Fiction: Infinite Regress

By Noah Rymer

The sun grew weary on some vacuous dive east of nowhere, and the papers stood sticky with beer, untouched by my signatureand lying in my suit-jacket’s pocket. I took them out every now and then, letting ash falling from my cigarette obscure the print. It was one hell of a present—that much was certain, and it took all of thirty-three years for someone to give it to me. I gazed into the bar-mirror, greasy film over the surface distorting my reflection, and the barmaid caught my eye as I signaled for a drink, flagging a fiver for beer, and sinking in my stool let my eyes loll around the bar over the lovesickness of tears, cheap liquor, sweat. She placed the glass before me, and the glass tasted bitter. 

 

A couple scuzzy jazz cats found the space to moan and wail for entertainment with some disgraced lounge seductress singing sultry, while tone-deaf drunks crowded around me like I was their king. I laughed and shook hands and let my ears be chewed up by raw whiskey-breath running sordid, down-and-out tales as much as I could, but got tired of it all rather quickly; I rattled the change in my pocket, and decided to gamble on a pay-phone. 

 

The booth reeked of wino piss, a glowering beacon surrounded by empty streets and illuminated by the nonchalant red-blue glare of the neon-neglected bar. My breath visibly leapt out of me as tremblingly I held the plasticine receiver, noticing the melange of visual detritus that comprised the walls. I emptied a splash of change into the machine. The dial tone was expectant, knowing, wavering between heaven and hell; the other end clicked. A voice I ‘d once known, now sharper than any of Cupid’s poisoned arrows, answered—she sounded weary, most likely having had been woken up abruptly by the persistent ring. 

 

“H-Hello?” 

 

“It’s me, Alice.” 

 

“Who?” 

 

“Frank.” 

 

“Hi,” she replied curtly. 

 

I fiddled around with the leftover nickels and dimes I had in my hand, almost searching for a poor box to offload the guilty silvers like they were from Judas’s moneybag. 

 

“Have you signed the papers yet?”

 

“Alice, you know I don’t want to.”

 

“I know, Frankie. I know. I’m sorry.” 

 

“Sorry? You’ve sure got a funny way of showing it.” 

 

“Don’t get violent on me, Frank, so help me— ” 

 

“I’ve never hurt you, never hurt our daughter...” 

 

“It’s not that, Frank—it never was. You were a good husband…you just, just needed to get some things sorted out…” 

 

“Oh, so what am I then, some damn junk drawer? I just need to be reorganized, and then I'll be ok?” 

 

I heard some rustling on the other end. Something like a sigh. Something that spoke of a buried kind of love, that’d lie awake some nights and sleep others. Something that said, I want you, but you’re damaged goods. 

 

I could feel her cradling the receiver, cradling my voice against her neck, but what was between us was a quarter-mile and about a decade of antidepressants, sleeping pills, and failed couple’s therapy. Insomnia brought me to her bedside, lying on my chest while I thought about the possibility of our child inheriting my mental illness. Alice said she knew I wasn’t mentally stable when she started dating me, but that she didn’t mind.

Alice thought that love would fix our problems, fix everything; it’s been apparent to me for a while now that there are some wounds that love can’t heal. Alice and I have loved each other every single day as a choice, not a feeling, and it seemed with every smile we plastered on our faces we strained ourselves even more, little by little. 

 

I remembered we were in the bathroom once getting ready to go out, our baby Annie safe with her sitter and the both of us in the finery of lovers, approaching their late-stage. She was applying the last bit of rogue to her cheeks while I combed my hair. Alice looked at me directly but at my reflection, and put up her fingers as if to improvise some kind of frame. 

 

“You know, darling,” she spoke softly. “At times, I think of you like a piece of fine art: you’re beautiful to look at, but hard to take home.” 

 

She didn’t bother to clarify for the rest of that night, for the rest of our relationship; I came to understand that you have to forget a lot of little things like that, to forgive your love and move on. Now I understand much more clearly what she meant. 

 

“Darling...” the telephone booth itself seemed to take pause, hesitating, “...it’s over.” 

 

I calmly replaced the phone back in its receptacle, letting the familiar analog click comfort me that our conversation was over, would be over forever, and after I signed the papers Alice and I would never see each other again. I collapsed, sobbing hysterically. The tears were pouring out of me so rapidly, so enormously, that I believed if I stayed long enough in the booth I could very well drown. 

