Harrison Changes - Part II
Last week, we met Harrison, our narrator’s old friend with a penchant for trouble. For years, he’s dogged the narrator as he’s gotten older and stranger, holed up at all hours in his room watching politics. Things take a turn, though, when the narrator’s girlfriend stumbles upon Harrison in the bathtub.
A couple of years ago, I told Blair that I was self-medicating. “I don’t know what else to do,” I said, picking at an elbow scab on her futon. “I keep having dreams. I keep seeing him.”
“This is so dumb,” Blair said, scanning my pill collection, which she’d insisted that I spill out across coffee table after she caught me sneaking one over her kitchen sink. “I’ve been seeing a therapist this last year and I’m so much calmer. Really. This is survivor’s guilt; this is manageable. There’s medication for what you’re going though. Prescriptions.”
“We didn’t survive anything,” I told her. If it’s any kind of guilt, I still maintain that it’s the regular kind, because I should have brought him food or called his parents or taken him to a clinic. Even before it was obvious that some unprecedented shit was going down, I knew that Harrison was not well. He seemed to have stopped going to class, hardly leaving the apartment except for his work-study. There were strangely colored scabs across his legs, bruises, and he’d sometimes forget to feed himself. He screamed at breeches in legislative decorum for hours into the night and complained about shady vision and pregnant migraines. One fall morning, at the onset of his metamorphosis, Harrison tore himself away from the filibuster of an infrastructure bill for a rare appearance in the kitchen as I scrubbed the dishes, and asked, apropos of nothing, “You ever get those headaches, where like, you’re staring at a screen for too long, and everything’s blurry?”
“I mean, sure,” I said, looking into the sink. We had not yet discussed what happened with Brooke. “Sometimes.”
He took a slug of milk from the carton. “I’ve got the worst fucking headache.”
The problem, I told Blair that day in her apartment, is that I’ll never know whether this incident and the others like it were omens of what was to come, or if rather they were just run-of-the-mill headaches, like what anybody might get after eight straight hours of screen time.
Like: what if I’d noticed sooner?
What if I’d tried harder?
What if I’d loved him better?
“We failed him,” I told Blair.
*****
With Quinton gone and Brooke out of the picture, I felt lonely in a way I had not known before. Harrison kept himself locked in his room all day, and I missed him in a different way than I did back when he would go out every other night with his DSA friends. This felt even worse, somehow—I was less jealous, maybe, but it was like he was further away from me. I felt stuck, tethered to the space between Harrison and the outside world.
My days were plotless. I went to work, went to class, studied, and watched black and white movies that barely held my attention, sometimes going days without speaking to anyone who had any real affection for me. On one particularly hopeless night, I purchased a $20 LEGO set, closed my bedroom door, and emptied the pieces onto the carpet. “Jesus,” I said, imagining what I must have looked like, sitting there on the carpet, surrounded by plastic bricks.
One Friday night, I decided to hell with it. “Hey man,” I said, banging on his door. “You and me. We’re hitting the bars tonight.”
“Can’t,” Harrison said, and I could hear his fingers clicking. “There’s a town hall that I—”
“Get out of here with that,” I said. “Let’s get fucked up.”
I waited up for him to shower—his first in ages, as near as I could tell—and then we headed to the bus line. I didn’t say much on the walk, but we must have been thinking about the same thing, because Harrison asked, unprompted, “Brooke isn’t still mad, is she?”
“She, uh,” I said. “She dumped me.”
“Oh,” Harrison said, and, for a second, I saw a flash of the guy I knew when we were teenagers, the guy who smoked me up in his Trailblazer the night after we put Daisey down, even though he had a competition the next morning and even though he couldn’t understand why my family insisted on keeping her alive for as long as we did, given how sick she was those last few months. “Man.”
I got us off the subject as fast as I could. Straining, I asked what he’d been up to lately, like some distant uncle.
“Nothing,” Harrison said, as we stepped over train tracks. “I’m not up to anything.”
“You ever think about going back to those city council meetings?” I asked, grasping. “For those input sessions?”
“Public comment,” Harrison corrected me. “And no, fuck that. DSA’s there every week.”
“Why do you keep watching the news so much, then? If you’re done with all that.”
“Because it’s important,” he told me. “Because it affects people.”
By midnight we were shit-hammered, shouting over the crowd at Lucky Joe’s for the guitarist to play “Wagon Wheel.” The guy laughed, leaned forward, and said, “I’ll have what they’re having,” and we about lost our minds when he played the opening chords. We danced, hit up another bar, and kept drinking until we were completely hammered. The drunk bus skipped our stop and so Harrison talked my ear off on the long walk home.
