12
Jax woke up late. Twenty-eight missed calls from his wife. That number held weight and fear, the kind of fear that wakes you up—the weight of a nuclear bomb.
Fuck. Fuck! he thought.
Jax leapt out of bed with his half-dead phone in hand and jogged through the house, looking for Austin Daark the way a distraught child searches for their parents. At this point, he had missed enough calls to be able either to form a plan of action or to wait for the next call. Daark had to know what to do, and if he didn’t, then maybe he could give experimental advice whilst remaining the calm logical center he always was.
If you need anyone for long enough, you lose independence. You run to them with every problem as if they know both sides omnisciently. They become what Daark called “Pocket-Jesus,” a savior for the modern-day issues. In this case, Daark was the last person worth running to. He rigged the outcome in his favor with his little silver coin though it was never the coin that swayed Taylor Jax. The coin sped up her process of uncertainty by landing in the crack. If it had been heads or tails, she could dismiss it as a product of probability. Jax’s spacey vibe triggered uncertainty long before Daark introduced the coin. When you get a stubborn thought stuck in your head, you’ll take any sign as permission to pursue the thought to its ends.
Daark sat at the kitchen table, drinking a glass of lemonade. It wasn’t freshly squeezed or anything special. It was store-bought and drawing near its sell-by date. He hardly addressed Jax with a glance, the way you would glance at a ladybug crawling on a park bench. Jax should have suspected Daark had ulterior motives as it was rare to see Mr. Daark in a domestic, painting-like setting. He was too calm, too inviting, and Jax took his bait.
“Two more days till you see your family,” Daark remarked.
“That’s the least of my problems.”
“Don’t you want to see them?”
“Yes, but I’ve been happy here. At home, the smallest sounds wake me, but here I miss 28 calls with my phone on full volume.”
When Jax spoke to Mr. Daark, the previous urgency was missing. He acted as though Taylor would have to call a 29th time if she still wanted to talk. There was no longer a lingering Fuck! stuck in his thoughts. Now, he concealed. Now, Jax became the man Daark said he wanted.
“Will you call her back?”
“Of course,” Jax said, “don’t want to piss her off more, now do I?”
“Tuck your pride between your legs and waddle back to her, right?”
“I like my marriage,” Jax said, hardly parting his teeth.
“Do you now?” Daark sipped from his glass.
There’s never a good answer to that question. Simply asking that question implies the true answer is no, no matter what the response it. This question often comes up with struggling couples.
Oh, you love her, do you now? I mean, we both know you’re fighting every month if not every week, almost as a way of creating necessary drama. You’re bored, on the brink of cheating or breaking up, and your partner is a breathing body pillow.
But yeah, I believe you still love her.
Jax asked Daark what he was supposed to do next.
“What do you want?”
“I don’t know,” Jax said.
“You’re bored. You want life to be an adventure, like it is in the movies, but your life isn’t. your forefathers built projects on the weekends, but often times the largest adventure was a fucked-up saw cut or a missing hex-nut. People are running in public parks to get faster, in preparation of a danger that is never coming.
“Is this how you saw your life going, Jax? Did that kid from the fire want to go to school to be an accountant? Did he want to get married and have an only child because he hasn’t given in to the so-called necessary drama and have two? Consider where you want your life to go before giving your wife a call back.”
“What’s necessary drama?”
“It’s an action done almost entirely to spice life up. Sometimes it’s a child, a dog, or any old slight issue.”
“Do you have to be so cynical?”
“Hey, some people can be happy with it, but you clearly aren’t.”
The stress of the phone call moved to the back of Jax’s mind as he placed his phone down flat on the table and walked on out of the house. He felt the need to set his mind at ease before calling his wife back. There had to be something in life to find that was worth living for. Jax followed the gravel driveway out to the main road, and he hugged the side of the road as he walked, not knowing where he was going, just knowing that he was going.
Daark let his eyes trace Jax’s path without question. He assumed Jax had to comeback sometime, and if he didn’t, there were few better equipped than Austin Daark to hunt a person down. A small part of Daark nagged that Jax would not come back, that Daark had set him up for a life of backpacking and vagrancy. He pushed the thought away, deciding to deal with his issues at their appropriate times.
During the absence of Jax, Wyatt Emerson came in to eat breakfast and watch the news as a break from the morning’s work. Daark acknowledged him with a nod and drank his lemonade some more. They both tuned out of their current situations when the TV came on, and the TV became their world. No one really exists in the midst of entertainment. Everything else gets shut out unless a problem happens to be severely troubling—only then do the troubles override the entertainment.
Today, every news channel touched on a famous man’s death. It didn’t matter who it was; so long as the life in question was inoffensive, the public would deify them. They’d put the man in their stories on social media with a bland caption that could be applied to anyone. He inspired us all to be better. Or He inspired us all to follow in his footsteps. This man could be an athlete, actor, businessman, et cetera, and his death would be bandwagonned for attention. Look at me! they cry, I care! I care! But none of them cared longer than it took to make a post. They didn’t mourn. They “remembered” and tried to make the two words synonymous.
