Great Lakes/Great Escapes
“Little boxes lined up against water, radiating artificial light, emitting human life. Darkness finds its way into little cracks between streetlamps and inside abandoned apartments. There's little space for it—inside a city that glows at night.
'Eventually, eastward, the city drops off completely, just a few blocks short of where the land does. There's still reminders of the urban playfield: concrete, trees in careful rows, bits of fencing, marked pathways. But nobody can fully remove themselves from the city without falling into the water. Past Lake Shore Drive there's just you and visions of the world. There's a place where you're not really anywhere…”
"Wait, what?"
"Right here,” she continued. “You're not anywhere. You're not in the lake; you're not in the city; you're in the middle. You're not really anywhere," she said.
His eyes clawed her with curiosity. She gets so poetic sometimes. It was an utterly endearing quality, especially when her words get infiltrated with sloppy bits of booze. Her hair was falling out of the sloppy ponytail she'd roped up after leaving the bar, wrapped inside the hoodie he gave her twelve blocks ago. It hung off her slender shoulders and bunched up at the wrists, puffed at the waist and fell over her hips. She looked remarkably small and thin underneath it, with only her chest popping up and almost out of her shirt. It was the first thing he noticed about her when they met. He wouldn't lie. She knew it anyway. It was the first thing anyone noticed.
"Oh, don't look at me like that," she dismissed playfully.
He smiled and wrapped his thick arms around her and bent her to the ground in a drunken dip. She laughed and shoved him away and started stumbling toward the lake.
"Don't do anything stupid," he called after her.
"Stupid like what?" she yelled without looking back at him.
"Stupid like trip."
She got too close to concrete's edge. As the water broke against the rocks and splashed high as her head, the droplets that fell hit her, spraying her with the freezing lake. She shook it off like a dog, post-bath and zipped his hoodie. She turned and watched him half-waltzing, half-stumbling toward her. He looked so big and dumb. She cocked her head and smiled, reaching her hand out toward him. It was nothing short of shocking: an invited hand-holding session? Not merely tolerated, but instigated by her? He took the rare opportunity and wrapped his big fingers over hers. She dug her fingers between his, a locking grip, and began strolling the concrete boardwalk.
She had trouble keeping her balance, even with his hand sturdily keeping her upright. She needed more support, so he wrapped his arm around her and held her up by the shoulder, pressing her up against his side. A sudden chill of solemnity swept over her.
She ran her fingers over his side, up against the ribs and down to his stomach. He looked over at her, wincing pain written across his face. It didn't hurt. The scar was several years old; it didn't feel any different than letting her fingers sweep over any other part of him. It was just the sudden awareness of his personal history—history now shared between them, that made him feel pain scar tissue doesn't cause.
His scars were impressive compared to hers. Hers were plentiful quick swipes with little blades, his few were long drags with large razors. She glanced up at his neck, the scar he couldn't hide. She immediately gathered the slips of information in her mind: the blood thinners, the sleeping pills, the blood across his bed, the instant regret and the subsequent call to the police. It made her shudder. She still didn't understand why. It's not like she judged him or anything. It's not like she'd never tried herself, stood on the edge of ten-stories. It was just so horrible to hear, to think about, to recall each time. To think the hand she had been holding was the same hand that did that to him. She almost felt embarrassed by it, to lavish such pity on him, pity she wouldn't even consider putting upon herself.
"Do you ever think about hurting yourself again?" she asked, quite randomly.
"No," he spat back. He would not talk about this.
"You're a liar."
"How would I hide it from you anyway?"
"I didn't ask if you did it. I just asked if you thought about it."
"No. I'm happy," he replied and pushed her closer into him, hoping to quash her words by keeping her mouth up against his ribs.
"I'm happy too," she said lifting her head off his chest. Her words were lingering. She had more to say, and if he didn't acknowledge it she'd get cold and detached and he didn't really feel like dealing with that either.
"So what are you saying, you still think about it?"
There was anxious silence between them.
"Sometimes," she said, pulling away from him and making her way to a grassy slope. He followed her and watched her tumble over onto the ground, lay her hands underneath her head and stare straight up, ignoring his looming presence.
"Don't," he said with serious intent, refusing to lie down next to her until she acknowledged the pleading command.
