When it was too much to be alone, and when dreams of my father stormed my mind; when I felt the hot guilt of failure, imagined that sad way my mother sometimes looked at me, like she knew more about me than I knew about myself—I would call Katya up and go over to her place and find a little company. 

I was in Katya’s living room one evening, happy to be with her, trying to convince her that I was benevolent, that I resented nobody in the world, no matter their transgressions.

“Prove it,” she said. 

How could I? Wouldn’t it take a lifetime? Instead, I tried to do a handstand, but I tumbled into her coffee table. 

We’d shared this cookie, snickerdoodle, 50mg THC. No newbie stuff, but not soul-sucked-through-cosmic-straw, either. First bite we melted in our mouths, tongues mashed to roof. I wanted bad to feel different but half an hour passed and nothing, except my back smarted. 

I’m a failure at getting high, even. I thought maybe we should get something to eat.

“Let’s get something to eat,” I said.

She was lying on the couch. 

“Everything is upside down,” she said. “I think it’s working.”

“Your head is just off the cushion,” I said. 

But then my blood bleated loud and the room grew beyond familiar. Time folded over itself and I experienced each moment like it had already occurred. Sometimes I felt this way, as if reliving a life I’d already lived, my failures repeated over and over in an infinite regress, like I was sandwiched between a pair of parallel mirrors. This felt most potent, most true, when stoned. I’d seen the tips of Katya’s black hair spool on the carpet and I’d stared down into her eyes forever. We would die, we would be born again, I would be a failure eternally. 

What I wanted now was one true, unrepeated experience of my own. 

“I definitely feel something,” she said.

We decided to drive around in my Toyota Camry, which wasn’t sexy, but I inherited it from my father—his only son, his only child—and was obligated to his memory. Sometimes Katya sat in the back and pretended I was a taxi. She did that now, commanding me, gesturing regally. “Oh driver, you’re going oh so slowly, driver, won’t you speed up?” But then her pale jaw gaped like the hinges were stuck and she quit talking. A full few blocks went by like this until she said, “May I sit next to you, driver?” She crawled up front, and for a moment, her perfect jeaned butt wagged in my face. She rolled down the window. 

“You’d make more money with a GED,” she said. 

“Like how so?” 

Katya was a good friend but she knew how to irk me. Like my mother, she laid plans for my hypothetical future success, in which I showered every day and volunteered at a food shelter where everyone knew my name. 

“You could get a better job. Stop making sandwiches. Apply to college or do something you love.”

“That’s all abstract,” I said. “I like shredding chicken breast.”

The summer night crowded in, shoving its way past the ending day, and soon it would be cool and dark and romantic. We were driving across the bridge and a train on the tracks below was a long smear lit by the sunset, sliding off toward the milky pink sky out across the prairie and mountains. 

“Well I like that which is abstract,” she said. “I’m going to be famous and powerful one day because of my abstractions. I’m going to be governor.” 

“What’s your first act as governor?” 

She thought this over.

“Free lunch for all. Sandwiches. No one hungry, ever.”

All the talk of sandwiches got us hungry for sandwiches, so we drove to Quiznos, where Jeff, my boss, was working. 

It was the new location in a strip mall on Grand, across from the university, the location that smelled permanently like peppermint for reasons I never discovered. The neighborhood nearby was all Obama yards. I’d bought the cookie from Jeff’s younger brother, Frank, but Jeff didn’t know. Jeff was a no-drugs-period type of guy. A McCain guy. 

He stood on his toes to muscle his calves and rarely washed his hands. When we came in, he was pacing behind the bar in tiny, arched dinosaur steps, T9-ing his phone in furrowed concentration. He was alone in the shop. He liked this amount of power over everything, a fresh-smelling kingdom unto himself. This is why he’d never leave Wyoming, he’d said before: he was a misanthrope. 

I found the store lonely.

“JEFF!” I shouted. 

He muttered a Jeff-specific curse word—“darnation”—and dropped his phone. 

“You come in on your day off?” Jeff said, retrieving it and wiping both sides on his shirt. “You always come in on your day off. What life do you have?” 

“I’m the boss here,” I said. “The customer is the boss.” 

Katya and I stood admiring the selection of breads. We could choose whichever we liked and the generosity of being able to choose overwhelmed me. I thought I might cry, it was all so beautiful, that we lived in a place with such an abundance of warmth and food, that this experience was ours specifically. I thought of all my father had given up when he died, and maybe because it was summer, maybe it was because I was with Katya, driving his old car, maybe it was because I was stoned—but he was in the background of my mind that day. I had the dumbest want, to share a sandwich with him, to introduce him to Katya. 

“I know what you want,” Jeff said.

“How could you?” Katya replied.

