On a Friday after work, Aiden drove from Ameribank to his friend Richard’s house, a
shorter trip than his regular commute because Richard’s house was in Redford, a
giant suburb in Blanket County that was closer to Ameribank. Richard’s parents were
gone on a two week vacation, and he wanted Aiden to come work on his resume
because he was trying to submit an application by the following week to a
company where one of their mutual friends was working (the week previous, Aiden
had emailed some high level edits on Richard’s resume which included: getting
it to one page, erasing all nonprofessional jobs, and “maybe rewriting” an
entire section whose first bullet point had begun with “managed large volume of tasks in many facets
of small business with high standard of quality and attention to detail in
fast-paced environment…”) Richard answered the door wearing his greyish black “Summer
Sanitarium” concert t-shirt which seemed to be in his total weekly rotation of
possibly four shirts and which had a large cartoonish drawing of a group of
forty assumed to be rock band members dressed in straight jackets.
“Good
afternoon Mr. Lin,” Aiden said walking into the house in a chipper mood that
felt solely derived by which day it was.
“Oh look
it’s the fancy business man,” Richard said.
“Well,
not all of us can live the high life,” Aiden said, smelling the marijuana smoke
halfway through the entry.
The first
room Aiden passed—what he figured was originally intended as a study at some
point—was barricaded in a square shaped pattern of bags and junk that looked
like it was close to two feet tall at its smaller sections and possibly five
feet tall in its peaks. The living area had more hoarding attached to the
walls, encircling a small area of space Richard had setup in the middle of the
room with a leather chair and his Playstation. Most of the junk in the living
room, 1950’s looking dolls, golden brown paperback books, and stacks of plastic
containers wasn’t coherently organized, and Aiden walked around the room staring
at things that seemed like they could merit taking, as if in Aiden’s future
there was an antique show he planned to eventually visit that was based around
eccentricity rather than value.
“I know,”
Richard said, sitting down in the chair and picking up his controller.
“It’s
bad,” he said.
“Are
there fish in that?” Aiden said looking at a fish tank in the corner.
“Umm,
yeah I believe so.”
“Stop.
Just put on blinders,” Richard said.
“I can’t
man. The last time I was here it wasn’t nearly as bad,” Aiden said, referring
to an indistinct time when Richard’s family had recently moved into their house
in Redford from their house in Tannis (which had been equally as cluttered) and
when the house had been relatively clean.
“Really?”
Richard asked as if he had no timeline against which to judge his current
situation.
“Yeah.
You’ve got to get out of here. It’s not healthy.”
“Yeah I
know. I need a real job first. That’s what you’re here for,” Richard said then
stopping, as if his concentration had been permanently broken, “Fuck, let’s smoke
a cigarette.”
The
outside area was a seven foot wide space of grass in between the side of
Richard’s house and the neighbor’s house but which looked relatively well kept.
“How
long are your parents gone for?” Aiden asked.
“Two
weeks.”
“Why
don’t we throw all this shit away, that’s plenty of time.”
“My mom
would freak out. That’s the whole point, she doesn’t want to throw anything
away.”
“What
about storage, do you have a storage facility?”
“Yeah,”
Richard said looking away, “I think a lot of that stuff is from storage.”
“Just—”
“Alright,
alright,” Aiden said, smoking for a minute without talking.
“What do
you want to do later?” Richard asked.
“I’m
down with whatever. We don’t have to do anything, I’m still technically broke,”
Aiden said.
“Probably
better, I need to finish that and get it over to Manny.”
“Do you
have any whiskey?”
“Yeah
Jim,” Richard said.
“I’ll
need some inspiration.”
“You
need inspiration for a resume?”
“Dude.
Definitely for a resume,” Aiden said as they walked back inside.
The top
of Richard’s section for “experience” was a three year long period in which
Richard had managed his parents’ investment account, bullet points about how he
had grown the account and taught himself high level investment skills— but
which was really a loosely based account of a huge swath of time in which had
Richard remained mostly unemployed. “I think you should really put your college
at the top. It looks good and it distract from….that Devil’s Advocate job,”
Aiden said, sitting on the couch with Richard’s MacBook. “With the Portern
International—I still can’t tell at all what you did. Walk me through a day.” Two
hours later, Aiden had drank somewhere close to half of Richard’s 750ml bottle
of Jim Beam and was sitting on the couch watching The Shining while Richard was
working at his dining table with what looked like an interested focus.
“I think
I’ve only seen this movie once,” Richard said, looking up from his computer.
“I’ve
seen it a lot…But I’ve been reading about Kubrick. I feel like I want to watch
it again just so I can pay attention to the shots. The cinematography.”
“So is
it like the hotel that drives him crazy or is he just crazy?”
“Um, I
think it’s both. The place drives him crazy. I think the same thing has
happened before at the place,” Aiden said, thinking in his head of the specific
scene with the twins and all the blood.
“But
also I think he’s just supposed to be crazy. I think he’s supposed to be like
every husband who just hates his wife for no reason,” Aiden said, causing
Richard to laugh.
“Well
yeah,” Richard said grinning, “that makes sense.”
“I think
we should go to Waffle House,” Aiden said fifteen minutes later during a
commercial break in the movie.
“I
thought you said you already ate on the way over here?”
“Yeah. I
did,” Aide said, thinking, “But I drank a lot.”
