Bugs were everywhere that summer, swarming in gnat clouds on muggy nights, appearing later in the form of small red bumps on the bitten that carried them everywhere. There was no repellent for them. The day sky was always a blue becoming grey color with a dark wet horizon—as if everything perpetually sat on the fulcrum of an incoming front never before seen on Doppler radar.

People moved to and from work on the same highways with the words fucking and hell on tips of tongues sealed inside their mouths. Most felt no emotion or sensation of life or love. God was assumed dead, though everyone still attended to church. There was only the latent fear of abandonment and confusion. All notions of family or friends grew soft and benign like fatty tumors. To each person, it was as if everyone else had never been. Each human instinct gradually backslid into its unknown origins; every reaction was that of an animal—a highly-evolved defense mechanism the mammal mind deployed in a time of continuous winter. When people were born or when death occurred, it brought only a vague notion of heaven and hell, then something about the weather, then nothing. There was no substance whatsoever to what humans thought.

—

I hate this kind of story, Byron thought. He had dressed himself heavily in fuzzy, plaid colors. On the street, he sensed an endless mechanical dancelessness in everything—tonight, in the foggy trance of the city light poles that made summer cold. Crickets chirped in the band of grass between the sidewalk and the road. He listened from the sidewalk, waiting for Meg. They were going to a concert of a band that played music people with dreadlocks liked to hear. Their name was Once Okay Twice, Byron knew, as Meg had told him two days ago.

Meg opened the front door of her apartment building slowly, as if underwater. The door made a sound but Byron could still hear the crickets around him. She wore too much make-up and her perfume rubbed out the odor of the grass. Polka dots sprung from her skirt as she walked towards Byron. He smiled and waved. She smiled and waved back, then there were greetings, then nothing else happened.

They walked in an atmosphere unfavorable to conversation. Visibility was bad due to the night and the bugs intermixing, draping an ivy nocturne around every exposed object. In the distance, things fluttered in errant beams of light: moths, mosquitoes, street debris, maybe small droplets of rain parachuting from heaven in slow motion, or maybe just confused air.

Byron could see Meg was holding herself with her own arms. They had dated for almost two years, two years ago, and then broke-up. Right now, the reasons were unimportant. They still shared the same group of friends but didn’t speak often. They once conversed on the subject of Barack Obama. Since then, Byron thought they hadn’t talked in almost six months. When they crossed paths two days ago at a coffee shop, Meg invited him to the show. She said her boyfriend would be in the woods somewhere, explaining he loved to camp. Byron said he would. That was two days before today.

In the street a tall bicycle glided by, clicking mechanically, laboring robot through the shadowed road. Byron pointed but Meg didn’t look. The rider wore a Mohawk and tight black pants. His chain wallet made a clink sound against the crossbar as he spun the pedals around, moving like a tractor down the street, not even braking.

There was lightening, but it was only heat.

“So what kind of music do they play?” Byron said.

“Once Okay Twice?” Meg said. “They’re like a jam band, I guess.”

“That’s cool,” Byron said, as if saying nothing.

“Sure you want to go?” Meg said.

There was a siren on a nearby street. Byron felt stiff deep inside his body—the muscular pain of a long term problem. He thought of all positions in which he tended to sleep. His futon was to blame. Meg told him the show was in East Nashville. Right now, they were in Middle Nashville, which wasn’t even an actual place.

“Like, yeah,” he said.

“We can do something else if you can think of anything,” Meg said.

“No,” Byron said. “Let’s go.”

He looked at Meg and blinked. He was not wearing his glasses. His eyes were very dry.

He could feel his contact lenses engraving little grooves across his eyes. He blinked again and Meg went out of focus. White lines appeared out of thin air. Bryon rubbed his sockets until she reappeared.

“Every time I blink I feel brain damaged,” Byron said.

“I’ve always suspected you were a little,” Meg said.
They talked as they walked towards Byron’s car. Meg seemed to move closer over time,
then began to touch Byron’s arm sometimes.

