Distance
“Man, I don’t know, I mean, just fuck her, ya know? I mean, I love ‘er but this is bullshit,” Jack said with his head in his hands.
Tonight, they were going to drink.
Ryan looked at him, “Dude, you’ll be aight. Just... let’s go out and see whats up. Have a couple drinks, play some pool, maybe sing a song or two, see what tonight’s got to offer.”
Whether for celebration or disaster, gain or loss, the natural human response to extremity is to imbibe. We spend so much time in the middle that the spectrum’s end disorients and befuddles us, we don’t understand it, we need it to be simplified. And it's not that drinking makes any problem less complex, in fact it often relegates them to the realm of incomprehensibility. However, in the congenially inebriated, personal issues lose their sharp edges and are ground down into smoother, more tolerable shapes by the removed perspective of time itself, by the ancient and important perspective that is: “fuck it.”
Jack just hated not knowing, not trusting the person he loved. Love was new to him, so he coveted and protected his love like an egg in a concrete room. He thought about her entirely too much and knew it, regretted it, even gave himself rules like, “don’t text her for three days” and even wrote them down so he wouldn’t forget. He and she were separable by a distance of around 200 miles and would be so for the foreseeable future. They were in different places, physically, emotionally, ideologically, but not, he thought, theoretically. In theory, why should distance matter so much, what could 200 miles of road exert over love? He recalled a song about mountains, valleys, and rivers and felt encouraged, generally. However, tonight was different. The distance, at first so ethereal and smoky, barely there at all, became steadily palpable. Began to take on physical form and spacial volume. It felt less like a road than a wall or better yet some kind of filter, influencing and changing every word and thought that he and she shared. Soon everything was seen through that filter; it was like a pair of sunglasses that had been welded to his head. It began to effect the way he viewed everything, his mood. When the sun went down and the world grew dark, he was unable to see (so thick were his shades) and so he stumbled around the city, this filter prohibiting him from making real connections with the human beings he happened to encounter on these stumbles.
Even later that night, when he happened upon a girl, interested, who had asked for his number earlier in the month, Jack could not bring himself to relate to her, to see her, in her proximity, as anything more than a threat.
Seattle’s University District was walking distance from Jack’s apartment. He and Ryan raised glasses and drank like war heroes, like survivors and escapists. Like World War One tunnelers. Playing songs, in the mildly (and lamp-lit, so that the light was directed skyward) illuminated room, recalling triumphs and inciting pride. Nothing, they say, is good or bad but thinking (fucking thinking!) makes it so.
They needed a third, a witness, to somehow validate their camaraderie and observe their lives and by so doing make them worth living. This third, Frank, their friend and ally was also wounded: his hand had recently required surgery in order to remain functional, and he, also in order remain functional, was taking pain-killers and was thus wary of alcohol. Although all observers alter the nature of that which they observe, the two men with problems differentiating the physical from the emotional couldn’t ask for a better vantage point than their friend Frank, who would abstain. When alcohol and opioids combine they do not stack on top of one another, adding up to some manageable level of intoxication, but instead multiply inside the body, making its movements and thoughts increasingly tangential. However the original imbibers saw no problem with multiplication, relying on their learned mathematical skills, and combined them fearlessly.
They spoke for some time, eschewing issues until they were more physiologically apt to handle them. Planning to visit a vaguely Irish bar on The Ave, to play pool, sing songs, and see what that bitch had to offer, they realized it was nine: a socially appropriate time to be seen drinking at a bar on a Thursday, and set out into the night to dissolve their troubles in corrosive liquid. Oh merciful blur! How thankful they were for fermentation, for chemicals and receptors! Oh the industry of intoxication, the business of displacement, the sweet knowledge that you can leave whenever you’d like! Jack thought, as he commented upon the dirty, damp street, about monks, hundreds of years ago, drinking away their fears in order to believe. Apparently, in the middle-ages water was unsafe to consume and so the general public relied purely upon alcohol for hydration. Whether priest or child you were given daily beer rations sufficient to blind moonshiners. Even more recently, in early industrial England, Gin supplanted water as the dominant bodily liquid, generating phrases, from actual events, like “throwing the baby out with the bath water.” Alcohol removes, creates distance between you and what you find important and allows you to conceive it differently, to understand it through more than just one, possibly harmful, lens. No perspective, however well-intentioned or helpful, can remain so through time, without becoming malignant.
