You order a three-egg breakfast at Denny’s, and the toast comes out burnt as sin. But you are a coward, and the waitress has this smile that etch-a-sketches the longness of a day onto her under-eyes, and it is 3:00am in the sense that you feel shame for being in places that welcome you, so it is never brought to light beyond the grit-specks on your teeth.
Your buddy Curtis is sitting across from you in the booth, even though he doesn’t work nights the way you do, and drinking coffee at 3:00am on a Tuesday qualifies as masochism for anybody who knows what color the sun should be before it sets. But he’s worried about you, the way he’s always worried about you. In this way Curtis has always been a monolith of care—your therapist calls it upward comparison, the way you see the smallest kindness from the ground up—an act of giants. You think about him the way loggers used to talk about Paul Bunyan, felling acres of timber every time he sneezed. The type of guy that carves tributaries into rivers with his hands and makes cattails flower from the mud. It becomes difficult to picture yourself as mud, so the metaphor ends there, as syrup stalls on his plate.
He asks you how you’ve been and takes a big toothy bite of his toast, which did not come out burnt, and you say okay because that is the metric of understanding that exists between you. Okay is a measured outcome—a net neutral of language that prevents care from becoming a seesaw. Okay is the big hoodie that hides the ribs like sandbars that have surfaced from your torso, the pounds you have somehow lost again. Okay is what he said when you asked him to become the co-bearer of your history. You press down on the volcanic ash of the rye and it is functionally inedible, and the compression makes it small, the way many other things are small, and suddenly you’re thinking about Paul Bunyan again, making bootheels into lakes into ecosystems in Minnesota. The sense of impact that comes with a story.
Another story comes to mind about a doomed two-day outing—Troop 76 on an odyssey of planning papers and trail mix and microbuses into the great northern plains of Dayton, Ohio. You went with Curtis and four other boys to see the Johnny Appleseed Museum there, which was actually just a house, which wasn’t even Johnny Appleseed’s house, since apparently he was born in Massachusetts, and the museum was just a bric-a-brac of his non-adventure merchandise. What they did have were wall banners and informational signposts, the words stewardship and labor-of-love applied on them in coatings like paint. You sat under a wooden monument of Johhny during breaks, a 7-foot-tall visage carved into the ironic sinew of an old apple tree, its heartwood shaped into an axehead at his feet. You wondered what stewardship really meant in that moment—if it was something to be repaid, or repented. Then Curtis came out with a kitschy souvenir apple and carved a snake’s length of its skin with a pocketknife, and you sat chewing right alongside him, figuring it may not matter either way.
Curtis watches you fumble shoelaces of bacon fat for about half an hour, the lights catching him and the table and the waitress in a dirty-carpet yellow, before you put your fork down next to an ad for window-washers, and suddenly the meal is over, in a way that makes it feel like it’s been over for a while now, or that it had never even started.
Curtis makes Jenga of the food-pulp-plate-cup amalgam at the edge of the table. The waitress gives a stare like helium balloons when you pay the check—rising, rising, taking you in and floating away. You stand, and Curtis hugs you like he’s tweezing a matchstick, and he says same time next week? As if that question were meant for anybody, but found its way to you first. You re-assess yourself, just a flossy sliver in his capacity for care, a pore in the sandstone of it, then you hug him back with your beanpole arms and say of course.
That entire time, you’re looking at the old vinyl booth, damaged all the way to its seams. There is a dent where you sat, where the fabric meets the laminate. It looks like you, the crevice of you, or some shape that might be you somewhere long into the future. You think of legacy, of stories, of mythos and care, of Americana and truth, and you wonder what will result from this—if someday people will see this impression and make a world of it. One where you exist as lakes or acres of trees or something that you never were. If they will give you a new name, a new history, a way of living revised on and on until you are mountainous with the love others imagine within you.
When you make it home, there is an apple on the counter. Faux-plastic red, narrow, ripe. You turn it under the sink light, trying to remember if it was a gift—and if so, from whom. When your teeth break the skin, the first things you taste are enamel and the collapse of flesh, the processing of juice and skin into mush. Then the swallow, feelings of it being carried away, converted, kept. The rind becomes tiny against your palm, until your mouth wades in its remains, and you count seeds as they trickle from the core, their cyanide compositions resting on the stone. You roll them along the counters one at a time—everything they are—then dry them in a towel, rush them into the yard, and pitch them into the green.
You call Curtis in the pre-dawn, just to tell him all about it.
