Marcelle is awake in a stranger’s bed. The light from the window pours onto her pillow as a golden deluge, blinding. It doesn’t matter what time it is, she always leaves as soon as she sees the sun.
She finds her skirt and top, both too small and thin for the weather, and pulls them on. She shrugs into her coat, dark purple velour, with faux fur trim and a near-invisible leopard-print pattern. She checks her pockets for her keys and wallet, then walks out the heavy, metal apartment door, letting it slam shut behind her.
She can tell at a glance she’s not in a good neighborhood and she sighs. The dirty concrete walls are covered in graffiti and there’s the faint smell of spray paint lingering sharply in the air. She navigates the stone steps in her stilettos, grinding her teeth as she counts the steps down and down and down. Of course there isn’t an elevator.
On the ground floor, she’s catcalled by an older gentleman, his face swollen, his eyes unfocused and milky with age. She ignores him and stumbles out into the street, squinting against the sun. The warmth and light feel good, like being cleansed. Sterilized.
Marcelle walks two blocks and is catcalled once more by a man shockingly similar in visage to the first, so similar that she looks twice, unfortunately encouraging him to say a few more words.
She takes refuge in a diner. Inexplicably, diners always feel safe to her, comfortable. All diners are essentially the same everywhere; they’re consistent, reliable.
She gets only coffee and drinks it black. It’s bitter and she enjoys it. The staff doesn’t speak English, and she enjoys that, too. When they speak English their words intrude on her thoughts, force her to listen, give her a dangerously false sense of understanding. Better instead not to understand at all, to sit in the white noise of indecipherable conversation, quietly.
She sips her bitter cup slowly, savoring it. When it’s empty, the waiter promptly refills it. She drinks four of them. She’s trying to figure out the rest of her life. Where can she go from here? Not here as in the diner, or the neighborhood, but something more abstract, more metaphysical.
It’s a daily ritual, one of the few she indulges in: a morning (and afternoon, and evening) routine of drinking coffee and wondering silently, “Where can I go from here? Where do I go from here?” If her tears were beads, on the days when her thoughts made her cry, she could make a rosary of them to ruminate with.
Having come no closer to an answer, she pays for her coffee with wadded up dollar bills, smeared lipstick on the white mug the only trace her prayers leave behind.
Back on the street, she gets directions to the nearest train station from a passerby. At the station she squints at a map, trying to figure out her route. Following lines up, down, across, she finds her way home.
When she gets on the train, she goes the wrong direction. It makes three stops before she realizes it and rushes off the train in a confused panic. A few people on the platform chuckle at her mistake and she must stand with them as they wait for the train going the other direction.
When she’s finally in her own neighborhood, she pauses on the overpass to watch the traffic below. Thoughtlessly, she counts off any blue cars she sees. One. Two. Three, four. If all the cars were blue, it might look like a river. A great, mechanical, metal, lifeless river. Five. She could toss a coin over her shoulder and make a wish. Six. She arbitrarily decides she won’t move until she counts ten.
It takes longer than she expects, but she doesn’t mind because it keeps her occupied for fifteen minutes or so. An incredible fifteen minutes where she isn’t thinking about how tired she is, how much pain she’s in, how cold she feels. Then she reaches ten and continues to her building.
Up four flights of stairs, she runs into Alexei.
“Hey, Marcelle,” he says, sounding so pleased to see her that she cringes.
“Alexei,” she says, the extent of her salutations.
“You look nice,” he says.
She says, “Oh, please,” with such a thick layer of sarcasm that he resolves immediately not to say another word, and she feels bad.
“You look… nice, too.” She hopes it sounds sincere. In truth, he looks like business-casual personified, like an animated Gap mannequin.
He doesn’t respond, his eyes cast down as he walks past her, but she notices how his cheeks have flushed pink.
On the sixth floor she goes into her apartment. It’s dark, the blackout curtains drawn, just the way Finn likes it.
“Did you get any sleep?” a voice in the darkness asks.
Startled, she says, “Come on, stop scaring me like that.”
“Like what?”
She still can’t tell where exactly in the studio apartment he’s lurking. It’s not the first time she’s caught him in this manner, and while it started off somewhat pathetic, to the point of stirring something in her of sympathy or pity, she now found it cheap and annoying.