 

The two most damaging words in the English dictionary. Two words that put a close on ten years like a house up for sale. My chest crumpled like a brown paper sack, the bottom soaked in the alcoholic contents it was hiding, shriveled, and now ready-to-discard; man’s impotence is best demonstrated in the face of a divorce order given by his future ex-wife. 

 

I stumbled back into the bar, purged of any feeling whatsoever. I got myself a glass of whiskey and sat on the left side, where the band was playing, at the back. This meant I was about 10 feet from the musicians and about 10 of the same feet from the bathrooms. The singer was laying it into me, focusing all her shamanistic energy on to me, or as much as she could in this cramped, trashy setup—she had eyeliner like red velvet and lips to match with a dress of satin, pinning me down like a butterfly with her sleazy, barroom sexuality, and I couldn’t care less. 

 

Maybe two hours later, when the clock hit one, I quietly shuffled out to Harold And Kathy’s, the perennial greasy spoon that dished breakfast no matter the hour. This town was turning sinister on me, though I had lived here all my life. 

I took my refuge within the burnt-sierra tiling and the church-basement seating, ordering a steaming plate of biscuits and gravy alongside a coffee to go together with a feverishly smokedcrumpled half-pack of cigarettes,. Most of the staff was playing poker in the back but I chatted up Jenny, the waitress matchstick-skinny and with frizzy auburn hair whose smock was always grease-stained. It was a dead night, so she wasn’t too worried about a rush—I was her company, she told me, and I chuckled, trying to occult the sadness in my eyes with laughter. Jenny asked about my wife and I laid it out, and she sat down and hugged me, and said that if I ever felt lonely that I could go out with her, and I thanked her.

 

She got up and told me that the place was closing down for good on the 3rd, too. A lot of good things were coming to an end. She went back to the kitchen to cook. I flipped a quarter while I waited, trying to drown myself in petty amusement until I could contemplate the implications of the dissolution of my marriage preferably in private. I was still young, had a decent bit of charm, and didn’t look too bad at that; thirty-two was a fine agefor something like this. I felt a stroll in the town afterwards. 

 

The door chimed as the performers from the bar sat down for a meal, just as dead, and looking just as hopeless, as I was. Not a word passed between the three of them, and Jenny dragged a few of the staff from their poker game to help her attend to the customers but not without some grumbling and compliant from the two chefs who were adamant that they were just about to win the pot: twenty bucks and a six-pack of Flying Dog. 

 

Traffic lights bled into rain-slicked streets, empty changing of colors like mood shifts. Whole buildings lay enslaved within the eyes of puddles: another world beckoning me, some place I knew was better than where I currently resided. I walked around the neighborhood with no destination in mind, only the knowledge that I wasn’t going to be coming home tonight. 

 

The houses sat patiently in rows with an openness that spilt out into the town, and I imagined them all to be doll’s houses:stable, unchanging, divorced from mutable existences given to chance. There only existed material decay, not those of bonds nor relationships. The smiles were permanently painted on, never to frown. Happy houses. There was antiquity. There was family. And I was going to have to leave it all behind. 

 

I sauntered through the minutiae empty of the town, catching the glint of the fading sign for a tool shop and the electric buzz of the downtown paved with streetlight. A mile away from here was a roller rink converted from a strip club, mauve tint painted over the brick, and it was hard to tell if that was there before or after the renovation; three-fourths of a mile west would land you at a convenience store—the rumor during my tenure in college that there was a brothel on its second-story. I never tried to find out if there was any truth to it; it existed better as a part of a shared mythology. If you wanted more southern charm you could see burning crosses the size of skyscrapers peeking out of the ashen woods on certain nights. 

 

