridge. She took off his clothes and he asked what her name was and she said, “Are you feeling it, yet?”

They had met up in the kitchen because he was leaning against the fridge and she wanted a beer.

“You look out of place,” she said.

“Funny thing is, this is my place.”

Outside, they had shared a cigarette and when she asked him what he did for a living, he said he wrote plays. But in the bathroom, with her nipping at his lips, suddenly all he could think was movies. As she moved against him, he closed his eyes and imagined those panoramic screens crackling in silver light. He thought of taking her to a drive in on some clear night in early autumn. He would need a different car, something where you could take the top down. There was probably great tactile satisfaction to be found in putting the top of a car down. The next thing he knew, the girl had pulled off of him and she was straightening her skirt and putting up her hair in the mirror. He blinked a few times, threw the condom in the toilet and put his jeans back on.

“Do you think you'll write me into one of your plays?” she asked, putting a bobby pin in.

“Sure, maybe,” he said. “But the thing is, it's a comedy.”

“So?”

“So, you seem like a little more of a tragic figure, don't you?

She paused for a moment, looking at him in the glass of the mirror, and bit her lip.

He coughed a little and said, “Hey, sorry. That was a joke, sorry.”

The girl shrugged her shoulders and moved toward the door.

“I'll see you around,” she said, and slipped back into the noise of the party. The door closed and the boy stood looking at it.

He rubbed his nose and said, “Yeah, yeah. We should catch a movie sometime.”

VIII.

He woke up in the morning, with the sun trapped behind clouds so far up that the whole sky looked like the eye of some dead animal, gone milky. At first he didn't know where he was. His cheek was pressed against cement, and he could feel his pulse in his temples like a door being slammed closed repeatedly. It took him several minutes to sit up, and when he did, he looked at his surroundings with dull resignation for several minutes.

He rose like a kid trying to find his footing on roller skates, some sick vertigo welling up in his stomach. When he got his balance, he walked as quietly as he could to the edge of the block. The face on his watch was missing, and he could taste blood on his teeth. He fished his cellphone from his pocket, several of its number keys missing and a hairline crack twisting through the center of the screen.

Josh answered his call on the third ring. From the sound of the call, the party was still going on.

“We thought you were dead.”

“Not quite,” Ian coughed. His voice was gasoline and tinfoil. “Can you come get me? I'm in a scrape.”

“Where are you?”

“Outside of Jenny's.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah.”

“I'll be right there.”

VIII.

As they pulled onto the highway, Josh asked if Ian needed the music down.

“It doesn't feel like a hangover,” he said, “I don't know what it feels like.”

Josh nodded and continued driving, drumming his fingers on the wheel, occasionally looking away from the road to inspect Ian. He was staring at the visor, contemplating lowering it so he could inspect himself. He hardly had the heart. When he did, he surveyed the damage with the stoicism of a saint. A gash above his eye, dried blood all over his mouth and nose, filling up the cracks between his teeth.

“Christ,” Ian breathed.

“Do you know what you took?”

“Just some coke, from this girl. Jesus, it had to be cut bad. Either that or it was laced with something else. I can't remember anything.”

“Nothing?”

He shook his head, and tried to take some of the stains off his teeth with his finger. It was no good.

He said, “It just feels like I spent the whole night staring into a light bulb.”

Josh, nodded as if he understood. The roads were slick and gave off steam in the summer heat, and they passed back from Jenny's neighborhood and into Ian's where there was so much more brick for foliage. Ian stared at the window.

After a long time, Josh asked Ian, “How's your play coming man?”

Ian sighed softly. He reclined his seat and, staring at the roof of the car, said, “There's not a play anymore. Either that, or I'm starting over. I don't know. I just gotta get out of town for a while.” Ian closed his eyes, Josh turned up the music and they folded into the highway.