“I’m going to turn the big light on,” she threatens, reaching for the switch. His least favorite of the lights.
“Don’t,” he warns, and flips the lamp on by the record player. She catches sight of his silhouette, sitting cross-legged on the floor in the corner, records stacked around him. There were piles of their things all over the room.
She feels the movement of heartbreak in her chest and she warns herself. Don’t. She steels herself, feeling no particular emotion upon glimpsing the stubborn cowlick in his auburn hair that makes him look younger than he really is.
She takes her shoes off at the door and gingerly steps over his mess– their books, tapes, her yarn for crochet, his guitar pedals, stacked in decaying towers, piled rubble, the results of their failure to communicate, to be understood. Why was he even organizing their things? She fought the urge to kick their belongings.
“Why are you doing this so early?” she asks instead, reaching for her bath towel over a boxed collection of some comic he’d been into before they’d met. She wonders if maybe he’s pulled everything out to research the person he used to be, to try and learn to be himself again. She feels a twinge of pain in her stomach.
As she steps into the bathroom, she glimpses on the fridge that he’s taken down the photos of them at Niagara Falls again. She slams the door shut, her sympathy shriveling like scorched tissue, not caring to hear his answer. He, too, seems indifferent toward hearing her response about whether or not she’d slept.
As soon as the door closes, he turns the lamp off.
She hates to live with an insect, he knows. That’s all he is, a leech afraid of the light, repulsed by fresh air, preferring the stagnant hopelessness of their studio apartment. He hasn’t been outside in seven months and they’ve been broken up for three. Broken up because he can’t leave the apartment, can’t even open the door, because he can’t face anyone, because he’s terrified. Split up, like he’s splitting up their things, breaking apart their lives, disentangling himself from her. Separating.
He puts her records back on the shelf and stores his own in a cardboard box. Only her name is on the lease so he needs to pack and move. Finn knows this, and pantomimes the intent, has been pantomiming the attempt for three months. He can’t leave, as much as he needs to, he’s stuck. He doesn’t have the will to leave. He doesn’t have the courage. He doesn’t have the strength required to open the front door and take a step outside.
When she’s not home, he stands staring at the apartment door, trying to will himself to pass the threshold. The photos of them at Niagara Falls watch him, reminding him of a time when he could go outside, a time when he could smile for a picture, put an arm around Marcelle’s shoulders. He hates the photos, how his smile mocks him, how that Finn seems smugly superior, the better version of himself. He tries to be more like that Finn, the good Finn, the old Finn, but he can’t.
He hears the shower faucet turn off and a few seconds later Marcelle enters the room in a rush of hot steam and rose-scented shampoo, her long brown hair wrapped up in a towel. Another scalding shower, he thinks, to sanitize the filth she feels has settled on her skin since this began, like his reclusiveness might rub off on her if she’s not careful.
Marcelle goes to the closet and pulls shorts on under her skirt, then slips out of the skirt and stores it neatly with her jacket. She grabs a gray hooded sweatshirt and shrugs it on. Both the shorts and the sweatshirt hang loosely off her frame. She lounges on the couch (his bed), kicking her feet up onto the coffee table, turning on the morning news.
“A ten car pile-up,” Marcelle says. She takes a small comfort in the fact she’s not a part of it.
Finn sits still, distracted. He has an album in his hand he doesn’t remember seeing before. He asks, “Is this Slowdive album yours?”
She turns to look at him. Her eyes flit from the record to his face. “Why bother?” Then, again, losing her composure for a second, she shouts, “Why bother?!”
He doesn’t flinch but casts his eyes down, studies the album art.
“I think I’ll write to my sister, see if I can stay with her awhile,” Marcelle says, turning back to the TV. She’s started saying that recently, almost like a threat.
Finn is reminded every time of the ending to Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis, when the family leaves Gregor to die and rot in his room while they go on vacation.
They both know if she left, he’d starve to death before risking a trip outside. He was already half-starved, trying not to eat any more than was strictly necessary since he’d lost his job, burned through his savings, had nothing to contribute, nothing to give.
