One and One Make Two, or Else They Make One
By Tanner Edman
All things are subject to decay—I know this. And within a week of meeting her, I knew that this law would apply sooner or later. But the idea is rarely synonymous with its manifestation. In other words, I had no way of knowing that the decay would arrive in the form of her beside me, in the passenger seat, looking at the melting ice cream in her lap and not at me. It’s as if she’s speaking to the lopsided Oreos as they take on extra sugar, saying to them, “It’s just too strong of a word.”
I’ve just told her that I loved her.
She shakes her head, “I . . . to be honest, I don’t. I don’t love you.”
I nod and glance out over the dashboard at the brick wall before us. We’re in a hospital parking lot near my home. In order to get to the driveway, you need to go through this lot and around a corner, into an alley, where if you go down long enough you’ll find it. But I didn’t feel like going that far for this kind of talk. A talk like this needs privacy the same way dogs and cats do when they’re on their way out.
She glances at me and says, “I really . . . really like you. I do.” Then she looks down at that bowl of off-white mush between her thighs. “It’s just that this . . . that . . . I knew I’d be leaving. You and I talked about it, remember?”
“I thought . . .” I blink and recollect a time on her mattress, the two of us naked and talking about the future. Somewhere in that talk she’d mentioned the Bay Area: Frisco and Oakland and San Mateo. Places I’d never been. Places I had no desire to visit. Places far away, too far away, for things like this. “I don’t know. I thought it was gonna be a long time from now, I guess.”
It’s March now, and in less than two months she will be graduating with a degree in architectural design. On the night we met, drunk and beside each other in my dining room, she’d told me, I want to design hospitals.
I remember widening my eyes and cocking my head, asking, Why hospitals?
Have you ever been inside one? How the hell do they expect anyone to get better in a place that looks so cold, dead, and empty?
It was a Halloween party where we’d met. She was dressed like a sailor and I was dressed like me, like nothing. I’d just come from another party, and on my way over, I’d torn off my dumb shirt and rubbed the stinking pomade from my scalp. I looked stupid. Nobody spoke to me. My plan was to remove the evidence (the shirt, the pomade) from myself as quickly as I could, run inside to the party my housemates were throwing, get more drunk, and then waddle my way upstairs and strip and jerk off and go to sleep. What wound up happening was she and I sipping beers until dawn and me watching her tail lights slowly pull away from me as the sun rose pink and golden over the rooftops. I knew then that I was in love. But as with decay, it wasn’t until now that the idea and its manifestation became one and the same.
“I love you,” I say.
Her lips and nostrils tremble. Within a moment there will be tears. And after that, her tears and my tears will collide, and it will be as if we both came from a shower, our faces gleaming. But now she isn’t crying. Now she is nodding and telling me, “I know you do.”
Ever since I met him, he’s been the rabbit and the hole, always begging me nearer and always reminding me—even if only as the thoughts which surround me whenever he’s close—that time is running out. There is no time. It is work and school and friends, moments fleeting. I see him beside me, his jaw clenched, eyes squinting, maybe regretting what he’s just told me. And I wish, I wish, I wish I could repeat those three words. He won’t believe it like I won’t believe it, but it’s the truth: he’s the first one outside my family to tell me that. Or, I mean, the first one who wasn’t merely a friend.
“It’s just too strong of a word.”
In my lap is melting the ice cream he’s just bought us. This was a date. And me, God damn me, I’ve ruined it. I won’t be moving until after June. Why did he have to ask me? Why did he have to insist on knowing what I don’t even know?
“I . . . to be honest, I don’t. I don’t love you.” That last part I regret the moment it leaves my lip. But it’s too late, and I fix my eyes on the ice cream, knowing it’s already been said and that the sooner it sinks in, deeper and deeper, the sooner he and I can move on. Move onto what? I don’t know.
About a week after I met him, he invited me out walking, and we went to a small park near his house. We stopped and sat at a bench, and, looking out at some daisies, he told me about time’s strangeness and the oddity of every moment. Think about it, he’d pleaded, getting excited, getting antsy. I could tell—just by watching and listening—that he didn’t have nearly enough people to talk to. Every moment is the end product of literally every single moment which has come before it. Take—take you and me, okay? You know how many empires rose and fell, or how many wars, conquests, and migrations had to happen just so you and I could even talk right now? I thought about it. I really did. As he spoke, I saw grandparents young again fleeing Stalin and great-great-great-great grandparents in the prime of youth crossing the Atlantic. I saw desert children lying in the heat, heard flutes playing while drunks danced at some inn. There were fields of barley at sunset and cannon balls flying to castles. If anything had happened differently, we wouldn’t be here. Not like this, anyway.
For a moment, sitting beside him, it felt as if I knew every forebear. As if we’d met and shook hands.
But even so, it was too strong of a word, “I really . . . really like you. I do.” I adjust the ice cream and continue, “It’s just that this . . . that . . . I knew I’d be leaving. You and I talked about it, remember?”
He tells me, glancing over briefly, “I thought . . . I don’t know. I thought it was gonna be a long time from now, I guess.”
Others had come before him, and others would come after. I knew this whether he did or not. And yet, naked and beside him or else walking and talking or else hearing his night time breathing, I allowed myself to forget. How could I? There were places needing designing; I was in demand. Or, anyway, I would be in demand. Perhaps this is what he is—an amnesiac machine. Just looking at him makes me forgetful.
Why can’t I tell it to him?
Is it not the truth?
Or, if it’s really not and I really don’t, which part is it inside me yelling?
He glances at me and says it again, “I love you.”
And I force away whatever has me pining and foolish, saying, “I know you do.”
Tanner Edman
3/8/22
Tanner Edman is a writer who has trouble writing about himself although, truth be told, most of his stories are about himself—even his fiction serves as a kind of window into the mind that has been adorned, rightly or wrongly, with the name Tanner Edman. He is shy to a fault and annoying in his gregariousness, a dreamer afflicted with chronic insomnia, a pacifist waging a perpetual inner war, and a person whom you may—or may not—have seen this morning in your dreams. He is a student at UC Davis, for the time being, and plans on doing whatever he Will because that's the Whole of the Law which is Love.