“I’m going to get my shit together,” Harrison told me. “Cut back on C-SPAN a little. Get my grades up. I want to be a better friend to you. Swear to God I didn’t mean anything with Brooke. I thought she already knew about it. I thought she’d find it funny. The vampire won’t come out again. It’s behind us. It’s done. Little kid shit.”
He nearly tripped over himself every other step, but Harrison sounded clear in a way that I hardly recognized. I bought his promises. I believed him. Harrison was going to do better. I could hear this in his voice, and sometimes I think that the real tragedy is that right then, right there, if his body hadn’t changed, maybe he would have gotten his shit together. Maybe all this could have been different.
I fall into this trap every now and then, but then I remember that the next morning, hungover out of my mind, I woke up to the all-too-familiar sound of Harrison shouting at the livestream of a local press conference, a passion in his voice that, at the time, I could not imagine conjuring.
“Fallacy!” I heard him shout, ecstatic. “Good luck defending that one!”
Head pounding, I stepped into Harrison’s doorframe to ask him to quiet down, but something about the sight of him stopped me. His back was turned, and he was shirtless, hunched over his desk with his fingers on the keyboard, eyes glued to his computer monitor. A chyron occupying the bottom of the screen read, City Council Debates Future of Asteroid Crater.
“Are you seeing this?” he asked his friends over Discord. “I mean, are you seeing this shit?”
*****
There’s one moment from that last night out with Harrison that it hurts to remember.
On our way home, Harrison stopped, leaned over, and vomited onto the sidewalk. When he finished, he wiped his mouth and coughed. “Fuck,” he said, all intoxicated-formal.
My smile warped as I looked to the concrete at what had come out of Harrison. There was nothing natural about his mess, all neon green and otherworldly. Milky-white worms writhed around inside the fluid, squirming around in all directions and sucking at the pavement, lapping up their first taste of terrestrial Earth.
“Jesus,” I said, and we laughed our asses off. “Fucking gnarly, dude.”
*****
Only one person called to ask about subleasing Quinton’s old room at 642 S. Meldrum. I suspect my Craigslist ad must have seemed overeager—I’d exaggerated our home’s proximity to campus and the reliability of its internet connection, even using blatantly false descriptors like spacious and modern. And so I was thrilled when someone finally reached out, this senior who spoke in a breathless, rapid-fire monotone, her words blurring together in a string of run-on sentences.
Blair.
“Are you new in town?” I asked, over the phone, and from that simple entry point she managed to impart that she was a lifelong New Jerseyan studying Biology at Rutgers on the pre-med track, and that she’d been living off Plum Street with another college student until said roommate had to move back home after her father had a heart attack, which meant that she, Blair, couldn’t afford rent at her old place anymore, making it lucky that she wasn’t officially on the old lease, and so therefore she needed a new place to live, which was problematic because, being mid-semester, most student-housing options were no longer available, which is why she was thrilled to see our ad, but felt nervous about the prospect of living with two men she’d never met before.
“I don’t mean to imply that you or your roommate might be anything other than perfectly decent guys or anything, it’s just that you can never be too sure, really, and I’m a little on edge because all this business with renting and roommates and finances tends to amplify my social and emotional anxiety in ways that I don’t really know how to put into words.” She paused. “How much did you say for utilities?”
I mean, shit.
How could I have resisted falling into friendship with someone who thinks that way?
*****
A few minutes before Blair was scheduled to tour the place, I knocked on Harrison’s door to tell him that he should come out to meet her. “She sounds interested,” I said.
“I’ll be out in a few minutes,” he replied. “The state senate put forth a measure to pave over the asteroid crater. Can you believe that shit? Like this town needs more luxury condos.”
“She probably won’t want to move in without meeting us both,” I said. “I think you’ll like her.”
“I said in a few minutes,” Harrison grumbled.
Blair arrived exactly on time. “Where’s the other one?” she asked, once I’d shown her around. She ignored the constant stream of vitriol coming from behind Harrison’s door—“You call those opening remarks, Grassley? You call that pathos?”—and politely accepted my lie that he was just cranking away at a term paper.
“Listen, I really need a place to live,” she told me, over the clap of Harrison pounding at his desk. “I’m sure he’s fine.”
It looked like a done deal from the moment Blair stepped inside, but I asked her a few questions just to be safe, and she answered each with a characteristically long reply, somehow divulging the finer points of her spiritual belief system when asked what she did for a living.
I told her the room was hers if she wanted it.
“Anything else I should know?” Blair asked. “What happened to your old roommate—this place isn’t haunted or anything, is it?”
