This Thing Between Us

by Gus Moreno

People cannot bear to think there are channels of human experience that are closed off to them, that they’ll never know. People want to believe their experience is universal, that nothing’s outside their scope.

What they say: call me. What they mean: it’s your responsibility to let me know when I have to care.

But we still worked together somehow, like two different animals that learned to hunt as a team. You were you and I was me and there was this thing between us.

Drums cracked, and projected on the screen in my head was this: She’s gone, she’s gone, she’s gone. I could feel your absence like a pulse running up and down the right side of my body where you were supposed to be sitting, your head on my shoulder.

I met your parents, met your friends. We fought. We made love. We each quietly hoped the other would grow out of their failings but learned to talk about it when that didn’t happen.

You broke that cycle for me. Thank you for that. Second to I love you, that’s the thing I keep wanting to say. Thank you. Besides I’m sorry.

I’m supposed to move on, get over it, let go. But it’s like having an arm amputated and complaining that you can still feel the phantom hand balled into a fist, and it hurts, and they all stare at me like monks in their Zen gardens, and say, “You have to let go.”

Plant something and watch it grow. Except it doesn’t feel that way. No journey, no thing to endure. It feels like a corruption of genes. A double helix scrambled in a petri dish. A puppet forced to work on crossed strings. Those trees that manage to grow around power lines and stay mangled forever.

Who cared, now that the worst possible thing I could ever imagine had already happened. What was worse than burying you, living in a world where I couldn’t see you, where I was locked in this basement existence? There was nothing I wanted to know anymore, except whether killing myself would bring me to you.

And I didn’t want to synthesize it into something else. I just wanted to stay with the solid thing, your absence, which in its ethereal quality was more real than the other stuff.

A pink-haired girl on Etsy was selling shirts of a tweet you once wrote: Fuck demonizing immigrants. It was the millennial version of those cultures that exhumed a dead person’s corpse and paraded it through the streets, dressing it in new outfits, posing with it for photos.

I wanted to forge something big enough to kill the whole world.

In the rearview mirror I saw the red glow of the brake lights on the blacktop, and out of the dead night something scrambled, like an animal, into the red. It was crawling on all fours, except its legs were spread out on either side of its body like a spider. A spider the size of a person. Its hind legs were covered in denim, something white flapping under its belly, what could have been the cook’s apron. His eyes had completely fallen into his head, leaving two yawning gapes.

An owl flew over the cabin and swept into the tree line. I stepped aside for you to see and then remembered you were dead.

smiled and said something about how reassuring that was, but inside I was ripping the wallpaper off my skull.

At the same time, I waited for my own dreams. By all means, brain, delude me.

The details bloomed all at once, not the way a story usually unfolded, but beginning, middle, and end all at the same time, the way stories happened to God.

Our presence in the living room, though, made the first floor feel soft, the corners of the rooms rounded off. Upstairs, the shadows still clung to the corners like cobwebs, like the dark was the same as heat, rising to the top. At night the rooms felt sharp, lifeless, and if they were filled with anything it was that invisible hostility a person felt in their room after waking up from a bad dream.

He popped back up and his snout was powdered with snow. Half of him was buried when he stopped prancing and hunched over to pop a squat. See you in the spring, poop.

It meant sooner or later I was going to lose you again. No matter how deformed I felt, or how hobbled I was by your absence, with time I would develop the right callus to get on with life and you would slip into the background like a hand on someone’s leg that they feel less and less the longer it stays there.

I climbed out and poured the dirt over him. With maybe a foot left to fill, I planted a small pine tree I bought from a nearby nursery. This tree would grow and its roots would reach Brimley’s body and recycle him. The burial you wanted. It still didn’t soften the blow of standing before another grave.

Maybe the smoke cleared too late and I drove head-on into a tree, crashed through the windshield, my upper body splayed on the hood, and this was the fever dream of a dying brain.

I tried catching you but you fell through me.

The earth is not a good place. It’s slippery. You live on the edge of a blade. On one side is an abyss. On the other side is an abyss. Whatever happens on the blade, the horrors, I can’t control.”

“I love you,” you’d say, like words could push someone if you said them hard enough.

But I wasn’t scared, because dying felt like sinking into a deep, calm sea.

I’m afraid that when we die, we end up wherever we always thought we’d end up. If we want to go to heaven, we go to heaven. If we believe in reincarnation, we come back as a baby or an animal or a tree. If we think we’re going to hell, we’ll burn forever, and we’ll never realize that we were the ones to put ourselves there. That in the afterlife we all tapped into a mechanism, some larger system bent on fulfilling our personal ideas of death.

But then I’d die expecting to find you, spending all my time traversing an afterlife landscape that I make up as I go along, searching, when all I’d want would be to sit in that darkness with you, blind and mute and floating in the ink like a womb.

I don’t want it to be that what I believe is what matters most. I want the truth, without a brain to skew it, without eyes to filter it.

Looking at the clock helped, because numbers were hard to make out in dreams.

I was overcome with the knowledge that we were standing at the end of the universe. We were on the edge of everything known, the veil drawn thin here—even the light that flared over the horizon and met my eyes, its constituent particles barely held together.