“Not you, Katya. Dooles here.”

“Hey,” I said. “Hey, hey. It’s Dooley.” 

“You want the country white bread,” he said. 

He was right, though I didn’t know he was right until the moment he said it, the desire arising with the suggestion. He set his phone on the board next to the bread.

“What else?” I asked.

“You always get turkey breast,” he said. “And you like it with American cheese.”

I was salivating. It was like I was already eating the sandwich. It was the sandwich I always had and always wanted. 

“Jesus you’re good,” I said. “Do I want toppings?”

“You bet your sweet ass you want toppings. Banana peppers. Olives. You like pickled things. Pickles. And the thing about you Dooles is you put the lettuce on before you toast it.” 

“That sounds risky,” Katya said, unsure. “Maybe you should try something new?” 

But I didn’t. He finished making the sandwich while texting with the other hand.

We ate by the front window in a booth bolted to the linoleum. The light outside became dimmer than the fluorescent light inside and we watched in real time as our reflections grew brighter in the glass than Grand Avenue. I thought I looked aged, then I thought what a stupid thought, I couldn’t be any older than I was: nineteen and longing for perspective, to have some vantage on my life. It felt good to see my face filled in by the world, the trees and the cars, the road, the university students walking by. 

“It’s not so grand,” I said, looking through myself to the slow dragging cars.

“Mine’s real good,” Katya said.

“No, the avenue,” I said. My lungs tingled, ice flecks. “It’s just a wimpy street.”

She set her sandwich down on the wax paper. I’d irked her. Every breath felt freezing cold.

“Don’t talk bad about this place,” she said. “You’ve never been in Burns. You don’t know wimpy. I could tell you awful stories about what happened to me in Burns.”

I’d had to look it up when she first said where she was from, a tiny town of a few hundred closer to the Nebraska border than our state’s capital. 

“What happened to you in Burns?”

“And you know what else?” she said. “I love it here. It’s not just that Burns was horrible and I was always hungry. I feel cosmopolitan here. There’s broadband. There’s city snowplows. International students. And sometimes—don’t be offended—but sometimes—”—I knew what she was going to say before she said it—“—you make me feel guilty. For enjoying this.”

“I apologize,” I said. “You’ll make a perfect governor.” 

I stuffed the preordained sandwich into my mouth with what felt like true remorse, my father flitting by in the window, which in fact was my own reflection. 

“Are your toes tingling?” she asked. “Mine are all staticky.”

When we finished, we decided to walk to the movie theater, ten blocks east. In the cool early evening, the walk would be refreshing. The air was filled with the smell of cut grass and sagebrush, hinted of autumn. Katya had left her sweater in the Camry. She crawled into the back while I rummaged for my phone, which had fallen between the console and seat during our drive. I suspected Jeff was texting horrible things at me. 

Instead, I found the pot cookie Frank sold us, sleeved in wax paper, a neat bandage of masking tape shutting it tight. 

“Huh,” I said.

“What?” 

“Nothing,” I said, leaving the cookie where I found it.

“Is this about what I said?” 

She closed the back door. I closed the front.

“No.”

“Don’t feel bad about that.”

“I don’t.”

I couldn’t recall who’d produced what we’d eaten earlier. The mix-up must’ve happened in transit, after we’d met with Frank, or when we stopped at Subway, which cookies were moister than Quiznos’, and which I frequently imbibed. It was a divine mystery. Whatever the case, the discovery meant we’d eaten just a regular cookie and simulated our high. While we walked through the quickly chilling evening air, we continued the simulation. 

Perhaps this knowledge should have erased the way I felt. Instead, my neck turned liquid, sparkling static. Everything glowed bright.

The university football practice fields were on the way to the theater, a few blocks from Quiznos and prisoned off by a giant iron fence across Grand. University buildings throbbed beyond the green. Players ran beneath floodlights, birthing pain in one another in giant, loud collisions. Two guys smacked together and dropped to the recently mowed grass.

“Why does my back hurt?” I asked, turning to Katya. 

She tugged her sweater lapels together.

“You tumbled into my coffee table,” she said.

“Oh yeah,” I said. “You know Ryan Armstrong?” 

“No,” she said.

“Oh,” I said. “Well, he’s on the football team. I thought you might’ve been in econ with him last semester or something.”

“What about him?” she asked.

“Oh,” I said, “I thought maybe he’s over there right now, getting smashed. We went to high school together and he decided he’d walk onto the university team. And now he’s a star.”

“That’s what work can do for you,” she said, knowingly. “That’s what working real hard does.”

“I work hard,” I said. “Some people have bad luck.”

“Not you. You’re blessed. We both are.”