The future is always hard to comprehend, but it becomes unbearable when what you thought of as being far away, categorically, actually butts up against you, nudging and winking, transcending theory. Theory almost never works out the way it’s supposed to. Perhaps it should be borne out of action rather than vice versa. What can theory lend to actual experience, what weight does any idea have in light of physical pain? Ideally (and this almost never happens) theory and action should work together. But alas they are like oil and water, spiteful siblings who get along when Mom’s watching but will not hesitate to poke at each other should her gaze wander. They must be kept in line, clearly defined and sequestered, so that they interact without combusting. Its fun to think there’s no difference between fiction and reality, but if there really were no difference, it wouldn’t be fun at all but necessary. And necessary things are almost never fun.
Jack’s eyes rolled and widened. “I just don’t know what to do, I know there’s something she’s not tellin’ me I can fuckin’ feel it, even through texts. Like she’s just putting me on, placating and appeasing me, like she’s too afraid to tell me to fuck off.” He felt monstrous, huge and imposing. Like he woke up in Hitler’s body. “Why can’t we just tell the truth, it’s so hard to say what you want from someone.”
Things can be hard to say.
Ryan kicked a beer can into the gutter. “I bet everything’s fine, man, just let it be for a bit, ya know? Stop trying to influence everything that happens and just let it be, let it just happen.”
The opiates made everything a little softer and made speaking a little easier, language’s impact being diminished. It seemed to guide now rather than to push.
Jack laughed in exasperation, “I know, yeah I know I should. But I’ve never been so good at doing what I should.”
Feeling lighter they began to skip, yelling ironies into the night sky and declaring their allegiance to nothing. Frank, unaffected by multiplication, observed them not unconcernedly, joining in on their revelry, but keeping a safe distance. This too, was felt, but not commented upon, by the revelers. In what, you may ask, were they reveling? And they would reply (knowing them) with laughter and derision. To ask that question is to misunderstand revelry, to try and comprehend death. To blame water for its capacity to drown. To blame Pain for pain. Just let it be.
Jack, Ryan, and Frank entered Finn MacCools and were drawn, as if by magnetism, to the bar where they ordered pitchers of golden salvation. Salvation in hand, they regrouped around a pool table, which took quarters, to try their hand at geometry. A fourth companion, Robert, and yet a third vantage point, who agreed to limit himself to only four or five beers and couple bumps of cocaine so that he could drive, joined them and completed the rectangle.
They felt like they understood distance, the relationship between points and goals, but could only occasionally bring to fruition what they imagined. The distance between two points, seemingly static, changes immeasurably with perspective and time. The longer you consider the queue ball, the more you try and control the outcome, the more likely you are to fail. Just line up and hit it. Do what comes naturally and you may even surprise yourself. It’s like this for many games; sometimes it is not care that matters (in fact care can be fatal) but how that care manifests in action, how that theory is practiced. Learning geometry aids the pool player pitifully in comparison to confidence and conviction.
The bar was lit darkly, colored particles streaming through stained glass; here red, there green, the light became mottled in the confined space, projecting a vaguely brown hue. Individually, the colors would remain beautiful and untarnished, but together they confused the issue, somehow making it easier to forget divisions and focus on combinations, which are much easier for the soul to absorb. The name was Irish, but there was nothing inside of it, nothing adorning it, to suggest that affiliation. The connections between things began making less and less sense, and distance seemed to fold up rather than stretch, becoming so easily visible that (despite their ability, now, to comprehend it) it could only be ignored for a few more pages.
God gave us two eyes so that we may gauge the depth of objects in space. We have used this mechanism so well that we can represent physical space within two dimensions, accurately and mathematically portray distance (from a single perspective) on paper. Some say that reason performs a similar emotional function, seen as the mind’s scale which weighs and judges and records our thoughts and feelings objectively. Reason however, like depth perception, is based in perception and is therefore lonely. Left to its own devices it can grow sickly and become underfed, leading to radical convictions and absurd beliefs. We all need a little help, now and then, to stay level and to understand distance for what it is.
