Way Down Deep, page 1
Way Down Deep
Charlotte Stein
Cara McKenna
Contents
1. Friday
2. Saturday
3. Sunday
4. Monday
5. Tuesday
6. Wednesday
7. Thursday
8. Friday
9. Saturday
10. Sunday
11. Monday
12. Tuesday
13. Wednesday
14. Thursday
15. Friday
16. Sunday
17. Monday
18. Tuesday
19. Wednesday
20. Thursday
21. Friday
22. Saturday
About Charlotte Stein
About Cara McKenna
Also by Charlotte Stein
Also by Cara McKenna
©2017 Charlotte Stein and Cara McKenna
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the written permission of the author, except where permitted by law.
This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
First Edition
Edited by Ruth Homrighaus
Cover design by Cara McKenna
Formatting by Vellum
ISBN: 978-0-9980911-2-9
With our deepest thanks to Ruth and Molly, trusted midwives at the birth of our wonky baby. And as always, thank you, lovely readers.
1
Friday
Unknown Number
3.03am
I know it’s pointless, writing to you. I know you won’t text back.
But I’ve been stuffing everything down for so long, if I don’t put it into words it’s going to rot me from the inside out.
This town’s the size of a mud puddle, but it still feels like I’m drowning here. Drowning in strangers. Drowning in silence, more than anything else.
Drowning doesn’t even sound that bad, some days. People say suicide is the coward’s way out, but is it? Doing nothing is cowardly. Suicide takes action.
Jesus, this is so pathetic. Thank fuck you’ll never actually read this. Anyhow. Goodnight, wherever you are.
2
Saturday
1.46am
I’ve rewrote this text fifty times, and gone back and forth on whether to reply about a million times more. Even now I’ve got no clue whether I should be saying something—because I’m not the person you want to talk to. I don’t know who this person is or whether they care or not but I can tell you this:
I care. I care about you, stranger. At least enough to try throwing you a life jacket before your head disappears beneath the water line.
Yeah, suicide does take action.
But staying afloat takes more when you’ve got nothing to hold onto.
So just grab a hold of this, okay?
3
Sunday
9.10am
Oh my god, I’m SO sorry. This used to be someone else’s number.
That’s super fucked up, that I probably woke you with all that psycho sad sack bullshit at 3am. You were really kind to reply, but don’t waste any more time worrying about me. I probably drank a little more than I should have that night.
I’m okay, really. Just feeling sorry for myself. Though now I feel like such a crazy melodramatic asshole, there’s not much room left over for self-pity. I guess I have you to thank for that. So thanks, stranger.
Sorry again. I promise I’ll delete this number now.
1.05pm
I just spent pretty much all morning trying to decide what to do. I’d hit on a possible answer while eating breakfast, then by the time I was done it would seem like the most foolish words that anyone has ever spoken. At one point, I even made a pros and cons list for the two main options, but still didn’t really get much closer. Which sounds pretty extreme, I know, but then even the smallest answers feel dangerous.
I mean, I could say you don’t seem melodramatic. But what if that makes you slide back into the water? And if I say you did, I’m definitely going to be that arsehole who rolls their eyes and jokes about people who are depressed.
So in the end, I thought I’d skip out on both and choose option three:
Don’t delete my number.
Or at least, don’t delete it because you think you bothered me. Even if expressing depressed feelings falls into that category, I’m never doing anything that you could possibly interrupt. As we speak, I’m sprawled on my couch in pyjamas I’ve yet to change out of, while the fiftieth episode of something I’m not even watching plays on the TV.
The very worst crime you’ll ever be guilty of is making me rewind something back to the beginning.
4
Monday
1.48am
I hope this won’t wake you.
I hope that, yet there I went sending it anyhow. Just more fodder for my growing asshole cred.
The first time you replied I got a little freaked out, because it popped up with someone else’s name. Someone who wouldn’t be texting me back unless Jesus fell off the wagon and started drunkenly tossing miracles around.
Speaking of drunk, yet again I’m probably not what you’d call entirely lucid. No doubt the liquor played a part in loosening my fingers enough for one to slip and hit the send button.
All afternoon, I tried to talk myself into deleting your number, so I wouldn’t wind up spraying my sad all over you again in a fit of sloppy weakness exactly like this one, but in the end I couldn’t. I just changed the contact from the old name to Stranger.
Anyhow, it was nice to hear from you, stranger. Like I was shouting into the void and the void was kind enough to whisper back. The void cares more than most of my friends, as it turns out.
Also, what are you watching? I’m watching some Nazi documentary. What is it with British TV? So goddamn many Nazis.
2.58am
You don’t have to worry about waking me up. Chances are you won’t be. I sleep like someone trying to start an engine stuffed with sugar—in stuttery fits and starts. Really you’re saving me from staring at the ceiling. Or from nightmares that are usually about me, staring at the ceiling.