At the chapel where we got married—a small white-painted pine affair—I walked to, perhaps one of the last places to be open this late in this town that tucked in at sundown. There were the gas stations, the fast food joints, and the two bars in town, sure, but everything else was shut off save the mercy of God. The doors creaked, hinges un-oiled, and the emptiness crept through my bones as I kneeled down on wooden floors, prostrating myself before the altar. My prayers like a flood came out of my mouth,yet drier than cotton, and after a half-hour in the pitch save for the light of the tabernacle candle glowering crimson, I left. The gap between air and structure widened as I made my exit, a giant moonbeam shining through and enshrouding the chapel in tomblike silence. I walked. I got tired after a short while. The Twi-Lite Motel screamed VACANCY at me, NO flickering like a superimposition over darkness; Schrodinger’s Room. The bed scratched me and was much better suited as a coffin, the bathroom held an unsettling beige accentuation stuck in the seventies, and I met a few roaches who were scuttling around my feet, curious of their new visitor. The window spilled out into the main road, a used car shop right in spitting distance and illuminated by a sputtering road-lamp. Curtains fluttered with slight winds, flapping like sails to someplace far, far away from here—I envisioned myself an ex-pat, or perhaps a cosmopolite in foreign America. I thought of romance languages, changing my name, reinventing myself, or faking my death, thought about volumes in that dingy room, the stationery sole witness to the schizophrenic developments within my head. Soon, I had the world marked out on the whole pad—the complimentary pencil’s graphite shattered across twenty pages or so. 

 

In my dreams I kept on walking the same street I grew up on. It stretched on without end, each house mutating and morphing further and further till the landscape began to look like melted wax, with the accompaniment of a slow, garbled vinyl record that, upon further listening, sounded like an old pop hit my grandparents used to listen to when they were still alive. A car was speeding along, slowly, and in the dream I could see forwards and backwards and yet never thought of getting out of the way. I was a deer blinded by the headlights, hapless.

 

When the car made the collision I remember the steel and flesh melting together, disaster and victim inseparable. The dream switched to a third-person view as I saw my corpse strewn about the torn metal and floating blood in slow-motion like some kind of sculpture. Alice was the driver. She seemed really shocked, and yet had a clear and complete view of me and it seemed likeshe couldn’t press on the brakes at all. The doo-wop kept on playing, almost saccharine with its devotion, steadfast in its resistance to be anything else but completely sincere. 

 

I woke up in a cold sweat, the in-house clock dimly pointing out on LCD display that it was, in fact, 4:36, and as such it would be best to drift off into a dreamless sleep. I rummaged around my coat’s pockets and found a bottle of sleep aids, and woke up a few hours later violently throwing up, evidently the pills not having the effect I intended, probably having taken too many. In that sickly stupor I roamed around the town again, the alacrity of the grey sun like a panopticon searching my every move. A slight surreality penetrated all things within and outside of my vision, as if there lay some subtle esoteric magic imbued within all things, as if everything was pagan and my Catholic faith had simply beguiled me into thinking in terms of a pure monotheism. 

 

I thought of myself either to be dead and still dreaming or alive and hallucinating, as old buildings, old people gushed forth from the spring of memories deceased and became vivid and as visceral to me as blood on a white lamb. The fashions of yesterday flew flagrantly in my face, their cloth once tattered flags to be found in thrifts now seemingly straight off the rack. Almost instinctually I headed for Louie’s downtown, a newer joint the town had, only to see that its building was completely vacant. So I went back to the old haunt for a beer to sip on. I waved to the barmaid as I walked in. 

 

“Hey Martha, how’s the kid? Haven’t seen you for a long time, not since...” I checked the wall. “Well, about seven hours ago, give or take.” 

 

I tossed a few crumpled bills at the counter like shooting craps, but she only gave me a weird look. She signaled for Tony, one of the bartenders, to come over. I could just make out their whispering—

 

“Tone, who the hell is this kid? You seen him before?” 

 

He shook his head, both glancing sideways at me.

 

“Hell no.” 

 

They turned their backs towards me, and then Tony came by. 

 

“I’m gonna need to see some ID.” 

 

I scoffed, annoyed they were acting like they never knew me before. I tossed over my card and Tony scrutinized it, squintingit over. 

 

“Sorry kid,” he slid it back. “Ain’t old enough yet. Come back on your birthday, alright?” 

 

He waved me off. I looked at my license and sure enough it did say that I was twenty. In fact, the print said that the next time it would have to have it renewed was March 17th, 1990. 

 

I looked at the bar mirror, and sure as hell I was ten years younger, a bit fresher in the face with a little stubble and the same feathery hair I championed when I was still in college. The pieces were slowly coming to me in my druggy, hungover state of mind, but there was just one more thing I had to check. 

 

I held my breath at the door, checked my reflection, fixed my hair, and adjusted my clothes. If what I thought was going to happen was actually going to happen, then I could count this temporal displacement as a second chance to fix the future. To restore it. 

 

I knocked. Silence. Then, after a moment’s pause, a smoker’s rough-hewn voice replied “Coming!” and hurried towards the door. A lady no older than forty-three, red-haired, bejeweled hands, and a faint distinction of European beauty, came outside to greet me. 