When the news ended, Daark and Wyatt talked about unrelated matters. The dogs consumed the chow in their bowls outside before running off to the edges of the property without a second thought of their master. Daark’s voice had an uninterested tone as he told Wyatt about Jax. To Daark, it was a precaution; Jax would be back, but if he came at night, the technical head of the house should know. Otherwise, Wyatt could potentially put a bullet-hole in Jax for trespassing.
“You sure he’s going to be alright on his own?”
“Adults need to be free and solitary. Jax’s death isn’t exactly my concern.”
Wyatt gave him a peculiar look. “Jax is a person.”
“And if he’s dead, his name will graze the top of a report. Reckless abandonment, or whatever Pax Co. calls it to deal out less money from their own pocket.”
“You really don’t care about anything, do you?” Wyatt bit his lip. “Oh right, possessions and loyalties are for weak people or something. That’s what you think, right?”
Daark chose to avoid argument by remaining silent and waiting for Wyatt to get back to work. The argument was beyond Jax or the land. It had more to do with what Wyatt lost when he was younger. Bad arguments are rarely about the topic at hand. Looming under Wyatt’s feelings was a thought that Daark couldn’t reach with ease. He could reach the conscious and surface of the subconscious, but if Wyatt didn’t directly think about the hidden thought, Daark could only graze it. For now, Wyatt seemed relatively docile, so Daark assumed that what he could only graze had to be repressed trauma. Repressed trauma didn’t interest Daark unless he was trying to torture a person.
Daark kept a passive eye on Jax. So far, Jax was headed into town, whether he knew the town was there or not. He could’ve been meandering aimlessly, and often times the lost and wandering have a way of finding civilization. Jax looked skyward pensively from time to time, and the thin clouds floated across the sky like tourists in a hotel’s lazy river.
What good are wives, spouses, children? He thought. What good is money without purpose?
Jax thought about a weekend that came a few years after he married Taylor. They shopped for dishes, silverware, and Tupperware, but Jax couldn’t get into it. So long as the plates weren’t radio-active, cancer-causing amalgamations, Jax didn’t care if the edges were smooth or decorated with grooves and dots. He almost thought to use paper plates forever. After all, when had he ever cared about carbon footprints and excessive waste? Porcelain was just another dish to wash. Tupperware implied a consistent need for storage or refrigeration. Silverware, well, plastic can’t beat metal this time. But either way, did he care about a day in the future when one of Taylor’s friends commented on embossed napkins? All these items had no value. They were decorative at best, and a boring small-talk conversation at worst. This was the adult life apparently.
Jax believed he had been happy then. Before office parties, Christmas parties, and neighborhood potlucks, Jax dipped his toe into the rest of his life. Simple things made him happy. He could walk around the neighborhood holding his wife’s hand, filling the hours with thoughtless bliss. Now, it was items and ownership that gave anyone happiness. Rather, it gave them status and ownership, but no one can ever be made truly happy by a cup that says #1________.
He thought of slipping on the wet floor at Pax Co. It created drama, tension, and stress; three similar words that made life interesting. Sometimes life required story-like arcs that resulted in temporary peace.
Necessary drama.
The world needed depression; it needed the lowest lows humanity could offer, or pure bliss wouldn’t feel so good. Children can enjoy little things because their lowest lows are dentists, vaccinations, and scraped knees. That’s why children have come up with the greatest games of all time, like tag. There are no stakes in tag, and the winning is based upon not-losing. There’s little shame in being It. It is a transitional position. You pass It on until everyone is bored of the game.
Hardly anything came through this section of the road except semitrucks and people on road trips. Jax would have walked in the middle of the road if the speed limit weren’t over seventy. At these higher speeds, you either heard the car coming up behind you, or you died walking in the middle of the road. He chose the roadside where the tallgrass and various weeds grew intertwined with one another. How long had he been walking for? More importantly. . . How far had he walked? Jax skipped through time, lost in the sea of his own thoughts. His thighs burned, his feet ached, and he did not know if he was out of shape or if he had gone too far. Either way, Jax marched on like a soldier.
Pain became nothing. That ache in his thighs was nothing more than a sign of living. He gratefully accepted pain. Pain could be ignored with enough willpower. The only issue came from spread. It began with the thighs and feet. Only an ache. Just sinusoidal, predictable waves of pain. In and out. In and out. Jax slowed down to a snail’s pace. He made headway still, but not much. Jax had no idea how far he’d come if anyone asked him. Miles. Kilometers. Either unit is only an imitation of distance. It was far, painfully far. Sweat caked across his skin in layers. His drying sweat felt like dirt, like he had been walking through a sandstorm.
He looked like a maniac, but it didn’t matter. No one could see him anyway. No one could see the sweat stains that were shaped like bays and harbors. No one could see his ratty nest of hair, matted in some places, sticking straight up in others.
The pain moved to his calves and spasmed in waves so large that they would’ve looked like blades of grass on a graph. In-Out-In-Out-In-Out! He hobbled forward like a crippled man or a zombie, no longer thinking. He could only act on short blips of feeling and pain. Jax reached for his calves to massage them in vain. He took one wrong step, and before he knew what to do, Jax laid horizontally on the ground, incapable of any further movement. His heart beat rapidly in his chest; he was closer to death than anything else. The sun beat down on the boiling pile of flesh that was Aaron Jax.