"I won't."
"You can always call me. Even if you just feel like it," he spoke clearly, still standing over the girl who was still ignoring his stare.
"I can't. It’s not something I can just call someone about. I could've called all kinds of people and I never did. You don't just go around announcing it to everyone."
"I'm not saying you did it for attention, okay? I'd never insinuate that."
"Of course it wasn't about attention,” she said, sitting up suddenly. “You of all people should know that."
He fell over onto the ground with frustration. "I know it's not about attention okay. It's about…" He froze. It was about…it was about…
She looked over at him, staring with blank eyes, waiting for an answer. "About what?"
"You know."
"All I've got are psychology definitions." Something about displacement, the self-loathing and impulse toward self-destruction, something about lacking the capacity to deal with the pain.
She lay down next to him, curled up inside him. There were no more words left.
"Do you ever really stop thinking about it?" he said, purging the words from inside him because they were starting to make him sick—the things he never admits.
"No," she replied in casual defeat. "The alarm goes off some mornings and I throw the blanket over my head. Just hide inside this little pocket I've made on my bed, but it's impermanent.
"It's different."
"Not really."
"The complete end is somehow the same as sleeping in?" he jested.
"In a way," she said, "Yeah. The alarm goes off and you just don't feel like being awake. Not ‘cause you're tired, just ‘cause you don't feel like doing life that day."
The attraction of the escape kept both of them. There was no denying it. The alarm. The classes. The hourly wages. The drive. The teachers. The idiots in class, the useless texts, the minutes falling away serving customers, the wiped energy and uncontrollable tendency to press eyelids together. The emotional entanglements, the bad movies, the forever of survival, the pressure of a cabbie on your tail, the disappointments of trials you don't learn from, the hangovers you know are coming, the bleak realization of a future unknown, the incapability to just function properly in the world. No more mistakes or heartbreaks or lost and lonely days. It was easier to sleep through it. Wake up on the other side of it, put on a Jawbreaker CD, drown in good music, warm affection and the stores of liquor lying on a shelf underneath the sink. It was why they were there, bodies at rest, eyes absorbing the nothingness that is the lake at night.
She couldn't think about it anymore. She got up. It took her a while, she had to sit up and let the alcohol in her brain settle so that things wouldn't spin so much. Then she rolled over onto her knees and pulled herself up. He rose to his elbows to watch her wander to the water.
She was hanging on a railing overlooking the harbor.
"I wanna fall in."
"No you don't," he wanted to say. But he couldn't pull the words out of his mouth. Instead he shifted his weight to his legs and got up, wandering over to her, letting his body smash into the railing and his head slump on his shoulders, so he could get a look at this water.
"Oh, it's a romantic notion," she blurted out after his silence. "Fall into the water and just live there, floating in an infinite abyss. It's stupid."
The night looked weird, orange glow was rising out of the city while absolutely pitch darkness overtook the water.
"It's not so stupid," he said.
"Reality check," she said, disagreeing with herself more than him. "We'll just get wet and cold and probably caught up in the tide. We'll die." She thought for a second. "We're not so hard to understand. You and I."
"What do you mean?" he asked, rotating his upper body on the railing so he could get a better look at her.
"I mean, everyone who's ever gotten smashed and slipped out for a few minutes; who's ditched a class or hit the snooze or put on headphones cause the train's too loud or daydreamed or posted pictures of the beach on cubicle walls. They get it, in a small way." She felt unsure about the words she had just said. Maybe it was an oversimplification. Maybe he wouldn't understand. "I don't know,” she said after the silence and pulled herself away from him, closer to the lake. Very few understood, really. Very few could stand on the borders of the lively city and the dead sea and actually understand the threshold between them. “Can’t I just want nothing sometimes?” she pleaded to the lake underneath.
It started downtown. The first set of city blocks went out. It spread north a little, then almost the entire south side shut down. Then it climbed up at them by streets. Street by street every light shut off. It passed over them, past Fullerton, and Belmont, up past every el stop they had been memorizing for years. Past the end of the brown, red and purple lines. Every light was gone. Suddenly, there was no city. No northside, no downtown, no Sears Tower, no distant sea-side lights, no rumbling el, no glowing bar lights. It was all gone. It was the lake extended over the ground.