My mom worked for years at the movie theater a couple blocks off Grand and when they screened X-rated movies she’d go to midnight showings for free with my dad and canoodle in the back row. Concessions were discounted for employees and they’d load up on hot dogs and large cups of pop. I imagined their hands becoming sticky in the dark, their hair holding the rank smell of popcorn long after the reel finished. They were students at the university then. She won’t say it, but she’s not happy with the way I’ve turned out, not yet at least. She worries I do all the drugs. That’s what she says: “I’m worried you do all the drugs.” 

After my dad died, she worried I’d become like him, the far look in his eyes reflected in my own, that I’d become a pattern in her life. That night with Katya, I wondered if I’d be stuck forever in a series of repetitions. Did wanting newness meant finding its opposite?

We entered the theater, assailed by the bright lights and the electric pops and bangs of the flashing pay-to-play arcade games lined against a wall. Two boys not much younger than us were shooting zombies in a familiar fashion. We bought tickets to a romantic comedy and stood in a short line for popcorn. Katya stared for a long time at a standee cutout of a man my height who was smiling, holding a football.

“That’s not a real person,” I reported. “That’s a cutout, an advert. It’s not me.”

“I love popcorn,” Katya replied, looking at me now with anticipation and something like desire. “Popcorn’s my weakness.”

At the counter, I asked the concessions girl if she’d layer the oil for us. It was a hassle for her but it was worth it. There was oil on her forehead, or sweat, and her big lips were painted red and cracked. I wondered if I knew her from high school.

“Do I know you?” I asked her. “Is your name Cindy?”

She pointed at her nametag. It read “Cindy.” 

“But I’ve never seen you before that I remember,” she said. 

The popcorn was gold and I didn’t know if the light or the popped kernels themselves lent the luster.

“She’s too young,” Katya whispered, as we walked away with our big shining bag. “She’s just a baby.”

“I didn’t notice,” I replied, but my face grew hot with shame. Katya thought I had been flirting with Cindy.

After the opening credits, I realized we’d bought tickets to a movie I’d already seen.

“We’ve already watched this,” I whispered. 

We were in the back row. I wondered if I should hold her hand or not.

“I haven’t,” she said.

“Can I hold your hand?” I whispered. 

“You ask?” she said. “You’re asking this?”
“Yeah,” I whispered. “You should be a little quieter if we’re going to talk.”

“Yeah, okay,” she whispered.

“About being quiet?” I asked.

“About holding my hand,” she whispered.

A dozen people were seated in the near-dark, their heads silhouetted below us. I took Katya’s hand and when our fingers interlocked my hand numbed instantly; the numbness traveled up my arm and into my body until my limbs were numb and I orbited the planet, skyrocketed out of myself and into a feeling I’d never felt before. This was new, a marriage of the abstract and concrete, floating above myself but clasped to Katya. 

My sense of failure had always been spectral, unmoored, a haunted feeling that whatever I was doing would be better done by someone who wasn’t me. 

I quit high school after my dad drove to Happy Jack winter break of my senior year, folded his jeans and plaid in a pile on the Camry’s driver seat, and waded through the snow to the base of a ponderosa. A cross-country skier found him a few days later sitting up, cross-legged. He was frozen that way, in that position, or that’s how I think of it. That’s what I was told, and I right away thought that if only I was a different son, if only I wasn’t this person, then maybe he’d still be here. 

I didn’t want to look at him in the casket, but I did, of course, and his skin still seemed blue. He didn’t want to make a mess, he wanted to be polite. For years he had been plagued and sorrowful. Something broke loose when Matthew Shepherd was killed, just outside of town. He became obsessed with the crime, held it close to his heart, and though he wasn’t gay, or not that I knew, he couldn’t see the town the same after that, couldn’t pretend it was something it wasn’t. He’d been born here, he’d gone to war for this place, he’d come back when so many other people he knew hadn’t, and then a boy, not much older than his own son, had been tied to a buck and rail fence and murdered. He watched the skin of the town’s liberal surface peeled back to a bloody fascist interior that had always been there, only he was too ignorant to see it. This I pieced together after the fact, after reading his journals, talking to my mom. I was only ten or eleven when Matthew was killed and did not see the entire shape of the thing, did not understand the hate—that church, those vile slobbering people—or the love, angels in front of the courthouse. We were flooded by media, artists who came and played benefit concerts: Peter, Paul and Mary, Elton John. I watched the HBO movie years later, with Christina Ricci, recognized friends and neighbors performing penance as extras, participating in a pattern. 

What I could see at the time was microcosmic: my father weeping at the kitchen table in his socks and underwear, my mother stroking his back. I wanted to know what was wrong, but the question was too big for either of them to answer. And so I thought it was me.

