in bed
by Wilson Koewing
“A million years before time existed, I would have loved you.”
Jade said things like this and despite the pretension, managed to sell them.
At night we’d lie in bed listening to Alex Jones. This was 2013. Before Jones flew completely off the rails. He was always fringe and dangerous, just unaware of his reach then. Jade found him hilarious. She loved his wild tirades about globalists. How they fly black helicopters and drive tanks that run people over and spit out bones behind them.
“Can you imagine the idiots who believe this shit?” she’d laugh. “I want to rule them all.”
When Jones ended, we talked until we fell asleep. Me mostly listening and Jade asking questions like, “What if we’ve been lovers through dozens of past lives and sometimes, I’m the guy and you’re the girl?”
Jade was celibate seven years when we met. The reasons were vague, but involved a failed marriage to a classical musician, abuse, divorce and a lengthy period of self-isolation during which she produced stacks of abstract paintings.
“Would you ever put your paintings in a show?” I asked.
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because their pain is mine.”
When not in bed, we drove around New Orleans trying to pick songs that described the moment. I played “Continuous Thunder” by Japandroids as lightning rode across the clouds one night.
“You’re a literal fuck, if I’ve ever met one,” Jade said.
She was driving too fast down Octavia toward uptown, windows down, the low purple sky that forever hung above New Orleans pulsing with electricity.
Snake and Jake’s Christmas Club Lounge was our haunt and like anyone who frequents that place we never arrived before 2 am. A thing people do there is catch roaches under plastic cups and trap them on the bar. Jade hated this and knocked the cups over upon arrival. The regulars didn’t care, but occasionally a tourist would, and she’d let them have it. Comparing them to the roach, existentially trapped and needing to abuse a defenseless creature as a result.
When the first hint of the sunrise teased the horizon, we’d wander over to Camelia Grill. Those were my favorite walks. Trying to get Jade to hold my hand, her refusing.
“Don’t you hate the sunrise?”
“Not at all,” I said. “It means a new day of possibilities.”
“I wish I could toss you into the sun.”
The closer we got to Carrollton the louder the ding of the streetcar grew. Most don’t pay attention to the cable above the cars, but it’s what I watched when they passed. Sometimes, a little spark would be created and fall towards the ground and disappear into the air as the streetcar lurched away.
“Do you think there’s a couple like us walking toward the sunset on the exact opposite side of the world?” Jade asked.
“If I had to guess, the exact opposite side of the world from here is underwater.”
“Then we’ll have something in common soon enough.”
After breakfast, we’d cross the tracks and stand on the levee overlooking the Mississippi. Jade had something snarky to say about almost everything, but never disparaged the river. She’d just sigh and watch it flow.
Eventually, we’d return to Jade’s bed. The sun through the blinds forming soft lines across the sheets. Dust floating in the air and sizzling away.
It was on one such morning Jade and I had sex for the first and only time. She was on top and wouldn’t take off her t-shirt. One of those black ones with a red star. We listened to Carl Sagan’s original Cosmos play on her phone. I can’t remember specific quotes, just Sagan repeatedly making note of how truly small we are.
“Happy Birthday,” Jade said peering down at me.
“It’s not my birthday.”
“I didn’t say it was.”
Then she threw back her head and made an exaggerated show of the rest.
A week after that, Jade was gone.
I was sitting by Lake Pontchartrain on a bench near UNO when she called. A cargo ship slid across the horizon. I couldn’t make sense of why it was there or where it came from. All the ports were on the Mississippi.
I could barely hear her over the wind.
“I’m leaving town,” she screamed into the phone. “I put some of your stuff in a box and hid it under the bush by the door.”
“Where are you going?”
“I’m driving over Whiskey Bay,” she said. “It’s beautiful, but you know there are hundreds of dead girls on the bottom.”
“Are you coming back?”
“Spending a few days in Lafayette,” she said. “See my Dad. After that, who knows? I’ve got a map.”
The silence lingered. Only the sound of the wind from what I knew were all four car windows rolled down. The cargo ship was gone, and the lake was still. I could see Jade’s car, like a helicopter shot from a movie driving on the long bridge over Whiskey Bay.
“Are you trying to come up with a way to tell me how much you’ll miss me?” she asked.
“Okay, Jade,” I said, trying to steady my voice. “Let me know where you land.”
I hung up and drove to her apartment. There was nothing of interest in the box. A hoodie. Contact solution. A couple DVDs. I tried the door and it opened. The apartment was bare except for the couch and in Jade’s room, her bed. I laid down. There were no pillows or sheets. I inhaled the smell of the mattress. I stayed for a long time, feeling hollow. Eventually I got up and left. I tossed the box in a dumpster in the alley. It was mid-day. It might have been a Saturday. The day had no discernible characteristics that I can recall.
Wilson Koewing is a writer from South Carolina. His work has recently appeared in Bending Genres, Rejection Letters, Trampset, JMWW, The Loch Raven Review, New World Writing and Maudlin House.