 

“Hello, young man,” she smiled pleasantly. “How can I help you?” 

 

All of these characteristics belonged to Mrs. Vermoth, now my future mother-in-law. 

 

“I’d like to see your daughter. We have some mutual friends, butI haven’t had the pleasure of meeting her quite yet.” 

 

Her daughter, on account of her mother’s call that some cute boy wanted to meet her, came out as rare and as beautiful as an Egyptian jewel. I had loved her through her age (if you could even call it such when someone reaches their thirties), and now her youthful attractiveness was restored in complete to her twenty year-old self. Alice’s eyes had the glint of fiery passion subdued in jade mischief, wit embodied in long, thin fingers which wrapped hair like a cascade impatiently around themselves, and beauty inherent in all of her. 

 

She wore a polo underneath a cashmere sweater, a pair of jeans hugging her lovingly, and a dirtied pair of white sneakers, lazily tied. A red bow tied her hair at the back, in boughs like a weeping willow’s across her face. She extended her hand; her grin was something that was, with me, always something a little more than just friendly. 

 

“Hi! Alice Vermoth, pleased to meet ya.” 

 

Each marriage that started anew seemed failed to dissolve into the fog that lay at the edge of town, at the brim of night; Alice could never bring herself to stay with me more than ten years. We were never able to make it all work out, to make it last. But I thought, too, how bad would it be to stay in this cycle? To experience love at first sight over and over, the climbing joy of realizing a relationship and the promise of everlasting happiness in the other? But deep down I knew, even as I embarked on a thousand more decades, that this conceit would bear nothing for me—it was a tree withered, devoid of fruit. My love beheld no meaning, anymore, and I thirsted for a security that was only found in false renewal—another try, another day. 

 

I looked into those fresh, green eyes that sparked with sweet delight until they became dull and listless like marbles rolling anywhere without cause, beholden only to the laws of gravity. I experienced nights in hell and in cold, leaden beds because I also knew that there would be days of forgiveness and comfort, but every time I came to bear my sight into hers with the promise that I would love her forever I came to think it true less and less until the dregs of my affection were drained like cheap champagne. I went on one last date with Alice—our first—and told her I only liked her as a friend, but I did know a guy whomshe might be interested in, and that maybe they would hit it off. And I went back home and packed my things, and saw the world in a way I never had, living all thirty-two years of my life here. 

 

I went through the decade single for the most part, leaving a lot of time to myself, to God. I prayed a lot in those years, thought about joining the monastery and becoming a monk, the whole nine, but I found that the religious life held no promise for me as a proper vocation. So I learned another language, traveled across Europe, wrote a book, and eventually settled on a job as a copywriter for a sizable publisher. It paid well, and my coworkers liked hearing my stories. I lived in the city then, far away from my native soil. 

 

Yes, there were still nights when I thought about her; John, the friend I introduced her to, and Alice had been married for a decade now. Their daughter’s name was Henrietta. Annie had been my idea, my baby. John and Alice seemed genuinely happy together, and I wished them the best, prayed them the best, and Alice thanked me so during the speeches at reception for introducing them to each other and I could only give her the kind of smile that was weeping bitterly on the inside, my tears champagne and my cries drowning in the laughter and applause from the wedding guests. I knew I did the right thing, though—I knew John was a better man than I was, and at the end of the day I was happy, knowing that Alice was going to be in good hands for the rest of her life. 

 

I returned to Tarakova every now and then, still a regular at theusual haunt, and when I came back to the usual dive I ran mystory down for a few sympathy drinks, some drunks from the usual crowd shocked in their inebriated stupor with the barmaid patting me on the back, telling me that I was a damn fine storyteller with tears in her eyes, even. They were happy to have me back, they said, and I responded that it felt good to be here but that I couldn’t stay too long. And for all the tears lamenting the bottom of my glass there were still happy ones—if you really love someone, you gotta love what’s best for them.

 

I drained my glass and went back to that old greasy spoon, and I went to Jenny, who told me that they were closing October 3rd. I sat down for a good cup of coffee and a steaming platter of biscuits and gravy, and I felt no sadness, for any man who’s loved as much as I have can count himself as the luckiest of all. I tapped the ashes of my cigarette into the black swirling my cup as I left, spinning around meaninglessly and happily like tea leaves.

Noah Rymer is a dishwasher