He’d been a guitarist before. He played in a locally successful band and sat for sessions. It wasn’t much money, but it was a steady income while Marcelle landed the odd acting or modeling job here and there. They were able to make a modest life for themselves.
Then Ash, the lead singer of Finn’s band and his best friend since eighth grade, committed suicide.
Finn didn’t become an insect right away like Gregor. It was a gradual decreasing interest in living, a rising, inexplicable panic at being alive. Ash was his best friend, his confidant, it was impossible to express the depth of their love for each other. The world felt less safe without him.
Now, Finn’s guitars hang untouched from the walls like dead animals ready to be carved; he’s repulsed by them.
“Why don’t you call her instead?” Finn asks. The way he says it sounds like a challenge, a dare.
She stays silent, and Finn realizes in her silence that the reason she might not be reaching out to her family is because they don’t know. They still don’t know. He hasn’t told his family, either, afraid of how they might react.
They sit in that silence of realization for a few moments, recognizing the connection between them via the secret shame they share.
Bolstered by this long unfelt sense of kinship, Finn tries to ask again, “Did you sleep last night?”
Marcelle, who didn’t sleep last night, feels threatened by the revelation of her secret, the reason why she’s been keeping it is obscured even to herself. “Mind your business, Finlay. You’re the one who wants our shit separated, who doesn’t want any overlap, putting everything in boxes– who are you kidding?”
“I don’t want to be in the way,” he mutters. She’s heard it before. “I can sell my stuff–”
“Sell your stuff?” she shouts, infuriated. She gets on her feet and faces him, the ten car pile-up on the TV behind her. “Fuck you, Finn, a big fat fuck you! I swear to Jesus, Mary, and Joseph that you’ve forgotten you’re not the one who died.”
She takes a few steps around the couch toward him, easily swiping the album from his hands. “Ash lent this to us a year or two ago and never asked for it back. Do you want to return it to him?” Instead of handing it back, she throws the album like a frisbee into the kitchen where it crashes into the sink. Marcelle, in the throes of an emotional outburst, does not know what she’s doing but is high on the adrenaline of unrepressed anger. Clenching her jaw, she goes to the closet and puts on her jacket, then slips her feet into running shoes, leaving the laces untied.
He watches her from the floor, too stunned to speak. What can he say? He knows she’s right. He watches as she pulls a guitar case out from under the bed then takes his US-made Epiphone Casino off the wall. She shuts it inside the case, which suddenly reminds him of a casket. “I’m not even going to sell it,” she informs him, her hazel eyes flashing. “I’m going to throw it into the river.”
She watches him, waiting for a reaction, but receives none. Frustrated with his silent dissociation, she grabs the case and her purse and leaves the apartment, locking the door behind her to make a point. Then she waits, but nothing happens. She takes a few steps toward the stairwell, then stops and waits again. Finally, she goes.
Finn stands by the door, hand hovering an inch from the doorknob, but he can’t. His heart is pounding and he can’t. In a way, it’s what he’s wanted since Ash died: to lose everything. It feels right. It feels like what he deserves.
By the time Marcelle reaches the river, thirty minutes by bus, made forty minutes by lugging the guitar, she feels less committed to destroying it. It had been his favorite, well-loved and meticulously maintained, at least until recently. Ash, the Casino, and Marcelle were the three things Finn valued most in the world, and he hadn’t been able to save any of them. She felt like she might be just as likely to throw herself into the river as the guitar, so she sat on the snowy embankment and wept. Was she weeping for Finn? Was she weeping for Ash? Was she weeping for herself? There weren’t enough tears in her body to fully express the depth of her despair.
Annihilated and empty, Marcelle stands, picks up the guitar, and goes on a search for coffee. It’s just her luck that Alexei is the cashier at the cafe she walks into, their eyes locking immediately, giving her no chance to make a clean escape. In shorts soaked by melted snow, shoes untied, eyes puffy from crying, he’s the last person she wants to see.
To hold her composure, before she can give away her disappointment or he can say anything, she says, “What does it mean I was catcalled by identical twin drunks before noon? Is it an omen, do you think?”
Caught off guard, as she’d wanted, he didn’t know what to say.
“Black coffee.” She’s satisfied to have achieved the upper hand in this social exchange.