Oh and I don’t care if you’re drunk, either. My stone-cold sober is usually weirder than most people’s blotto. I mean, when you said you wanted to call me Stranger, my first response was a burst of happiness at the idea of having a secret name. How ridiculous is that?
And is it more or less ridiculous that I’ve already given you a secret name back? Smith, I’ve called you, after the author of that poem. You know the one—I was much too far out all my life, and not waving but drowning.
Hopefully that’s not too pretentious. Or too much of a reminder of the miracle that isn’t happening. Or the friends that aren’t calling. They’re all fools to not want to talk about Nazis on British TV at three in the morning, I promise.
I want to talk to you about it, and I barely know you. I don’t even know where you’re from. Up until this point I thought you were British, and so understood our strange ways. But now I see I will have to guide you through them. Explain in detail why we love dull-voiced documentaries about Nazis so much. Help you understand what makes them so vital to our country.
Here it is, the big revelation:
I haven’t got a bloody clue.
It’s as much a mystery to me as it is to you.
I don’t even think I’ve ever watched one all the way through—right now I’m in the middle of The Killing. Give me dismembered bodies and haunted detectives and rain-drenched roads over grainy footage of Churchill any day of the goddamn week.
3.18am
Hi, stranger.
I stayed awake on the off chance you’d reply. I waited and watched that entire stupid documentary, and then there was a ping just as the credits rolled. And then another. Nine pings, and I waited for them to stop for good before I read what you wrote.
Was I afraid to interrupt you? I think maybe. Or maybe something else. Some greedy cousin of anticipation.
I held my breath and waited, waited, and the pings kept coming, like a box of chocolates filling up. It made me feel strange, and warm, like this middle-shelf bourbon is doing. Plus some other bad food-and-beverage similes I can’t think of just now.
Yeah, I’m not from these parts. I’m from the States, New Mexico. It’s a long story how I wound up here, in a tiny little turd of a village just off the M1. It’s not quirky and picturesque and beset by a disproportionate number of murders like the British villages in the shows my aunt likes to watch on PBS. I’d kill for a murder. This place is dull as fuck.
But here I am, and here I’m stuck for the time being. It’s very wet and gray. I don’t mean to piss on your country, but I won’t lie, it’s rough. At least when you come from a place that’s dry and sunny 362 days a year, it is. And if you’re a whiny douche who can’t handle a little rain.
I’m homesick, ignore me. Maybe only March sucks. Maybe April will be better.
Hey, look at me, the eternal optimist!
I feel like I should wonder if you’re a man or a woman, if you’re sixty or sixteen, but I don’t really care. I think maybe you’re a woman, but that’s probably just me being sexist, think ing only women know about poetry or worry about strangers.
You don’t have to tell me. It doesn’t matter. I only care that you’re a human and you’re awake and you’re kind, when you have no reason to be. That you said, “I’m here,” when almost anybody else who got those texts would’ve said, “Fuck off, stalker, wrong number.” If they bothered to say anything at all.
It makes me wonder what I would’ve said. I feel small and a little ashamed that I can’t guess.
Now me, I don’t know about poetry, but that one you quoted sounds nice. I’ll look it up. When I read that you think of me as Smith I first thought of Elliott Smith, because lately I’ve been listening to all the music that used to make depression sound so romantic, back before I knew what depression actually feels like.
I wish I had the same problems I did back then. I didn’t even know what problems were, or what hopelessness is like to live inside, like a well that’s so empty there’s no water and no floor, not even any walls, too bottomless for you to make out the sky or stars or hear somebody calling your name. If anyone’s even noticed you went missing.
Fucking similes. Hey, maybe this one makes you my bucket. Deep, right? I think I better leave the poetry to you.
I’ve been listening to way too much Nick Drake lately, too. He’s my kind of poet. You showing up makes me think of some of his lyrics. Now you’re here. Brighten my northern sky.
Before I shut the fuck up, I want to let you know, I’m not going to kill myself. I can’t. I have something too important to live for.
Believe me, I fantasize about it. I fantasize that it’s an option, that I could hit the stop button on the shit show my life’s become, but I can’t, and I won’t. Promise. So don’t worry. I’m here to stay.
Now try to get some sleep, stranger-bucket.
3.30am
First of all, can I just say that I love you waiting for the pings? Every time I text I get this slight sizzle of nerves that you’ll want to text back the way normal people do—immediate and between the seven thousand things I want to say, instead of all slow and deliberate and like letters. I love that this is like sending each other letters.
And don’t worry, I love your similes.
I’m currently rolling around in all of them, especially the chocolate one.