Now, in the theater, everything became strange, myself foremost. Below us, moviegoers’ silhouettes glimmered new; the infinite regress regressed. I’d never held Katya’s hand before. I’d never known I wanted to until I did. I felt charged with the possibilities of what a new life could look like, what elsewhere might mean. If she asked, I would drive her across plains and deserts, glance at her in the mirror, admire her low voice and confidence. It was her lips I wanted to kiss. 

When the movie finished, we walked to Washington Park, across the street, the same park where my friends hosted graduation parties a year prior, before they moved away. Some who stayed pretended not to know me when they ate at Quiznos—they’d order from me as if I were just anyone, just a guy working at Quiznos, no future, no past they knew, which I understand now, after years away, that desire to split from everything familiar, to renounce the face of the past asking you what sandwich you’d like to eat. 

But when I think of those long, repetitive days in which I imagined my life was ever about to begin, and of those former friends who’d order politely without even a secret glance of recognition, only transactional swiftness; and when I think of my father, of all that was new with Katya—not knowing then what I know now, how that summer wasn’t the beginning of the rest of my life, but just another summer, another summer made less painful by the grace and kindness of a person I still love, wherever she is now, whoever she has become—thinking of those years, sometimes it all still smarts.

It was dark outside and the park was poorly lit and the cottonwoods had spewed strands of fluffy white seed so there were white spits strung along the curb and hanging from the playset and swings. Katya sneezed. The neighborhood was quiet until a car with low suspensions passed an Obama house playing loud bass, turning and driving past the theater toward the practice fields a few blocks away. We could see the field lights’ many lit bulbs like weird alien UFOs floating above the single-story houses and elms between.

“I still feel gone,” Katya said. 

She held my arm with both of hers as we slow-walked along the footpath. I felt the pulse of her heart through her muscles, and it sang loudly, against darkness and the future and a circle of repetitions. I could never tell her we ate the wrong cookie, couldn’t erase retrospectively what we appeared to share now. 

“You think Ryan Armstrong does all the drugs?” I asked.

What I wanted to ask was, what marked failure? Would a moment in our lives arrive when no amount of work could save us? But I knew what she would say because she’d said it before: we’re young, we’re young, there is time yet.

“The cotton is so white. It’s glow-in-the-dark,” she said.

“What about Burns?” I said.

“What about it?”
“I want to know about your life.”

We stopped walking. She looked at me worried. We were on the edge of the park, still in sight of the movie theater and the marquee’s red glow on the street. I felt like I’d known her all my life but I’d only known her since spring—we met at a college party I hadn’t been invited to—and now here we were, arm in arm at night. She placed her hand on my chest. My heart beat quickly and I thought I felt her fingers pressing through my skin and bones, clutching at my heart. 

“You can’t just ask a person something they don’t want to say.”

“Why not?”

“Please don’t,” she said.

Her voice cracked and I realized she might cry. She looked up at me then, and I knew she was going to kiss me before she did. Her lips were soft and her tongue moved against mine. When we were done, she pressed her hips and her body tight into me. 

Were we still so young? I felt cast out of youth, the unburdened play of life, felt as if I were clamped in the jaws of my father’s death. He had been a quiet, kind man, or that’s what I thought I knew of him. I never heard him ask anyone a question they wouldn’t answer. No one could save him. Maybe I did resent him. I didn’t want to, but maybe I did. Should suffering beget suffering? Where does it end? If the universe ever circles back to that time, I’ll ask him that one question, even though I know it’s something he won’t want to say.

Katya saw the playset over my shoulder, and then she was tugging me backward, saying she had an idea, something we hadn’t ever done together, and before we knew it we were both swinging in the dark. 

I pushed off and up I sailed, pretending I could jump the houses and parachute into the practice field I couldn’t see. 

“Let’s get married!” she shouted. 

“Now?” I asked. “I’d love to. I’ll do anything you want.”

I could see it, could see our life receding into the future, could see every day like some variation on this day, could see the simulated high wane, the true love rush in to fill the space between us, could see the pain of our pasts sweated out of us like a bad fever, and what would be left would be now, and now, and now, and tomorrow, and every tomorrow after that, too. I wanted it, badly. She just shook her head.

“I mean like on the swings,” she said. “We have to swing side by side and then we’re married. Didn’t you ever play that game?”

“That sounds impossible,” I said. 

She pulled ahead of me and when I reached the top of the arc she dropped behind and though I kicked my legs to change momentum and keep pace, I couldn’t match her, I kept lagging or zipping past, the summer air perfumed and chilled as I swung through it with all my will bent on this one synchronized moment, and when time came and we were side by side, exactly where I wanted to be, I reached out to her, to take her hand, but she sped on by.