“Yeah
you did,” Richard said, lifting the bottle.
“We
could walk?” Aiden asked.
“No
we’re not walking.”
At the
Waffle House (which was a long enough drive to cause Aiden to say while looking
out Richard’s car window, “yeah, I’m glad we didn’t walk”), their waiter was
younger guy in a ponytail named Moses who introduced himself when he got to
their table with, “Hi my name is Moses. I’ll be your waiter, your
entertainment, and your social worker tonight.” Aiden and Richard both ordered
“All-Star Specials,” a combination of waffle, eggs, toast, hash browns, sausage—causing
Richard to complain about his decision as if he had been backed into a corner
on a chess board by Aiden’s decision to order the same absurd portion of food.
As they were finishing eating, an older couple sat down at the table behind
them and they heard Moses saying, “Hi my name is Moses. I’ll be your waiter, your
entertainment, and your social worker tonight.”
“I feel
like Moses used us,” Richard said, leaning back in his booth seat with a
dejected and tired face that looked like he had just finished some kind of
extreme athletic marathon event.
Aiden
woke up at 3:10 am on Richard’s couch with a lopsided headache—sneezing
continuously and reaching for a box of Kleenex that was conveniently located
right next to his head, affording him the strange ability to engage in a half
sleep-half sneeze rhythmic pattern that went on for about fifteen minutes
before he finally got up to get some water from the faucet which he poured into
a plastic Lord of the Rings chalice type glass he couldn’t tell was dirty or
not, but which after examining the very bottom of the cup repeatedly while
tasting the water as vaguely salty, he decided as “dirty” but not dirty enough
to get a new glass. Looking through one of the cabinets in the kitchen for pain
medicine, Aiden noticed himself growing excessively angry that “with all the
shit here, there’s nothing actually useful,” and moved into the bathroom where
he found a bottle of Tylenol that looked visibly ancient with an expiration
date of 2007 but which after looking inside the bottle and noticing that the
type of capsules did not match the picture of the tabs on the bottle—leading
him to assume that the bottle had been recycled and that the pills were
current— Aiden went ahead and ate three, partly wondering if something like
cyanide was dropping into his stomach. Back on the couch, Aiden took a hit from
Richard’s chillum, convinced for once that the marijuana would be beneficial
because of his headache as opposed to most times when he smoked, in which he
became overly introspective and analytical to the point of extreme discomfort
and paranoia. For the next several hours, Aiden watched television and surfed
the web, consciously deciding to not make an attempt to go back to sleep which
felt initially as a choice made from the fact that he had a splitting
headache—but eventually felt made from the fact that he was high and in a
really weird living space—reminding him of times when he had decided to stay up
all night when he was very young with friends, and how it would kind of make
him feel high from the intense sleep deprivation. Reading the internet, Aiden
found a comment on a forum that seemed especially bleak and depressing but also
kind of funny, and started copying and pasting it within itself until it
started to form into a life of its own:
The
only reason I'd forget my apartment is if I wanted to invite people over.
But
I work too much to make friends, so it's remained unfurnished.
I
make decent money and am typing this in my furnished apartment.
I
considered getting a couch once, but didn't see the point.
Just
another place to sit.
I
already have a chair for the year.
And
I've been living in this couch.
Sometimes
I get sad that I don't do anything aside from basically work or sleep.
But
then I go to sleep or start working and forget to sleep again.
Around
10am, Aiden and Richard drove to go get donuts and coffee. The overcast and
glowing morning sky—with clouds running in a concurrent egg shaped pattern
toward a whitish yellow light in the distance— looked to Aiden in his sleep
deprived head like it was pasted on to itself, or like if it were from a
painter’s perspective who was intentionally trying to make the sky look “far off”
but also dramatic and religiously themed.
“So did
you have a period of time that was like that half sleep where you can’t tell if
you’re sleeping or not?” Richard asked as they drove.
“No, I
closed my eyes for like twenty minutes at one point. But definitely was awake
the entire time.”
After
the donuts, Aiden and Richard went to a disc golf store and purchased some used
discs for twenty dollars at a store that was down the street from a course they
had never played which was located in the middle of a suburb north of Tannis
that Aiden thought looked exceptionally beige and repetitive except for the
inordinate amount of martial arts places and smoothie stores which seemed to
occur at a higher than normal frequency. The disc golf course was an amazingly
well maintained and pristine curvy field of grass that had a cement creek type
river running through the middle filled with a low level brownish green water
that looked unsanitary but not excessively littered, unlike most similar type
water reservoirs Aiden had seen around Tannis which were always dotted with
trash.
“This
entire thing is like perfectly mowed,” Aiden said as they walked.
“And no
one is out here,” Richard said, “There’s apartments right on this course and
nobody uses it. I feel like I’d do this every day if I lived there.”
“It’s
nice though right, the wide open space?”
“Yeah, I
feel like this is what we use to look at everyday…Back in the—” Richard said,
apparently referring to an anonymous set of ancestors.
On the
next hole, Aiden stood at the driving spot and paused, staring at the disc in
his hand.
“I feel
like I’m using a different disc than before.”
“It
feels like smaller in my hand now,” Aiden said.
“What?” Richard
asked.
“I
didn’t sleep very much,” Aiden mumbled for the tenth time in the day.