“I think it means… they think you’re pretty,” he says, mechanically taking a cup down from the stack by the register.
“I’m sure,” she responds absently.
“Is that a guitar?” he asks, indicating the case leaning against the counter.
“No. It’s a dead body. I was on my way to get rid of it.” She kicks the case hard enough to make him flinch.
He cracks a confused smile, unable to tell if she’s making fun of him. She’s not, this time. He passes her the mug of coffee and she pays with wrinkled ones. She then realizes the operational difficulty of carrying the mug and the heavy, solid case.
“Do you need help?” Alexei asks. She scowls.
She sits at a table, scalding herself only once on the way, and sets the guitar down in the seat across from her. She stares at it. Alexei stares at her.
Soon, she forgets all about Alexei, all about the cafe. It’s just her and the guitar, sitting there encoffined in its black case. She takes measured sips of coffee, slipping quickly into the routine of trying to figure out, where can I go from here?
Her insomnia began, it seemed, at the exact same moment Finn crossed their threshold for the last time. That’s how she felt. Right at that same instant. Their brains short circuited together, like from the spark of a kiss. They never so much as held hands again after that last crossing. He moved himself to the couch that night on the pretense that he felt ill, but she stayed up the whole night and he slept soundly. She stayed up every night after that. He felt ill, and she stayed awake.
After they broke up, she simply began staying out as many nights as she could. Finn didn’t say anything, only asked if she was okay, if she had slept. She hated it. She hated him. He was the reason she couldn’t sleep; who can sleep knowing there’s a parasite living in your studio apartment?
Was that unfair?
She’d run through four stages of grief (the break-up was during anger) but she could never reach acceptance. She couldn’t accept he’d changed, couldn’t accept losing both Ash and Finn. It was clear to her now, staring at his guitar, that he might never recover. He’d let them both run out that door. It went beyond any cry for help or attention; something inside him was dead. He died with Ash and she was living with a corpse.
Though the cafe didn’t offer table service, Alexei was refilling Marcelle’s cup for her. He watches her ruminating from the counter and wonders what goes on inside her head, not realizing she’d come a hair’s breadth away from walking straight back out the door upon seeing him.
Her repulsion toward him has to do, more than anything, with her sharp skepticism toward kindness. He was nice, and that put her off. He was so purely friendly that she could only attribute it to facade, and she distrusts him for it.
Finn was inconsistently kind. Marcelle knew about intermittent reinforcement, where the unpredictable reward of something can make it addictive, but knowledge isn’t the same as wisdom. She fell for it hard, like a body from a sixteenth floor window, and landed here. Now.
Where can I go from here?
She had the sudden urge to drown the guitar. She pictured herself doing it. It wasn’t enough to throw it into the water, she needed to feel it die in her hands. She’d wrap her fingers around its slender neck, push it hard into the river’s current, feel its hollow body fill with water. If she could kill it, if she could rid herself of it, know it was beyond saving, then maybe she could sleep. She could sever whatever tied her insomnia to his illness, if she just buried the part of him that was dead.
Delirious with resolve, she stands up so suddenly Alexei jumps. She grabs hold of the case and wrestles it out the door, stopping for a moment to surprise Alexei with a, “Thank you.”
She knows just the place– the lake behind their old college. They’d taken row boats out there when they were still in school, hoping, only half-jokingly, to find crocodiles in the shallow Midwestern waters. She knows just how to get there, and the guitar hardly burdens her.
Now she walks barefoot into the near-frozen waters of early November and stands still on the smooth surface of a submerged rock. She looks at her feet as they begin to detach themselves from her legs; soon she can’t feel them at all, and the numbness spreads up to her knees. She’s pulled the Casino out of its case and cradles it in her arms. With the weather so cold, there’s no one at the beach, no one to witness.
She kneels and plunges the guitar into the water, pushing it down with all her strength. She holds it under, against the icy burning of her fingers and legs, against the feeling that she, herself, is drowning.
The guitar resists at first but she holds firm, pressing it deeper until it starts to lose its buoyancy, the water rushing into its hollow body. Her hands go numb, and she holds her breath, watching the murky water swallow it hungrily. She finally lets go.
j.k. armstrong 
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