So, I just did my best to be interesting and comfortable when he came back. I was going to comfort him. I was going to have his back, because we were friends and that was what friends did. I threw on the television and grabbed a six pack of beers, determined to drink them all before he returned. I wondered if he’d find it endearing—me getting drunk all alone while he was out. I figured he’d want to sit down and have some too, and when he’d settled down and the vividness started to dissipate, he’d maybe be back to his old self. He’d want to watch TV with me, he’d want to get drunk too.

  Well, I did get drunk. Plenty drunk. It didn’t stop at the six pack. I was pouring myself cups of liquor and the whole time I had my eye on the door. I was just waiting, you know? Waiting for Ollie to come back in. I kept listening for his footsteps on the other side of the door. Some shuffling, some nervous breathing, the clang of keys. But nothing. I got drunk and Ollie never showed.

  ***

  It was night when I passed out. I was delirious. A couple times I thought I saw him, but I couldn’t move. I might have just been dreaming, or imagining it. I thought I saw him walk in for a minute and walk past me, like a ghost of ritual, going to his room for bed. I blinked and he was gone. But it was then that I got up too, as best as I could, to go to bed myself. I was so drunk I already felt the beginning of the hangover. Still, I forced my liquid body to peer back into Ollie’s room, to make sure he hadn’t snuck in.

  Nothing, empty.

  I slept.

  ***

  In the morning, I considered the very real possibility that Ollie might not come back. I called out of work again and sat at home and tried to decide where he might have gone. Ollie didn’t have any family nearby. He might have money and be staying at a hotel, but I didn’t know for sure.

  I kept putting pen to scratch paper, with the full intention of discovering something about Ollie. Instead, whenever I did, I found myself scratching out numbers.

  I was going over my sick days, the totality of my paid time off.

  “Really, I could call out for the next week, if I wanted,” I said aloud. “Usually, he said they’re once a week, or something close to that.” I was muttering. “I could call out until the next one. I’ll just have to keep my eyes open.”

  ***

  A week passed and Ollie never showed. I had his number, yeah. And I called him a lot. I never got an answer. I went to work most days, but each time I did, I was cured of any renewed desire to participate. Kev and the others made jokes about Ollie being gone. Brown bag flu, they said. Like he’d just been partying and feeling ill and that’s why he wasn’t showing. Kev seemed more annoyed by it than the others. “Well, if he misses much more . . . ” he’d say, trailing off. We knew what he meant.

  Each day, I counted the seconds on the clock. I watched for Jeffrey Masha on the television, I made snap judgments every day, guessing how long I’d have to wait for the Tide.

  I came up with nothing.

  Nothing I could be sure of. I lost count too easily. I got distracted by my own shit. I could never remember if the things people did were normal or not. That was Ollie’s territory, he was the observer. I wasn’t good at that shit.

  I was stewing, internally screaming at the boredom of my life.

  Every day I was locked into a coma, my body a vegetable, my mind fully alive and rattling its cage.

  ***

  The end of the month came and my sorrow had transformed to hate.

  Rent was due, after all.

  I lived paycheck to paycheck, just like everyone. My meager savings weren’t more than a couple hundred bucks. It took everything I had to plug the hole that Ollie left.

  I really started to hate him.

  I was out of sick time.

  I had to work.

  I thought about a new job, something I could love.

  But there were always more Kevs. Always more button-ups and bland coworkers—there was an endless amount of everything I hated. And there was no Ollie.

  My last beer sloshed into my gullet. It warmed me.

  I sighed, sniffed, rubbed something wet from my eye. I had to go to bed. I had work in the morning.

  ***

  Where the fuck was he?

  I was staring at a spreadsheet. My brain folded in on itself as I entered digits into squares. Kev stood over me, hmm-ing with approval.

  “Killing it, fella,” he said.

  I couldn’t wait to kill him again.

  Whenever Kev talked to me, I remembered the time I crushed his skull against the pavement. It was a satisfying memory. When stuck in a concentric circle, there wasn’t much else for me. Ollie was gone still, three weeks gone.

