Sometimes, you take it with you
The hours in the cell had felt like years, and only when they were over did he realize how wrong they were, like a dream that seems rational when you’re in it.
Some detectives had come in and asked him about the shootout, about who he knew that might want to do that too him, about who he owed, then they got quiet and let him theorize, then they did it all over again. The weird thing was, they hadn’t seemed nearly as interested as the guys from robbery who had tried to get him to confess to robbing that old boomer.
If he had to guess, they had taken him out of his cell for questioning ten times, but he knew that was impossible. Sometimes they had asked him about a quarter. Sometimes they didn’t have any eyes. Sometimes the interrogation room had no walls, just a floor floating in endless black.
One time, they brought him into the interrogation room, and it had just been him sitting on the other side of the table from himself, berating him for ruining his life. He had tried to convince the other him that he was the real Cooper, but the other him, his hair cut like a boy scout wearing a fucking anime t-shirt, had shaken his head and said, “No, I’m the Real Cooper, you just don’t remember,” and somehow Cooper had felt that he was right.
The shootout was often irrelevant to these hallucinations, and at times he had been sure it had never even happened. His lawyer (if he really had a lawyer) hadn’t even mentioned it, seemingly more concerned with the speed of his bail proceedings, asking him if he had friends in high places. He had spent a few hours convinced he had made the whole thing up and had really just been brought in for boosting or a B and E or something, until it came up on the news, but eventually even that sunk beneath the churn of delusion and paranoia.
His time in the pod unfolded, not linearly, but in airburst fashion, like an explosion folding back in on itself. An onslaught of unending false awakenings. Sometimes he would jolt awake in the pod, or wake up with his head on the table, the detectives staring at him, or the darkness closing in on him, or the demons with otherworld eyes laughing at him. Sometimes he woke up ten times in a row.
At the end, it was all he could do to sit there and wait for the next one without screaming.
When they told him he had posted bail and his girlfriend was waiting for him, he knew he was dreaming, but the world outside the pod was rougher than any dream he had ever had.
His clothes, freshly returned to him, smelled like gunfire and blood, even though he had been on his side in the seat during all the killing. Maybe it had been in the air when they took him from one cruiser, punctured and broken and spilling gore, to another, crisp and detergent-smelling inside, like a dumb animal that didn’t know where it was or what it was made for. Maybe the smell had stuck to his mind, his soul. That idea felt so good, so right, that it burst out in front of him like a real thing and he walked into a chair in the waiting area.
A voice almost finished knocking him down.
“Cooper!”
She was wearing poured-on jeans and a crop top. Her purse hung on a spaghetti strap so even it wouldn’t get in the way. Everyone was looking at her and she strutted over to him with her eyes all big and wet and lips parted just right.
“Oh, fuck, baby. Oh my god.” She hugged him like she would collapse if he didn’t hold her, so he did. She was softness pressing out in full curves and pulled taught in between. The memories came back all chopped up, as if the drugged-out days had been woven into a mesh in his mind, a clear stiff uniform plastic that sliced the soft textured time with her into scattered chunks unconnected to anything.
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Still, there it was.
He hadn’t been on anything but weed and molly back then. Just a 19-year-old with no concept of “now that high school is over, I should—”. She had known him senior year, and afterward, when she was still looking at colleges and the space between their respective social circles hadn’t yet reached an unsurmountable distance, like two pellets fresh out of a shotgun barrel.
They had become fuck buddies. Then one screaming night after he had seen her getting out of another guy’s car, and he had to explain why he was mad because he couldn’t just leave her with holes all in her wall, something had started that had the same size and momentum as a relationship, but was more like two people rolling down a hill.
It had ended abruptly his first time in jail, something about her parents and they even took her phone and watched her like prison guards (yes, she had actually said that). Ended but not died. There were the random calls, often months apart and always with that slurring sob and the sounds of bars or apartment parties muffled by a door behind her. He put them out of his head as quick as he put down the phone and didn’t remember a word of them now, six years later. But here she was.
The sign-out process, if there was one, dissolved on the hot surface of his memory like spit on the glass bulb of a pipe, and suddenly they were walking out.
“Come on, let’s go. Come on.” She pulled him by the hand and smiled through tears like they were going for a day at the beach but would be machine gunned into the sand at the end of it.
He went out the door and down the steps with her soft hand pulling him and he squeezed it out of some fear that if he let go he would slip right back into the churning disjointed time that had filled his cell, or maybe even farther and end up in that endless void of his dreams, where men who moved through it like fish in water hunted him in ways he couldn’t remember for reasons he didn’t understand.
The world slid past him, all concrete and sunlight, and he felt it was only his physical connection to her that allowed him to move. If he let go, it would all go still and cold again, and he would be frozen in place in a dead world.
She let go of his hand when they got to the forest green VW beetle parked next to a meter, and the world kept on rolling as it had been, car horns bouncing off the high downtown walls and everything. This jostled something loose, and he stood still thinking about it.
“Why did you bail me out?”
She fumbled for her keys, made eye contact once, big black orbs of hesitation like just before fucking, then sighed like they had just finished.
“Cause no one else would. I don’t know. I guess I’m hoping that now that you know all those people don’t care about you, things will be different.”
He didn’t tell her that all his friends that she had known were gone. That now it was just him doing it all. Did she really believe it was just bad influence? If so, she deserved whatever he decided to do. She held his hand again and his bitterness wavered.
“And you can’t skip, because I can’t pay it back. I’ll lose everything.” He felt her searching his eyes for signs this meant something to him. Afraid she might find some bit of him peeking through, he looked down like he was ashamed.
“I’ll make it up to you. I’ll earn it back.”
She squeezed his hand then let go again and he was left feeling like he had jumped a gap. She stood there staring at him like she was feeling everything he was, then her eyes disappeared under her lashes, and she opened the door.
“Come on. I have to tell you something.” She got behind the wheel and he pushed her door closed in some half-minded gesture of chivalry, like a child imitating TV courtship.
He stared at her pouting face through the windshield as he walked around and felt the pit in his chest at her words. Stupid. What could she say to him that would matter now? Probably some insignificant female confession, some trinket she had kept that he would have to pretend to remember.
He walked around to the passenger side and felt the expanse of downtown at his back, like a magnet pulling metal shavings in his skin. Suddenly, he was ready to run. She popped her head down towards the seat and smiled at him through the window and he sank in through it somehow and was sitting there watching her as she twisted and bounced and pulled into traffic.