“Holy shit,” she breathed.
“Holy shit,” he agreed – tense fear rising in his throat with images of looters and bodies on sidewalks, insane gunmen, drunken rapists, utterly melodramatic chaos gutted him.
“This is so cool,” she blurted out.
“What?” he asked, whipping his head around to see the darkness where her voice came out. “Are you kidding me?”
“No.”
“This is just dangerous.”
“Please! The city is completely black. What an amorphous moment,” she said, falling back into her poetry.
“It’s not symbolic philosophy time. Okay? It’s get real time. We’re in serious danger. We have to get back home.”
“Why? Why go back in there? It’s more dangerous in there than out here. Haven’t you seen 28 Days Later?”
“See! See!” he accused in exasperated tones. “This is exactly what I mean. This is not a movie, okay? This is real life. Get a grip.”
She just stared at him, her eyes grilling deep black holes on his forehead. “You don’t understand,” she said finally, turning away, wandering back to the hill and lying down.
“Now look,” he moved on, “Let’s just…go, okay? Let’s go get someplace safe.”
She didn’t respond. She didn’t say a word. She was pissed. He sighed.
“No,” she said, comfortably placing her hands beneath her head. “No, we’re safer here.”
“We have to get home. It’s the best place to be.”
“We’ll never get there.”
“So we might as well just say here?!” he shouted.
“Yes. Just ‘til morning; ‘til things get better.”
There was the space of silence between them, surrounding them, dying beneath their feet.
“Look, I’m not leaving without you,” he bartered.
“Then it looks like you’re not leaving.”
He looked around; his eyes had adjusted to the dark: vague outlines of the landmark buildings, stars sprinkling overhead, some trees, some waves breaking over rocks, her. Even if they were safe there – it wasn’t where he wanted to be, not where they should be. The trip through the city wouldn’t be fun, true. It would be difficult and dangerous and yeah, worse stuff could happen. But staying there?
He lay down next to her. She leaned toward him, cuddled into his side. She was smiling. He could just barely see it. She was more than content to stay.
And in the end, maybe she was right. Maybe they were best off right there. But this wasn’t where he wanted to be. Not anymore.
'Eventually, eastward, the city drops off completely, just a few blocks short of where the land does. There's still reminders of the urban playfield: concrete, trees in careful rows, bits of fencing, marked pathways. But nobody can fully remove themselves from the city without falling into the water. Past Lake Shore Drive there's just you and visions of the world. There's a place where you're not really anywhere…”
"Wait, what?"
"Right here,” she continued. “You're not anywhere. You're not in the lake; you're not in the city; you're in the middle. You're not really anywhere," she said.
His eyes clawed her with curiosity. She gets so poetic sometimes. It was an utterly endearing quality, especially when her words get infiltrated with sloppy bits of booze. Her hair was falling out of the sloppy ponytail she'd roped up after leaving the bar, wrapped inside the hoodie he gave her twelve blocks ago. It hung off her slender shoulders and bunched up at the wrists, puffed at the waist and fell over her hips. She looked remarkably small and thin underneath it, with only her chest popping up and almost out of her shirt. It was the first thing he noticed about her when they met. He wouldn't lie. She knew it anyway. It was the first thing anyone noticed.
"Oh, don't look at me like that," she dismissed playfully.
He smiled and wrapped his thick arms around her and bent her to the ground in a drunken dip. She laughed and shoved him away and started stumbling toward the lake.
"Don't do anything stupid," he called after her.
"Stupid like what?" she yelled without looking back at him.
"Stupid like trip."
She got too close to concrete's edge. As the water broke against the rocks and splashed high as her head, the droplets that fell hit her, spraying her with the freezing lake. She shook it off like a dog, post-bath and zipped his hoodie. She turned and watched him half-waltzing, half-stumbling toward her. He looked so big and dumb. She cocked her head and smiled, reaching her hand out toward him. It was nothing short of shocking: an invited hand-holding session? Not merely tolerated, but instigated by her? He took the rare opportunity and wrapped his big fingers over hers. She dug her fingers between his, a locking grip, and began strolling the concrete boardwalk.