—

“I think I’m moving to New York City,” Byron shouted on the highway. “In maybe a month. I don’t know what to pack.”

“What?” Meg said, then realized that she was shouting too. When Byron braked, the car slowed and things became more audible. Someone on the radio played saxophone.

“I’m moving to NYC,” Byron said. “Actually, just Brooklyn.” He looked at Meg who looked out the window. He thought he saw something but it was nothing.

“You shouldn’t move,” Meg said. To Byron, her inflection did not translate. He told himself not to talk or think about New York for a while.

Meg said something else that Byron couldn’t hear. He watched part of her mouth move so he laughed. She looked down at the dots on her skirt.

“I like your Polka dots,” Byron said. He took his finger from the steering wheel and pointed towards the dots. Each one was folded or curved and looked like a small white whale. Byron thought about Moby Dick. There was a snowy darkness in each white dot. It reminded him of the millions of different circles human beings run around inside.
Meg kept staring out the windshield. She made a gesture like she should blush but didn’t blush. Byron touched his face for a second. He saw her search her purse and find her cell phone with his peripheral vision. For several seconds, she dialed buttons.

When they got off the highway they were in East Nashville. It was very dark. Light had been swallowed by long row of dark oaks, swirled around, and redistributed as fog and dust. The road now was chipped concrete, washed-out by midsummer wooziness, rising like a mushroom spawning from corroded dirt. There was a gas station at a corner where they stopped for a six-pack of beer. When the wind blew, signs above the road swung in the air like earthquake chandeliers.

Meg held up her phone and pretended to read a message. “No more concert,” she said.

“The show is canceled.”

Byron kept driving toward the venue, but slower now. “Should we go home?” he said turning slowly towards Meg.

She didn’t say anything.

“I don’t know where to go,” Byron said.

Five seconds passed.

“I’m kidding!” Meg said. “Just making sure you really wanted to go.”

“But, like,” Byron said. “Aren’t we almost already here?”

He stopped at a stoplight where a bum smiled at him. Because it was nighttime, Byron had instinctively braked early before each light to maintain a constant roll, ensuring he could quickly accelerate should he sense someone or thing within touching distance of his car. The light turned green. He accelerated.

“The place is on the right,” Meg said and Byron turned into the driveway of an old apartment complex. It was pavement becoming gravel. The people outside were distinctly different in body sizes. Maybe a hundred people stood around, men and women, some children. When Byron parked and turned off his car, he thought he smelled something burning.

—

The venue itself was a gravel lot with a picnic area where people smoked. A mother and her little daughter, dressed in tie-dye, poured lemonade into red solo cups from plastic pitchers. “I’m the landlady,” the mother said to someone holding a motorcycle helmet. There was a guy wearing a fedora, standing, looking very busy. Beside him lingered an indecisive Asian couple. Byron looked at Meg looking at people. A group looking like band members plugged things into other things on a makeshift stage.

Byron thought of saying something. It felt like he hadn’t said a word for a while and it made him nervous. Still, he seemed very calm, maybe a little sticky—as if buttered by humidity with a slight forehead greasing. It felt like he felt this often: gooey and bemused. People were moving in and out of shadows, being loud and elusive, smoking, kicking gravel. Someone said to someone else, “They tapped the keg.”

Meg told Byron her friend was the drummer. Byron noticed him, standing alone, holding a Solo cup and a drumstick, smoking a cigarette—but Meg was looking at Byron.

“I got a teaching job,” she said. “Kindergartners.”

An airplane made a rocket noise overhead, momentarily drowning out her voice.

Something combustive and smoky had begun to occur in Byron’s head. Little firework crackles. He couldn’t concentrate. He was probably just acting antisocial, distracted with looking around, knowing nothing but the nothingness around him. It took him a second or two to respond.

“Wow, kindergarten?” he said. “I wish I could go back to kindergarten and be your student.”

“You remind me of some of my kindergartners,” Meg said. “I think you maybe still are one inside, like in the head.”