As the pitchers were depleted their hollow parts felt refilled and they soon grew bored with pool’s microcosmic judgments and wanted to sing, or in some cases, to yell. The bar had a tiny bright stage in its least occupied corner, complete with a microphone and a machine that seemed to contain every lyric and audio track (separately) of every song ever created. They took turns, choosing songs for personal reasons but expressing them publicly. It is somehow so freeing to sing someone else’s words; you are not responsible for these words and they have a place in public memory, eliciting responses from listeners that, although diverse, are not exclusive. Listening to music is like swimming in the ocean; people thousands of miles away, unaware of each other, are swimming in the same water. Watch the ocean sometime. It seems both individual and sum at once; it moves together, it has a skin and bunches up and ripples into waves, propelled by forces outside of our atmosphere. It seems like one undulating being and yet any one of us could easily take a bucket of ocean home. After a time, however, it will only be salt water, poisonous.
Singing released in them endorphins which then combined with those already chemically present, kindling in them a euphoria, an ekstasis which allowed them, and Jack in particular, to forget all about distance. What does distance matter to the mobile, what good is depth perception or scales when dimension and weight are unstable? Trust and betrayal become trivial and we stop thinking in terms of Kant’s grid. One cannot put the universe in a box, not always. Memories flash within the singer like olfactory revelations, allowing him to view his life, not as buckets filled with salt water but as an Ocean, swelling and dipping with astronomical purpose.
Jack sat, sweating, in the friendly booth from which he was observed, the flush fading from his cheeks and the high falling back according to physical law, causing his vision to see-saw like a seasoned sailor returning to shore.
“Let’s get the fuck outta here,” Jack slurred, “Go home, watch some Netflix, fuck around. Tired o’ this pace.” I think there was supposed to be an “L” in that last word, but that's what he said. His friends concurred, Frank nodding vigorously. They payed, and then prepared to exit. Jack burped loudly in bodily protest as he finished his remaining beer, but the body knows nothing and so he told it to shut up. They piled into Robert’s car (he had exceeded his personally defined limits but felt alert enough and no one there would argue) and, because they still had a little life left in them, cranked up the stereo. Jack sat the passenger seat selecting Drake’s “0-100”; the windows were subsequently dropped. Singing along he closed his eyes, feeling how comfortable it can be to know the script. They stopped at a light, one car between them and the line. Suddenly a cigarette flew through the open window and landed on his lap. At this point in the night Jack could not be considered, by any observer, to be “aware”. He looked down at the cigarette, confused, and turned to Robert as if to say, “is this real?” and began turning back to the window. Before that question could be answered a fist struck his face in its bottom right quadrant.
Somewhere between three and five men were attempting to remove Jack and Ryan (who sat behind him) from the car, opening the doors, grabbing, and throwing wild, undisciplined punches meant more for chaos than for harm. Robert and the surgically incapacitated Frank, being on the car’s left side, were left physically unmolested (yet what mental trauma they may have experienced who can tell). Jack and Ryan, sitting on the passenger side, received the physical brunt of the attack. Shocked and confused, brought violently back into communion with distance and contact, they reeled and contorted their faces and acted instinctively. They fought back against the reality of their situation, using the very doors opened for their removal as weapons. Finally an independent thought manifested in Jack’s traveling mind and he yelled, “fuckin’ drive, dude!”
Five minutes later Jack stumbled out from the parked car, withdrew his phone from his pocket and called her. Stupid fucking decision. He was brought back from his vacation to find his house burnt down, the distance now so obtrusive, so apparent, that it was all he could see. He was hurt, miserable, not on the ocean’s shore but lost somewhere in its center, floating. The things that made their relationship so special were being called into question and he was suspicious (rightfully so) of their validity. She didn’t answer so he left a message. What he actually said doesn’t matter, but the distance was winning, possible futures were being destroyed, doors were closing. The message can be summed up like this: “I don’t trust you. I need you. Please. I love you.”
He ended the message in a salty pool of regret, walked up the stairs, shoulders shaking with the physical weight of emotion, and collapsed into the supportive arms of his observers. Wept. Curled. And finally slept. He dreamt of deserts, of electrons circling nuclei, of rulers and yardsticks, of light.
Fetal and purged he awoke to his phone ringing, seeing things, he thought, for what they were.