She had trouble keeping her balance, even with his hand sturdily keeping her upright. She needed more support, so he wrapped his arm around her and held her up by the shoulder, pressing her up against his side. A sudden chill of solemnity swept over her.
She ran her fingers over his side, up against the ribs and down to his stomach. He looked over at her, wincing pain written across his face. It didn't hurt. The scar was several years old; it didn't feel any different than letting her fingers sweep over any other part of him. It was just the sudden awareness of his personal history—history now shared between them, that made him feel pain scar tissue doesn't cause.
His scars were impressive compared to hers. Hers were plentiful quick swipes with little blades, his few were long drags with large razors. She glanced up at his neck, the scar he couldn't hide. She immediately gathered the slips of information in her mind: the blood thinners, the sleeping pills, the blood across his bed, the instant regret and the subsequent call to the police. It made her shudder. She still didn't understand why. It's not like she judged him or anything. It's not like she'd never tried herself, stood on the edge of ten-stories. It was just so horrible to hear, to think about, to recall each time. To think the hand she had been holding was the same hand that did that to him. She almost felt embarrassed by it, to lavish such pity on him, pity she wouldn't even consider putting upon herself.
"Do you ever think about hurting yourself again?" she asked, quite randomly.
"No," he spat back. He would not talk about this.
"You're a liar."
"How would I hide it from you anyway?"
"I didn't ask if you did it. I just asked if you thought about it."
"No. I'm happy," he replied and pushed her closer into him, hoping to quash her words by keeping her mouth up against his ribs.
"I'm happy too," she said lifting her head off his chest. Her words were lingering. She had more to say, and if he didn't acknowledge it she'd get cold and detached and he didn't really feel like dealing with that either.
"So what are you saying, you still think about it?"
There was anxious silence between them.
"Sometimes," she said, pulling away from him and making her way to a grassy slope. He followed her and watched her tumble over onto the ground, lay her hands underneath her head and stare straight up, ignoring his looming presence.
"Don't," he said with serious intent, refusing to lie down next to her until she acknowledged the pleading command.
"I won't."
"You can always call me. Even if you just feel like it," he spoke clearly, still standing over the girl who was still ignoring his stare.
"I can't. It’s not something I can just call someone about. I could've called all kinds of people and I never did. You don't just go around announcing it to everyone."
"I'm not saying you did it for attention, okay? I'd never insinuate that."
"Of course it wasn't about attention,” she said, sitting up suddenly. “You of all people should know that."
He fell over onto the ground with frustration. "I know it's not about attention okay. It's about…" He froze. It was about…it was about…
She looked over at him, staring with blank eyes, waiting for an answer. "About what?"
"You know."
"All I've got are psychology definitions." Something about displacement, the self-loathing and impulse toward self-destruction, something about lacking the capacity to deal with the pain.
She lay down next to him, curled up inside him. There were no more words left.
"Do you ever really stop thinking about it?" he said, purging the words from inside him because they were starting to make him sick—the things he never admits.
"No," she replied in casual defeat. "The alarm goes off some mornings and I throw the blanket over my head. Just hide inside this little pocket I've made on my bed, but it's impermanent.
"It's different."
"Not really."
"The complete end is somehow the same as sleeping in?" he jested.
"In a way," she said, "Yeah. The alarm goes off and you just don't feel like being awake. Not ‘cause you're tired, just ‘cause you don't feel like doing life that day."
The attraction of the escape kept both of them. There was no denying it. The alarm. The classes. The hourly wages. The drive. The teachers. The idiots in class, the useless texts, the minutes falling away serving customers, the wiped energy and uncontrollable tendency to press eyelids together. The emotional entanglements, the bad movies, the forever of survival, the pressure of a cabbie on your tail, the disappointments of trials you don't learn from, the hangovers you know are coming, the bleak realization of a future unknown, the incapability to just function properly in the world. No more mistakes or heartbreaks or lost and lonely days. It was easier to sleep through it. Wake up on the other side of it, put on a Jawbreaker CD, drown in good music, warm affection and the stores of liquor lying on a shelf underneath the sink. It was why they were there, bodies at rest, eyes absorbing the nothingness that is the lake at night.