“Yeah,” Byron said. “Yeah.” He looked at the ground. Meg looked around in different directions.

“I was Batman for Halloween in kindergarten,” Byron said. “I wore a mask that didn’t really fit my face.” This was true. He was Batman in kindergarten, and for the rest of childhood, he was just a boy with an old hero’s mask, then something like a man but indecipherable from a child. None of it made sense. In his head, Halloween had gradually become mostly for yard work. Raking leaves. No one dressed up anymore—with age, the irony of holiday fright had faded, but somehow, it seemed like everyone still wore tattered costumes of themselves whenever anyone else was around. Byron thought things seemed different now from then—childhood. There were a thousand contrasting things between this and that world, he knew, and each morning he woke with longings for new and requited love. It was a craving loyal only to its own creator, but he hadn’t the agency to ascertain its root. He felt solely like a side-effect of something else, entrenched in the canned rebellion of twenty-somethingdom, existing on only temporary affectations, intangible attachments, substituting concrete things in life with the abstract, and always make-believing the world was becoming exponentially better.

“You would probably flunk my class,” Meg said. She scratched her elbow. “But I still wish I could have seen you dressed as Batman.”

“Look at the band.” Byron extended his hand upright and pointed, asserting himself in a way that surprised him—he hadn’t meant to point out anything. Some band members saw Byron pointing and looked. Meg looked back, finished a beer, and held the empty can like it wasn’t empty, as if an accessory—human garnish.

Meg laughed. “Yeah. That’s them.”

Slowly, she waved.

—

Meg talked to someone in the crowd about her crush on Bill Clinton. “In middle school I was jealous of Monica Lewinsky,” she said. “I wished I was Monica Lewinsky somehow. With that blue dress.”

Byron didn’t feel like drinking anymore. He felt intoxicated enough on air. Something un-breathable blended with the alcohol and congealed in his bloodstream, stiffening his veins with a metallic hardening.

“I always wondered if the Secret Service could see them through the windows of the Oval Office,” Meg said. “I wondered like, as Americans, if they felt bad, Bill and Monica. Like, did he ever think he’d have to explain the whole situation to the Supreme Court?”

Byron wondered if Meg’s boyfriend was ever jealous of Bill Clinton. He knew nothing about Meg’s boyfriend. Except that his name sounded like ‘Jerry’ and all Byron could ever think was Ben & Jerry’s when he heard it. Byron didn’t know much about Meg anymore. After breaking-up, it felt like they had talked a lot at first. It was the spring before school was over, before their conversation about Barack Obama—walking back and forth across hot blacktopped streets, outside into indoors, there was air conditioning, then none—but Byron couldn’t remember specifics unless he tried very hard, and he never felt like trying that hard.

–

It seemed like Once Okay Twice had a revolving door of membership. Before the show had even begun, Byron met several different self-proclaimed former members in the crowd. One in a CBGB t-shirt said he quit Once Okay Twice after a dispute over Barack Obama. He said, “Barack Hussein Obama.” Byron noticed a white chalk handprint on the back of a person’s black shirt. The person said his name but Byron could not hear. The person said he really just wanted everyone to come together. He said, “Like with music.” He said Barack Hussein Obama was president and everyone still has a miserable life.

There was colored liquid in his drink that was maybe whiskey or something. Byron wondered if any of this pertained to music.

On stage, Meg’s friend, the drummer, dropped one of his sticks, picked it up, twirled it on his finger, and almost dropped it again. His face was overly expressive, like he wanted to move his eyes and mouth too much. His shirt said, “SOCIALIST.” Everyone thought the band was about to play. The bassist asked the crowd for a lighter. Someone passed up a small orange Bic, but it didn’t work.

Meg stood beside Byron and watched the band not play anything for a couple more minutes.

“Somebody get some fucking matches,” an audience member shouted.

“If I don’t get a light I’m gonna cry,” the bassist said into a microphone. Feedback meowed. “Seriously, just kidding. I don’t care.”