Though can you blame me? Now all I can think about is a hot dry place I’ve never been to, and the taste of middle-shelf bourbon that I’m imagining is sticky and warm, and a well that’s so empty and lightless you need me to let down the rope.
I hope I’m doing it well enough. I hope you’re telling the truth.
I hope the something that is too important is as cool and amazing as you sound.
You deserve amazing just for Elliot Smith. I’ve never heard him in my whole life—I didn’t even know he existed. But now I’m lying on my bed in the dark, his words whispering over me in waves. Drink up baby, stay up all night, with the things you could do, you won’t but you might…
You’re probably going to tell me that they mean something specific. That they’re about a girlfriend he lost to heroin or some sleazy thing he did in a bar one time. But just for right now I want to imagine those words are only for me, or for both of us, like a soundtrack to the weird conversation we seem to be slipping into.
Because this is slipping, for me.
Usually I hesitate. I bargain with my own words.
I let out two as long as ten stay behind.
Yet I don’t seem to be doing that with you.
I wonder why? Part of me thinks it’s because you don’t know me, can’t see me, aren’t even aware of what gender I am. But mostly I read you saying things about suicide, and it’s like you’re slicing through the wall that holds back everything I would usually never say.
I would never usually say things like cool and amazing, but I don’t care if it could be the last thing you ever know about yourself. All that matters is that you do know it.
Goodnight, Smith.
Sleep well, under whatever bright northern sky I provide.
10.52am
Yes, letters. You’re right, that’s what these are.
I read your latest one in bed just before the sun came up, and I’ve been turning that thought around and around all morning as I showered and made coffee and breakfast and took care of things around here.
I can’t remember the last time anyone sent me a letter, or I sent one to somebody. Not even a heartfelt email. People don’t really do that these days—take turns, wait for the other person to finish saying what’s on their mind.
We don’t tell stories about ourselves anymore, just let the mundane blurt from our brains into our phones, hit send, half-read the reply in a rush, knowing it’s our turn to blurt again, to send a photo of our boring lunches or our boring faces, made very slightly less boring by the application of a colorized filter.
Anyhow, I’ve found that idea distracting in a nice way.
And I’m finding our correspondence very refreshing. It makes me want to wait until all the pings are in, and to read what you write, then let it settle over me before I rush to word my own reply. I haven’t done that in far too long.
Anyhow. My important something, as you put it, is about as far from cool as a something can get.
That’s a lesson I’ve been learning in recent weeks. That “important” and “cool” rarely intersect. Cool used to be a very big part of my life.
Before I moved here, I owned a liquor store. To say “liquor store” doesn’t paint the right picture, though. It was a boutique, basically, in the most happening part of Albuquerque. The kind of place where parents blow $600 on a bottle of ancient Scotch to give their kid when he graduates law school, where guys my age drop ninety bucks on bourbon in an attempt to convince ourselves we’re connoisseurs, not alcoholics.
I guess I’m probably a hipster. Or was. I don’t have any cred anymore.
I used to, though. My shop was like hipster church. Everyone came by each week to worship and be seen and empty their wallets.
It meant a lot to me, that shop. I picked out every light fixture, stocked it with stuff you couldn’t find anywhere else in the state. Hipsters fucking love hard-to-find shit, and I loved being the guy who found it.
That shop was me. It defined me the way being in a band defined me when I was in high school. I’ve always been like that. Like there’s not enough bones and meat inside me to build a person worth knowing. Like I needed a costume as big as a whole fucking building to pass for one.
And I did pass. I had dozens of friends, all as hip and clever and unique as me. But when shit went south and I had to sell the shop, it turned out I’d picked those friends the same way I had the light fixtures. They looked good, looked right and slick and hard-to-find, but they didn’t really give a shit about the guy behind the counter. They only cared about shining. Same as me.
Anyhow, that was the old me. The new me’s got nothing to hide behind, just this crazy, sad, inescapable anchor keeping me here, neck-deep in my own incompetence twenty-four hours a day.
I’m no one here. I’m that sad American guy who rents the apartment above—get this—the village off-license. It’s so fucking ironic, it could grace a forty-dollar T-shirt.
But that’s plenty about me for now. I want to know more about you. Tell me something. Anything. You seem full inside the way I feel empty. You’ve got poetry for marrow and compassion pumping through your veins. You seem genuine, and earnest. Everything I’m not. So tell me how you do it, stranger.
11.45am
I think the truth is it’s easy to seem full when you’ve spent your whole life not letting anything out. I have years of conversations inside of me; decades of unvoiced thoughts. They’re practically straining at my seams. Honestly, it’s a relief to have someone pluck at the stitches holding them in. To have someone actually ask about me.
I just wish there was something of worth in there to tell you. I have no interesting history—or at least nothing as interesting as hipster Scotch and fake friends and being in a band. I didn’t fall from the grace of some golden false god.