  But what hurt most was that I knew I’d already missed several Tides. I must’ve. They were right there, right in front of me, and I had no idea. That was what hurt the most. That I could’ve escaped, for just a day, but didn’t.

  ***

  At lunch, Erik sat beside me. “Sandwich? Nice, cool,” he said.

  I nodded, pretending not to listen. I didn’t usually take my breaks inside, but for some reason, I didn’t see a point to leaving anymore. Eating indoors was just another way to accept that this place was my casket.

  “So, dude, how you been?”

  Erik was older than me, a father, a jocular sports fan with a gray-flecked beard. He had strong arms and a straightforward manner of speaking.

  “Okay,” I lied, not looking up.

  He breathed deep, expanding his barrel chest. “Sure, man, sure.” He stretched his arms, cracked his knuckles. “It’s just,” he started, “me and some of the others have been talking. You seem not-okay. A little off. Maybe a little down?”

  I looked at him blankly. “What do you mean?”

  “Oh, well, you know. Look, man, it’s none of my business—but we’re worried about you. Like, really worried.”

  “What have I been doing?”

  “You just seem off.”

  “What does that mean though?”

  “It means that you’re acting differently.”

  “You barely knew me in the first place though. This is just how I act, maybe.”

  He balked. “Oh, c’mon, man. I knew you better than that. I went to your party, didn’t I? I used to hang with Ollie every now and then. He’d talk about you. We’ve talked here and there at work too. Let’s not pretend we’re strangers, okay?” His voice was soft, personable. I almost caved.

  “I’m fine. Really, I am.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Just, if you’re not fine, know that people around here are willing to talk, okay?”

  “Got it, thanks.”

  “How’s Ollie?”

  I shrugged. “Vanished on me. Dude was always sort of a flake.”

  He nodded slowly. “Got it,” he said, as if that explained everything. “Alright, then. Well, if you ever need anything . . . ”

  “I know where to go.”

  Another week wasted, another Tide missed, and it seemed like all of them came to talk to me in turn. They each said their piece, as if they were bringing gifts to a God of Death, offers of humility and kindness. “Do you want to go out this weekend, maybe?” “I have some extra food, if you’re interested.” “Are you going to move?” “If you need any help with it, let me know.”

  They all said what they needed to say, and I was just so fucking bored of it. Just bored to death.

  And it was then that I knew what to do. Alone in the break room, phone in my hand, Ollie’s number staring back at me.

  Im gonna kill every one of them when the tide comes in tomorrow.

  I stared back at my phone.

  Then: three dots.

  Wait wait wait lets talk.

  Okay.

  17

  I REALLY JUST thought I won, right there.

  I was sitting outside, wire chair, drinking a coffee. It was midday and I couldn’t really tell if everything was right anymore. But it was right enough. I knew I was going to get my friend back.

  Sure enough, right on time, he showed up. He suggested a public meeting, I didn’t know why. He’d gotten jumpy, I guessed. I stood up when he came toward me. “Ollie,” I said. “Long time, no see.” He didn’t smile when he saw me, just nodded.

  “How are you?”

  “Good,” I said. “Great.”

  “Sorry, about—you know.” He kept looking down at his feet, like he couldn’t stand to look at me.

  “Are you coming back to the apartment?”

  He shook his head fast. “No,” he said as he sat down with me.

  I swallowed. I felt the knife in my chest, twisting. “Do you want to tell me why?”

  And that was when something happened that I just couldn’t have expected. Ollie laughed. Loud, mirthless laughter. He was laughing at me. And when he saw my face, his smile faded to a grimace. “Wait,” he said. “You really don’t know?”

  “No. I guess not.”

  I felt my posture get rigid. My back straightened. I was puffing out my chest. Blood rushed in my ears. He was trying to make me feel stupid. I’d never felt stupid in front of Ollie before. I didn’t like it.