The guy in the CBGB t-shirt leaned in towards Byron and said, “I told him that joke.” His t-shirt was now riding up around his chest. He pulled his shirt down, admiring the logo.

“Oh?” Byron said. “Good job.”

The band played some songs. After one, there was a moment of quiet and Meg shouted for the band to play a certain song but was not heard.  The guitarist said the next a song was about money. An anti-money song, thought Byron. Until now, Once Okay Twice had only played covers. There was a huge British flag hanging behind the stage with things scrawled on it with black marker. In the center, someone had written “1969.”

Byron and Meg stood to the side, in the back a little. Both held cans that were almost empty beers. About five songs in Meg pushed Byron with her hip. He felt her buttocks squish against his thigh. He thought he could feel her entire body, but her body felt intangible, Byron thought, like an unidentified flying object.

The speakers spat rotten sound at the audience. It bounced off the members and fell onto the ground. There it sat motionless. Byron could feel it beside his ankles. He moved his feet against the grass. The blades were dark and greasy. Meg slipped off her sandals, picked them up, and held them against her chest like a small child.

–

When the show was over, no one really left, and later, a homeless man walked up. He was astonishingly short and moved his hand against his patchy beard.

“I’m Homeless Ed,” he announced to everyone. “But you can call me ‘Homeless’ for short.” He extended a hand and appealed for alms.

Meg tugged Byron’s elbow as if Homeless was standing too close.

The landlady appeared and shooed Homeless back in the direction from which he first appeared.

“What?” Homeless said. He looked hypnotized by the landlady’s tie-dye shirt.

“It doesn’t matter,” the landlady said. “You can’t eat out of our garbage cans!”

Byron thought this sounded rude.

“Don’t think I eat garbage,” Homeless said. “I only eat from sealed cans.” His voice felt scratchy against Byron’s ears. He looked at Homeless’ shoes and wondered if they fit him.

Other insults were thrown, but neither Homeless nor the landlady—or anyone else—knew what was being argued.

“Whatever makes you happy,” the landlady said.

“I’m gonna go eat a steak,” Homeless said, waved his arm, and left.

“Something’s wrong,” Byron said quietly, turning to Meg. “I don’t want to be here.”
Meg looked at Byron and, instinctively, they walked towards Byron’s car together.

“Thanks,” Meg said, passing the landlady. “Thank you.”

—

From the street, there was a blue film on each passing building. The streetlights pointed out lonely shapes. The clouds above were fish, belly-up in an oil slick. Groups of stars hung around as if not wanting to be there.

Neither Byron nor Meg felt like going home. Byron drove around a little without speaking.

He pressed his fingers against the steering wheel like he was playing a piano. Meg wondered if he forgot she was even there. She sat in the passenger seat, looking out the window, shivering, feeling an indistinct but comprehensive longing for something, imagining the future; it was fifty years later and she was thinking back, remembering and regretting basically everything. But she could be dead in fifty years, she knew. Byron could still be single, or a stay-at-home-dad, or something. She felt a moot sense of remorse and closed her eyes. She saw Once Okay Twice’s dropping his stick, and then heard a girl’s voice saying Byron’s name.

“Byron,” Meg said.

“Hi,” Byron said. His eyes were round but still somehow very thin—simultaneously rectangular and circular in the weak lunar glow. He quickly glanced at Meg then back at the road.

“Are you hungry?” Byron said. “We can eat Thai food at a Thai restaurant.”

Meg sat up as if she had just awoken.

They thought together but were unable to make any decisions and Byron continued to drive. He wondered if Meg felt kidnapped. He wondered how far away he could take her until she began to complain. He pictured her standing against a Polka dotted sea a million miles away.

Meg talked to Byron about teaching again, and then about new things she had learned.

“Did you hear what happened in space last week?” she said.

“Space?” Byron said. “You mean the outer kind?”

“A meteor shower,” she said. “Do you ever get the feeling we’re not alone?”

“I guess I feel like I’m not,” he said.

