by Nicholas Russell
You call your husband from the park bench, the first part of this plan. On the other end, you hear him chewing, his breath and the sound of his wet mouth loud in the receiver. Maybe the lunch he made this morning. This detail brings a smile to your face. He wants to know if you’re alright. You say yes. You play with the device in your lap as he tells you he’s walking over.
In your imagination, it was like most technologies anticipated by pop culture, much smaller than in the movies. But the way Morrison next door was using it on the delivery man, you’d need to use both hands just to aim the thing properly. Morrison fabricated a fake plastic shell to make it look like an old VHS camera. When you asked Morrison if you could borrow the device, you also asked him to remove the shell.
After some time, your husband approaches you swiftly, attendant, concerned. You are only around the corner from the apartment. He sits down slowly, back straight, the trace of a wince around his eyes. One arm around you, he kisses your cheek. Sometimes, Dad would describe moments where he would fail to recognize someone he loved, just for a second. He joked that he was astral projecting. And just now, when he sits next to you, for a moment, you smile politely at your husband without recognition. Just some guy. Then the hickey you placed just below his collarbone flashes with a wrinkle of his shirt. The cut on his right hand from the onions. The way his knees crack. Morrison told you to be careful with the device. You grip it even tighter in your lap.
“This is your chance,” you say. “You can ask me anything and I will respond with absolute honesty. No bullshit. And no matter what, at the end, you’ll forget we ever had this conversation.”
He has not looked at the device, which does not mean he hasn’t noticed it. When he finally does look, one of his eyebrows arches up.
“You going to hit me with that?” he asks.
Unwavering, his sense of humor. But you know he understands so you respond evenly, “No."
“Am I to assume you normally aren’t honest with me?” he asks.
“Not like this.”
Reid leans away from you, his arm still draped on the back of the bench.
“Okay,” he says. “But why?”
It is a cold day. The device feels stuck to your skin as if you’ve licked it. Maybe you should have eased into this with humor to match his own. He looks at you pointedly, obviously, making plain his confusion. You can sense something rising in him, it flickers. There. His curiosity, peeking through like you knew it would sooner or later. And then, again, just for a second, his face is unfamiliar.
“I don’t know,” you start. “Maybe after I say what I have to say, you’ll want to forget I ever told you. Or. Maybe this is your chance to get out.”
“Yeah, while you can.”
When you say this, you watch for the tilt of his head that always comes whenever he hears something stupid.
“What do you want me to ask you about?” he says first.
“It’s up to you, honey.”
“No, really. I’m happy to play along. Just get to it though.”
He looks away, forward toward the other end of the park. Of course, this is not ideal. You counted on his unbridled excitement, his propensity for explosive enthusiasm. You’ve caught him on a reserved day. And he’s right, you do only want him to ask you about one thing.
“I want to finally tell you about him, so I can at least know that I did it. Once.”
The one whose writing marks the back of one of the first posters you ever put up in the apartment you now share with your husband, on the box of books you shipped to the city when you finally moved away from home. The one he never got to see, not even online because the account has been locked ever since the breakup. High school sweetheart. College lover. Moral support at the abortion clinic following early months of debated motherhood. He even picked out names, wrote out a list for you on your phone. Now, you use them for D&D characters when your group meets on Saturdays.
Your husband breathes in deeply and nods. You forgo reminding him of the device. You hope that beneath his frustration, there is something darker, something unsavory. You hope there is something like anger or the pleasurable sensation of justified envy if only because maybe he too will have exorcised something.
“What, you’re still in love with him?” your husband mumbles.
That’s too simple a notion, a write off. No, not still. You never stopped loving him, but this isn’t where you wanted this conversation to begin.
“Yes, but—”
“I already knew that.”
The absence of malice makes the hairs on your forearm brush up against your jacket sleeves. Instead, you find measured, almost disappointed acknowledgement.
“How often you bring up something you two used to do without my prompting,” he begins slowly. “You don’t think I clocked every time we’ve wrenched the conversation in his direction?” You are unprepared for measured words. “How his parents hated the two of you together.” You are unprepared for a civil conversation. “On road trips, after long enough, you end up playing the same songs, old ones, and they’re never happy. Sometimes, you check your phone then look back at me as if you’re going to catch me being suspicious. And the way you do everything you can not to react to someone with his name in public when you think you’re the only one who hears it.”
