Fiction By Eli Hopkins

It was Christmas Eve and everyone had already gone to bed, not because it was late but because it had been dark for hours and everyone had run out of things to say to each other. James sat on the bed in his parents’ guestroom holding a phone in his hand, trying to decide whether it was acceptable to try calling again. He tried to remember how many times he had called already, but couldn’t. Putting the phone down on the table next to the bed he tried to parse the knot in his stomach but nothing would help. He looked around the room. Nothing about it was familiar, though he had stayed here before. It wasn’t his room, and never had been. Somewhere he could hear a clock ticking, forcing into insoluble firmness this intangible moment.

Suddenly James picked up the phone and punched in some numbers. He listened to the ringing and hung up when he heard the machine pick up. He wondered where she was, what she was doing. Looking at his watch he was surprised at how early it was, and disheartened, knowing it would be a long time before he slept. He forced down feelings of jealous rage.

He considered going downstairs to look for something to eat, but the thought of food immediately turned his stomach. A drink would be better, but there was nothing to drink in the house—he had already looked. There was only a bottle of wine in his suitcase that he had brought along as a gift.

He tried to think of a song, or a joke. Anything to dissipate the cloud that he felt growing around him, becoming more and more solid, more like a prison from which even his mind couldn’t escape. It was still early enough to call someone up to meet for a drink, if they could find a place that was open. But as he looked through his phone for numbers of old friends he realized that he didn’t have any, anymore. James felt suddenly grateful he had no numbers to call.

The door to James’ room was nudged open and he quickly pretended to be absorbed in something other than himself, thinking that it might be his mother or father coming to check on him. But it was just Rosie. She was sixteen years old now and moved with obvious difficulty. He wasn’t even sure how she had made it up the stairs. Rosie moved slowly around the room, as if inspecting it, sensing change but apparently ignorant of James’ presence. He picked her up and put her on the bed and she looked up at him with eyes that were clear despite her age and licked his hand. She had still seemed like a puppy the last time he saw her, but she had been attacked by a deer the previous summer and was never the same again. James held the dog on his lap and ruffled her hair, feeling the dent on top of her skull that still made her shiver and whine when he touched it.

James picked up the phone and hit redial and listened to a few rings before hanging up.

Putting Rosie on the bed James stood up and paced around the room a little to get his blood moving. The fire would be mostly out by now and the house was chilly and James felt suddenly cramped and desperate. Going for a walk in the snow felt embarrassingly poetic, but there was nothing else to do. Besides, it had been more than a day since he had been able to smoke. Putting on his shoes and coat, James took the bottle of wine out of his suitcase and slipped it out of its wrapping and into his pocket.

As he crossed the threshold into the hallway James glanced back and saw Rosie sleeping contentedly on the bed.

The faint glow of a fire in the woodstove gave off enough light to see his way to the door, casting glimmering shadows and a warm domestic illusion that was uncomfortable and alien to James. Crossing the chilly quiet of the living room James thought about all the times he had spent as a child wandering through the old house at night looking for home—the feeling of home, or at least its concept. He was no longer sure if it was that he had never found it, or that he had found it and had for some reason rejected it. He carefully opened the front door—his parents were light sleepers—and locked up behind himself out of habit, though no one else ever did.

Outside it was beginning to lightly snow, the unusually bright sky diffusing through the snow like a million tiny lanterns, like a light that had been left on for someone that was on their way home. In the yard stubborn summer bulbs jutted bare stalks up through the soil and the light blanket of snow.

James was already away from the house and up the road when he realized he had no way to open the wine bottle. He considered going back but decided against it. Placing the bottle flat on the road and using a key James tried push the cork into the bottle but slipped and cut his hand. He held the hand up to see how bad it was. Not bad, he thought. After a few more tries he heard the dull pop of the cork falling into the bottle.  He held up the bottle to his lips until he felt calm, feeling the wine course bitterly down his throat and then took a cigarette from a pack in his pocket and managed to light it without putting the bottle down.

He walked west along the road, his steps lit by tall streetlights that blended in among the white blanketed pines. In the distance he could hear the hollow sound of cars crossing a steel bridge, a steady hum that began to reverberate in his ears as he drank more wine. At some point the sound of the bridge faded away and there was silence, but it was an empty, devastating silence. As the snow began to accumulate James could hear the crunch of his steps under his feet and the sound comforted him, gave corporeal realness to his movements. He was not drifting like a ghost.

James walked for a while, drinking and trying to think of nothing. But the road began to oppress him with its linear morbidity; there was only the road behind him and the road in front of him. A path opened to James’ left and he walked down it, abandoning the bright road and the flutter of snowflakes that were illuminated in the wake of the streetlights.

Struggling to negotiate the terrain, James held his hand with the bottle out to his side. Under the canopy of trees there was only the faintest glimmer of light, just enough to guide him toward something for which he had no name. Some kind of freedom, a release of tension, or at least a subduing of the storm inside himself. Eventually the path opened up onto another road, this one without lights but with an open vantage of the sky that seemed now like a chasm. It was the same way when he had flown out of New York a few days ago. She was there to see him off, but when he looked back at the terminal gate it was like he couldn’t see her. Her body was there, as it had always been, but it seemed empty, like the insides had already gone off someplace unreachable to him. It had been that way for months, he realized. But he hadn’t known it at the time. All he knew was that each day she felt a little further away from him, until one day it was like she wasn’t there at all.

As he boarded the plane it felt like he was leaving life itself, and a yawning gulf of loneliness opened up in the sky and swallowed him and everything he had known. And though the plane had soared up into the sky, up into that floating gulf, it might as well have been pushed off a cliff to fall forever. Might still be falling.

James tipped the bottle of wine up and felt the last few drops hit his tongue, already becoming numb from the cold. He wound up and hurled the bottle up into the sky and listened for it to hit the pavement and shatter into a deafening completion. But there was no sound; there was only the silence of the night and the slight creaking of trees, murmuring to each other. He felt a sudden disappointment and went to find the bottle so that he could try again. But he couldn’t find it, so he had to settle for breaking some sticks he found by the road. But the sound of the sticks breaking was not what he wanted; it was less the sound of fulfillment and more the sick resonance of brittle bones being crushed.

James knew he was drunk now, but the freedom he wanted was not there. There was only the tightness in his chest and the empty dark night everywhere. He began retracing his steps back to his parents’ house. They still didn’t know about he and his wife’s separation. He meant to tell them but when the moment came it was too difficult and he made up an excuse for her absence. He knew he had to tell them, but not for a while. Not until he knew what he was going to do now.

His hand had begun to ache and he felt suddenly tired. He fought the urge to sit down in the snow and simply disappear in the blinding whiteness.

As he approached the driveway he noticed that the snow had piled up several inches, covering his steps and painting the world like a false diamond. Feeling for his keys, James sat on an overturned bucket next to the driveway to smoke a last cigarette before going back inside into the stifling silence. A bitter sense of incompleteness overcame James and he stuffed a handful of snow in his face, just to feel the crystalline coarseness, to will himself to a different place. But when he looked up he was still there. Snow fell on his face and in the distance he could hear the sounds of cars on the bridge, coming and going.

James took his phone out of his pocket and with difficulty dialed the number. When the answering machine picked up he expected to hear his own voice telling him he wasn’t home, but the voice wasn’t his, and would never be again. He wasn’t home, and there was no place in the world that was home. As he allowed himself to lie down in the snow he felt a weight had been removed from him, but he immediately missed that weight. There was nothing comforting about the lightness he felt now and he knew that he wouldn’t sleep.