  He just shook his head. He sighed. “Do you want to know where I’ve been the last month?”

  “Sure,” I said, keeping the syllable tight and ice-cold.

  “I checked myself into a place. A—jeez—I don’t want to sound melodramatic, but like a mental hospital. For people going through stuff, tragedy, suicidal ideation, et cetera.”

  “Really now.” Despite the coolness of my response, I hadn’t expected that. Ollie was always very well put-together. He never let an inkling drip of any mental illness, at least not to me.

  “Yeah,” he said, gaining momentum. “It was really good. Really set me on the right track. It made me realize a lot of things, a lot of things about how I’ve lived my life. Or, rather, how my situation and biology have forced me to live my life.” He paused for a moment. “Maybe,” his voice was like a whisper, a choke, “you should consider going too.”

  It was my turn to laugh. “Why the fuck would I do that?”

  “Because you need it. It’ll help.”

  “Is this about what happened at work? The last Tide?”

  “Of course it is!” he yelled. Ollie had his hands up, he was ready to grab me by the collar. He looked around, self-conscious. He put his hands back to his side. Then, half to himself, “How could it be about anything else?”

  “None of it was real though. None of it mattered, right?” I was getting tired of this already. I didn’t understand why he was being like this.

  “It was real for me.”

  “Yes, and then everything resets and it’s fine.”

  “I killed people, dude. I hurt them. I’m a murderer.”

  “But—”

  He cut me off. “But nothing. That shit doesn’t wash away. It stains you. I can’t sleep at night, man. I keep thinking about—about—about what happened. What I did. I keep seeing their bodies, falling. Just falling flat, like something inside of them got extinguished. Whatever fire that makes people alive, snuffed in an instant. I did that.”

  “You did,” I said. “And I want to do that too. I never got my turn.”

  “You got Kev,” he said. “That’s enough.”

  “Kev didn’t count.”

  “Weren’t you beat up after you did it?”

  I shrugged. “Maybe a little. But it passes. Just like it’ll pass for you. You need to come back to the apartment.”

  “No,” he said, “stop.” He had his hands up again, warning me. “It’s not a safe place for me, right now. I hate to do this to you, but I’m not coming back. I know it’s a lot, but I spent all my money on the hospital. It’s gone. But I’ll be happy to send you a portion of my rent or whatever when I get a new job.”

  I shook my head. I leaned back. I tried to swallow my rage. “You really fucked me over.”

  “I know, I’m sorry.”

  “Are you?”

  “Look, dude,” he said, starting slowly. I was getting angrier, because he kept talking to me like I was some sort of a child. Like I was stupid. He started every sentence as if I just wasn’t getting it. “I needed to do this for myself. To be right again. I’ve always had problems, you know? Not big problems, but just enough small problems that shit was hard. Everything we’ve done with the Tide . . . it just made shit worse for me. I can’t be that person anymore. I want to forget it exists.”

  “What?”

  “As far as I’m concerned, The Tide doesn’t exist. It can’t exist, for my own health and safety.”

  “But you were there.” I was speaking too fast, I was too excited. “I remember. You had the shotgun, and you were just tearing through everyone. Kev too, especially Kev. You fucking floored him, man. You ended that motherfucker. It was the greatest thing I’d ever seen.”

  He sighed. “If that’s true, that’s really fucking sad, man.”

  “I wanna have a turn.”

  More sighs, more consternation, more of Ollie blue-balling me out of some newfound “inner peace.”

  “C’mon, it’s only fair. I wanna do it.”

  He looked past me, like he was staring off forever. I waited, while his eyes went glossy and his mouth went slack. Finally, he said, in that same irritatingly slow voice, “I had a feeling you’d want to. That it’d come to this.”

  Finally, we were getting somewhere. “Well, no shit. We’ve talked about it for, like, ever.”

  Ollie: still staring into space. “What if I refused? What are you going to do then?”

  This is where I knew I had him. Ollie was smart, but he wasn’t that smart. He stepped right into my trap. I smiled. “I’ll just guess,” I said.