“Nothing like that, no,” I said. “It was just time. He moved in with his girlfriend. You know how it goes.”
From Harrison’s room, an apocalyptic, “Fuck!” made us both jump involuntarily. His bedroom door roared open, and he emerged, shirtless, wearing only a baggy pair of jeans that sagged below his waistline. It had been a minute since we’d interacted face-to-face, and the sight of him gave me pause. His hairline had thinned. His skin was pale. I could make out the impression of his ribcage.
“Fucking internet’s out again,” Harrison said, and, sure enough, the modem was flashing orange. He seemed taken aback by Blair’s presence, almost as though he’d forgotten she was coming. “You moving in?” he asked, quieter, and I wondered if he was embarrassed.
“Maybe, yeah,” Blair said. “Looks like it.” She introduced herself and extended her hand.
“Good to meet you,” Harrison said, crouching to fiddle with the modem. Bent over, I could see his ass-crack, and, sticking out of his back pocket, the tip of his plastic vampire fangs that he’d been wearing the night he frightened Brooke.
“I guess that might have been the other reason why our old roommate moved out,” I said, turning to Blair. “Dude was getting pretty sick of the internet going out all the time.”
*****
Not long after moving in, Blair surprised me with a six-pack. “Let’s get to know each other,” she said, leaning against my doorframe, and I obliged happily. We sat on the futon in the living room and the conversation started small. I bitched about class, rambled about Brooke for a while, and then Blair told me that she was angry at her dad for doing that thing again—the nature of the thing was never specified, but she spent a great deal of time explaining that the thing itself wasn’t important so much as what it represented in the tapestry of their relationship. “I don’t always get along with people as well as I wish I did,” she said, riding her own flying segue. “Although there’s this guy that I’ve been kind of seeing. Eli.” She handed me her phone to show off his Instagram. “I’m not sure if I’ll bring him over or not. We’ll see.”
“We don’t bite,” I said, scrolling through his pictures, and there was no helping us getting us onto the subject of Harrison.
“Has he always been like this?” Blair asked. I made a face like I didn’t know what she was talking about. “Reserved, I mean,” she said. “Always shouting in his room like that. I don’t think he’s said ten words to me.”
“He’s just going through it,” I told her, my default excuse. “Something about a falling out with the Democratic Socialists. I think that was like, his outlet, you know? He’s depressed.”
“Do you think you’ll renew the lease with him for next fall?”
“Well, yeah,” I said. “It’ll be our last year here. Who else would I live with?”
“Anybody,” Blair said. “Drinking buddies. Craigslist roommates. Co-eds.”
“I can barely think past next week.”
Blair leaned forward and flashed this conspiratorial grin like she was about to share something confidential. “Are you familiar with the in-between?” she asked me, and I shook my head. “It’s this idea I’ve been kicking around. See, I’ve been thinking a lot about that old headscratcher of whether a tree makes a sound if it falls and there’s nobody around to hear it, and I have to believe that it does, you know? Because if I fall right now, I don’t know who’ll catch me, but I know that I’ll bleed, and that it’ll hurt. You follow?”
“Uh,” I said. “Not really.”
“Don’t make fun.”
“I’m not. Sorry. Keep going.”
“I just keep thinking that we’re in this really urgent and temporary phase of life right now. Like: there’s no one around to hear us. We’re not kids anymore, but we’re not stable adults, either. We’re still in school. Haven’t met anybody permanent. We don’t have forever jobs—I mean, come on, are you going to be working in the dining halls for the rest of your life? Of course not. It’s all transitory, and it’s all in flux. We’re in the in-between.”
I didn’t really understand what she was talking about back then, but sometimes now I think about it, and I realize she was right. In the final months of Harrison’s life, I was in-between everything: adolescence and adulthood; Brooke and Adrian; the year I spent in that over-priced, under-maintained college house and the several I would spend on the road; holding onto the vestiges of my friendship with Harrison and finally shedding him.
“I’m trying to linger here,” Blair told me, quiet. “And it’s so dumb, but I want to be present for all the shitty house parties and the Adderall nights, because I’ve got this sense that we won’t remember much of it. That it’ll all just feel like a fever dream once it’s over, like something that happened to somebody else. I think we’ll forget about it as soon as it’s behind us.”
I think Blair’s a genius, really, but Christ was she ever wrong about that one.
To be continued…
Chris Vanjonack is a writer and educator from Fort Collins, Colorado. A recipient of an AWP Intro Journals Award, his fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared or are forthcoming in One Story, Barrelhouse, Electric Literature, Ninth Letter, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and he currently teaches creative writing at the Ohio State University as a Post-MFA fellow.
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