The city skyline was now all haze. When they stopped at a red light, insects flurried in the shimmer of old light poles. For a second, it looked like it was snowing, like giant white moths were just large pieces of snow, falling slowly in a soupy summer melt.

“Don’t sound so curious,” Meg said sarcastically.

She thought about Thai food and eating in general. She thought about Homeless Ed and wondered what her life would be like without a place to live, her life as a short man with patchy beard trimmed with world’s bluntest razor.

Meg’s cell phone rang and she answered. It was her boyfriend. Byron thought about ice cream.

She told her boyfriend she might eat Thai and hung up. She looked at Byron and smiled. Byron drove.

He was not thinking he would never see Meg again after tonight. He didn’t think that until after they decided against Thai and he had taken her home. It was later Byron realized that, when Meg was sitting in the passenger seat barely an hour before, she was waiting for him to pull the car gear into park so he could walk her to her door and hug goodbye maybe. It was dark and they could hardly see one another’s faces. Byron had sat there staring blankly into the void of his dashboard as if postponing something unknown, picturing a vague image of New York City, then the soiled dress of Monica Lewinsky. He resisted the urge to ask her to meet tomorrow and the urge to ask if she was just being nice when she said he shouldn’t move earlier—and then she had leaned over, hugged him awkwardly through her seat belt, and was gone.

—

It was very warm inside Taco Bell. Byron sat in the booth before a window beside the fountain drinks. Something inside him thought homeless. A lanky girl behind the counter asked if he wanted a free chalupa.

“I’m not that hungry,” Byron said and put his mouth on his straw, but the cup beneath it made the empty sound.

The girl shrugged. Her elbows splayed like sickles. Byron unbuttoned a few buttons on his flannel and scratched his neck, then thought, now it’s cold in here. “These places,” he said under his breath. The girl behind the counter looked over at him with an accusatory expression. Byron felt like what someone elderly would call a scoundrel.

After a few minutes, he buttoned his flannel up completely, but immediately felt uncomfortable with his collar tight around his throat. The girl said something to someone behind the counter in the kitchen about the drive-through window, and then stopped talking. After a while she picked her nose and looked at Byron

“We’re almost closing sir,” she said.

“Oh,” Byron said. “Okay.”

Byron’s eyes were still very dry. He looked at the girl then felt himself about to blink so he looked away to avoid communicating some schizophrenic Morse code with his eyes. Both contact lenses crinkled and almost fell out but were saved by his bottom lids. He closed his eyes and massaged his sockets. As he pushed his pupils back towards his brain, white ovals appeared like halos around lamp posts. He thought this might save his vision.

—

Later in Byron’s room, there was a television exposé: Barack Obama was elected President of the United States on a Tuesday and sworn in months later on different Tuesday. Byron remembered the election night. He had texted Meg a message with several exclamations marks—something like, YES WE DID!!!! or NOW WE CAN!!!!  When she did not respond immediately, he thought about sending her another, but decided against it. It was later when he was lying awake in the dark that his phone buzzed. Excited, he sprung from his mattress, but it was a message from the Campaign of Barack Obama, not Meg. It read, “Congratulations.”

Right now, Byron didn’t want to be in his room alone. He felt sad and told himself to do something. He walked around for a while, looking at spines of books on shelves and through windows at dead bugs on the sills. There were crickets on the other side of the glass mixing with the chorus of neighbors’ air conditioners. Byron thought of the different things he and Meg might say to each other if they were together—if today was two years ago.

Once in a while he would catch his reflection in the surface of a window, smiling and feeling vaguely spellbound. In the moments right after having lapsed into glancing fantasy, there was a self-correction, a moment of rush and then the sudden nothing of thinking again within the parameters of human biology where frayed brain synapses spark, only cognizant of the fact that some things happen only once and never twice. Byron was familiar with this clarity, almost exhilarated, disappointed, angry, but accepting of the truth the crickets spoke.

Story by Adam Moorad
Photography by Rachel Rebibo