She couldn't think about it anymore. She got up. It took her a while, she had to sit up and let the alcohol in her brain settle so that things wouldn't spin so much. Then she rolled over onto her knees and pulled herself up. He rose to his elbows to watch her wander to the water.
She was hanging on a railing overlooking the harbor.
"I wanna fall in."
"No you don't," he wanted to say. But he couldn't pull the words out of his mouth. Instead he shifted his weight to his legs and got up, wandering over to her, letting his body smash into the railing and his head slump on his shoulders, so he could get a look at this water.
"Oh, it's a romantic notion," she blurted out after his silence. "Fall into the water and just live there, floating in an infinite abyss. It's stupid."
The night looked weird, orange glow was rising out of the city while absolutely pitch darkness overtook the water.
"It's not so stupid," he said.
"Reality check," she said, disagreeing with herself more than him. "We'll just get wet and cold and probably caught up in the tide. We'll die." She thought for a second. "We're not so hard to understand. You and I."
"What do you mean?" he asked, rotating his upper body on the railing so he could get a better look at her.
"I mean, everyone who's ever gotten smashed and slipped out for a few minutes; who's ditched a class or hit the snooze or put on headphones cause the train's too loud or daydreamed or posted pictures of the beach on cubicle walls. They get it, in a small way." She felt unsure about the words she had just said. Maybe it was an oversimplification. Maybe he wouldn't understand. "I don't know,” she said after the silence and pulled herself away from him, closer to the lake. Very few understood, really. Very few could stand on the borders of the lively city and the dead sea and actually understand the threshold between them. “Can’t I just want nothing sometimes?” she pleaded to the lake underneath.
It started downtown. The first set of city blocks went out. It spread north a little, then almost the entire south side shut down. Then it climbed up at them by streets. Street by street every light shut off. It passed over them, past Fullerton, and Belmont, up past every el stop they had been memorizing for years. Past the end of the brown, red and purple lines. Every light was gone. Suddenly, there was no city. No northside, no downtown, no Sears Tower, no distant sea-side lights, no rumbling el, no glowing bar lights. It was all gone. It was the lake extended over the ground.
“Holy shit,” she breathed.
“Holy shit,” he agreed – tense fear rising in his throat with images of looters and bodies on sidewalks, insane gunmen, drunken rapists, utterly melodramatic chaos gutted him.
“This is so cool,” she blurted out.
“What?” he asked, whipping his head around to see the darkness where her voice came out. “Are you kidding me?”
“No.”
“This is just dangerous.”
“Please! The city is completely black. What an amorphous moment,” she said, falling back into her poetry.
“It’s not symbolic philosophy time. Okay? It’s get real time. We’re in serious danger. We have to get back home.”
“Why? Why go back in there? It’s more dangerous in there than out here. Haven’t you seen 28 Days Later?”
“See! See!” he accused in exasperated tones. “This is exactly what I mean. This is not a movie, okay? This is real life. Get a grip.”
She just stared at him, her eyes grilling deep black holes on his forehead. “You don’t understand,” she said finally, turning away, wandering back to the hill and lying down.
“Now look,” he moved on, “Let’s just…go, okay? Let’s go get someplace safe.”
She didn’t respond. She didn’t say a word. She was pissed. He sighed.
“No,” she said, comfortably placing her hands beneath her head. “No, we’re safer here.”
“We have to get home. It’s the best place to be.”
“We’ll never get there.”
“So we might as well just say here?!” he shouted.
“Yes. Just ‘til morning; ‘til things get better.”
There was the space of silence between them, surrounding them, dying beneath their feet.
“Look, I’m not leaving without you,” he bartered.
“Then it looks like you’re not leaving.”
He looked around; his eyes had adjusted to the dark: vague outlines of the landmark buildings, stars sprinkling overhead, some trees, some waves breaking over rocks, her. Even if they were safe there – it wasn’t where he wanted to be, not where they should be. The trip through the city wouldn’t be fun, true. It would be difficult and dangerous and yeah, worse stuff could happen. But staying there?
He lay down next to her. She leaned toward him, cuddled into his side. She was smiling. He could just barely see it. She was more than content to stay.
And in the end, maybe she was right. Maybe they were best off right there. But this wasn’t where he wanted to be. Not anymore.
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