  This snapped him out of it. “Guess?”

  “Yep, guess. Is it tomorrow? Does it matter? I can get a gun by tomorrow. I can steal one the morning of, I don’t care.”

  “But you don’t know if it’s tomorrow.”

  “Nope,” I said. And I think he was finally seeing my point. “I don’t care. It’s my turn. You can either help me kill a lot of people when there’s no consequences or you can let me spin the ol’ roulette wheel and take a chance. Either way, it’s going to happen. It has to happen at this point. I need this, man.”

  I sounded desperate, but it worked.

  “Fuck,” he said, tears rimming his eyes again. “Fuck. Fuck.”

  “When’s the next Tide, Ollie?”

  He looked scared, trapped. He was thinking. He shook his head back and forth, as if he were trying to shake away an awful idea. I didn’t know why I liked him so much right then, he was so pathetic.

  “You’re just never gonna want to stop, huh?” he asked, finally.

  “Not as long as I live in this world,” I said.

  “Okay,” he said, finally. His voice quivered. “The day after tomorrow.”

  I nodded, I breathed out. Relief flooded me. “Okay.”

  18

  OLLIE DIDN’T TEXT me the next day, but I didn’t care about that. Because really, I meant what I said. I was excited about something and I wasn’t going to let anything get in the way. I felt like I had given myself permission, finally, to act. And really, nothing else mattered. The Tide didn’t matter, not really. The Tide would only allow me to act more than once. But you know what they said: live every day like it’s your last. So, that was what I did.

  It wasn’t hard for me to find weapons. My father was a hunter, after all. I hadn’t been home for over a year and all I had to do was stop by unannounced and get to chatting.

  I never felt at home with my family, but still, I walked up and knocked.

  My Mom opened the door. She’d gotten older since I’d last seen her. My father stood behind her, a couple feet back. We left on ill terms last time, but it was alright. I could play along.

  “Mom,” I said, embracing her. “Dad,” I said.

  He threw my handshake away and it was as easy as that. He pulled me in. “Son,” he said. “It’s been too long.”

  “Too long,” I confirmed.

  They led me into the house, pictures surrounding me like mirrors out of time. There I was as a child, there I was as a teenager, oh look—there I was as a graduate.

  “You want some coffee?”

  “Yes, love some.”

  “Cream, sugar?”

  “Black is fine.”

  “Alright, hon. Give me a second.”

  Me and my father were left alone and he was staring at me intently, studying me. Finally, with a sigh, he said, “Jesus. I’m so old.”

  “Ah, don’t say that.”

  He gestured to me. “You’re a young man now.” He shook his head. “It’s just crazy to see.”

  “People grow up.”

  “That they do.”

  We sat there for a moment, just thinking about that, I guess. The inevitability of it all, of everything. The fucking, living, and dying that make up the circle of life. And me, the Great Disruptor of the Circle.

  Mom came back in with coffee and we all sipped and discussed trivialities.

  “How’s work?” she asked.

  I felt like a machine—for each input, I had an output. “Great,” I said, because you always had to respond in the affirmative. You always had to shield people from your own discontent. Depression became “tired,” work became “great.” It was just how it went.

  “Still digging it, huh?” said Dad, musing to himself. “You always were a wiz with computers.”

  “You were,” said Mom nodding. “You were always doing something on one of those things. I never could understand it, not at all.”

  “Same, that just passed us by, I guess. But you work with computers now, you went to school for it and everything.”

  “Well, yeah,” I said. “I mean, it’s not the same sort of stuff I went to school for.”

  Dad waved a hand. “At least you have a job. Not everyone does.”

  “Right,” I said, my teeth grinding. “You’re right.”

  “My friend Amy, remember Amy, right? Well, Amy’s son is still looking for a job. He’s had to work at a grocery store. It’s been over a year too, poor guy. He’s still looking though. You just can’t ever give up,” said Mom.

 

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