He goes silent, his face flushed, your palms sweating against the metal of the device. You remember the device and look down. Morrison told you to be sure to turn the dial. His is an old model, it only allows for sixty minutes of elapsed time to be forgotten, but the buttons are tricky to work. When he handed it to you, he said something about marking one side. But you can’t recall it now. You push your jacket sleeve back, check your watch. You turn the dial on the device to ten minutes. You rethink.
When your husband kisses your neck goodbye in the morning, you wait til the front door closes to check your phone, but there is no cheating here. Some days, you wish there was. Something physical to anchor you. When he posts about their engagement, you call your mother. She questions you witheringly and you immediately regret reaching out. She asks why you still care. Aren’t you happy now? If you were hoping he was looking back, don’t you already have your answer? It is with great resentment that you try to explain that the answers to these questions are not simple. He has erased you and you feel like lashing out. You watch them get married and find that it is too much. You cannot hide your grief from your husband any longer, your act is no longer convincing.
Reid braces his hands on his knees as if he is about to stand, to depart from this failed exercise.
“I don’t want to do this again,” he tells you.
“Just, please,” you say. “I need you to listen.”
“I think this time, if you’re set on really making this happen, we give it a proper go,” he says.
You check your watch. You have been sitting here doing nothing. Ten minutes have passed.
“No hesitation,” he continues. “No getting off track. No rehearsals.”
You turn the dial on the device accordingly then freeze. You look back at your watch. Something is wrong.
“You froze after pushing a button on that thing, the first time,” your husband tells you. He bites his lip before turning his face toward you, eyes cast down. “I went to get help. It seemed like you were going catatonic. You called me two minutes later, about fifteen minutes ago, and asked me to come back to the park.”
You want to walk away now.
“It’s strange,” your husband says. “I thought you’d have repeated yourself, done exactly the same thing. You started crying. Then you started singing something but I couldn’t make out the words. You were rocking side to side a little. After a while, you asked ‘What do I do?’ It took you a bit to finally say his name.”
As he speaks, you feel the echo of a tremor in your throat, swollen sinuses flaring around particles of tobacco. You cried the first time. You haven’t been able to cry in months. Now, you don’t even remember it. It might as well have never happened. You have robbed yourself of what you wanted. You fumble with the device carefully now. You are afraid to touch it, afraid to make it go off, afraid that you will never get through this interminable amount of time without having to live through each moment.
Your husband reaches across you and lays his hand on top of yours.
“We can still do it,” he says. “I won’t push back. But there’s a problem here and I don’t know how to help if you’re set on burying it.”
The device lies heavy in your lap. There is no interface, no blinking lights, no external markers of any kind. It looks like something fashioned from car parts. You do not know if it runs on batteries or some kind of nuclear energy. For all you know, it was only good for one more shot and now doesn’t work. You put your fingers to your lips and close your eyes. You have nothing of him as he is now.
Reid squeezes your hand and takes his own back. You raise the device to your face with one hand, the mass of scratched metal teetering in your grasp. You feel for the button on the other side. Now that you have given the thing a proper look, you realize both ends are identical. Easy mistake, not just for someone like you. You hear ticking somewhere inside. You don’t have long left before the timer completes its cycle. You press down on the button with your middle finger.
“Both times, you never asked me what I thought,” Reid says.
The words sound forlorn but when you look at him, his face is set. His mouth hangs open slightly. You keep phasing in and out of recognition. He stands with great effort. Those ceaseless years of tennis have given him the skeleton of a geriatric. You can still run for miles with a steady heartbeat. You don’t know why your mind goes there, making everything a competition.
“I’m going to cook dinner,” your husband announces. “Should be ready in an hour.”
He turns away toward the street and the sidewalk and the block corner before reaching the doorman. The ticking from the device grows louder. You set it down beside you, both ends pointed away, watch as a black beam fires out toward the other end of the park. Everything around the beam swirls and spirals backwards until suddenly, the beam is gone. There is no one around. The air before you has no memory. There are pigeons pecking at the ground. There is the echo of a breeze. At the end of this, you don’t know what you’ll do, not that you had a clear idea before. You wonder how long it will take before you stop blaming yourself. You wonder if blaming yourself gives the pain some added dimension, something more slippery than meaning. Your husband is half right. You can’t take it back, but you could choose to ignore it. Unbearably, you are still here. Deliberately, you are still here.
______
Nicholas Russell is a writer from Las Vegas. His work has been featured in McSweeney's, The Baffler, Orion, The Nation, and Conjunctions, among other publications. A long time bookseller, he's also managing editor at Still Alive Magazine and a contributing writer at Defector. His debut novel Observer is published by Ecco.
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