II.

By the time Sebastian’s decrepit car pulled into the cracked driveway, the sun had already disappeared in the Western sky, leaving an orange haze on the horizon. It was at this time of day that Sebastian’s eyes always played tricks on him; there was just enough light for the form of objects to show, but little else, their details smudged by the oncoming darkness.

Stepping out of his car, Sebastian slid the lock on his door to the secure position and shut it behind him. He opened his back door and, one by one, pulled out the bags of groceries (his aunt had jokingly referred to them as his “rations”) and slid his arms through the plastic handles, making it possible for him to carry multiple bags on one arm. With his other hand, he grabbed his tattered backpack and shouldered it. Locking that door as well, he trudged away from his vehicle and towards the back gate.

It was the dramatic climax of the last days of summer but the air was still remarkably humid and warm. The Midwest was always like this; Sebastian once remarked that the name of the state he resided in was unimportant. The whole Midwest might as well be wiped clean of state borderlines and made into one massive hunk of bullshit. Going from one state to another, little difference could ever be noted. Grey cities, endless corn and bean fields and the same people, their eyes blank and hands dirty from consumption and worship, as in the next state and the next one and the next one: all characteristics he had come to know and loathe. “Familiarity is the last refuge of the modest and chaste individual,” he sighed. He would have to write that one down, it seemed like a keeper.



Sebastian had been telling himself for the past few months that he needed to “write that one down” for the sake of trying to gather his thoughts together. It was something he had seen Jeremy do several times; he had notebooks filled with his thoughts and his clever, Socratic one-liners. Every time Sebastian meant to do so though, his thoughts would vanish and his memory would betray him the second he saw the white pages of his notebook. “I just can’t seem to say what I want to… my feelings lack the ability to find the words they need,” he proclaimed one day. Jeremy had been on the computer across the room and let out a small chuckle.

“You’re giving too much credit to words. Whoever told you that they could accurately express… or even somewhat express… how you’re feeling is a goddamn lethargic devil,” he had replied, exhaustion adrift in his words, as usual. He spoke in ultimatums often but this comment seemed a little too direct for his style. As always though, Sebastian took it to heart and lost a little faith in the linguistics he had relied so heavily on in his younger years as a wannabe poet and social blogger.

Upon reaching the back porch, Sebastian situated his possessions and reached for the handle on the backdoor. It was unlocked, like usual. His and his roommate’s abilities to lock the doors conflicted greatly with the class of neighborhood they lived in. Several times had Sebastian come out to his car before work or before embarking towards some hipster house party and found another possession absent in his car and one of his doors negligently left unlocked by its owner. Their house had yet to suffer the same ordeal, but time had a way of making all things awful come true. “Reason number forty-six not to believe in karma,” he had told himself.

Squeezing through the narrow frame of the backdoor, Sebastian partially stumbled on his way in, his balance thrown off when his grocery bags caught on the doorframe. He wasn’t a large human by any sense of the word, in fact his body looked rather malnourished; not as much so as Jeremy’s decomposing frame revealed, but living in this house, lacking the money for the basic nutrition and a steady diet of alcohol and narcotics had worn his swimmer’s body into something somewhat sickly and pathetic. Sebastian actually preferred it. His ribs were most definitely far more visible than they had ever been; a trait he had always found quite attractive on males. “I’m the masculine Kate Moss… the poster child for the south side anti-luxuries,” he had drunkenly mused over a house card game a few weeks prior.

“The messiah returns bearing gifts for the sheep herds in the valley!” Jeremy exclaimed when Sebastian passed from the back room into the kitchen. He was wearing Sebastian’s Minor Threat shirt and drinking a glass of what appeared to be whiskey and cola, maybe rum. Sebastian didn’t bother to point out the irony and instead said only, “Isn’t that my shirt?” Jeremy looked down at his chest and then back up, a face of indifference painted on him.

“It was on my couch.”

“Yeah, that’s my shirt.”

“Oh,” Jeremy said, unaffected by the idea of possession. He sipped his drink and made a face. “How’s the ol’ hometown? Still little America?”

“Of course, of course,” Sebastian confirmed, setting his groceries on the table. Jeremy inquired as to how he had come across such a supply of dry stock. Sebastian mentioned his aunt and then began silently unloading the rations.

“Hi Sebastian,” he heard a feminine voice say. He glanced into the living room and saw Adeline sitting at the computer, listening to Belle and Sebastian (or so it sounded to be) and gingerly eating an apple.
“I didn’t expect you to be here. No class?” He didn’t honestly care about the answer because he knew she did in fact have class: Logic was always on Wednesday nights.

“I did, but I skipped. Illogic wins,” she glanced to the side as she said this and smiled. Only adorned in a tank-top and sweat pants, Sebastian wondered if they had been fucking previous to his arrival. “It was a one time, drunken thing… if he wasn’t so goddamn good with words, it wouldn’t have happened,” she had pronounced after the first time she and Jeremy had hooked up (in the living room, on Jeremy’s decrepit couch, of course). Sebastian had known from the start it was bullshit: Adeline was remarkably intelligent, with a taste for box wine and obscure European screamo bands; it would have had to have been more than Jeremy’s drunken syllogisms to get her off. She clearly had a misconstrued attraction for the vanguard-building, jobless drunkard. Could Sebastian blame her though? He spent the nights she was around drinking away his unrequited passions and trying to remove Jeremy from the mentor-like pedestal he had subconsciously set him on. But either way, they were still fucking. It had become obvious to everyone in the house.

From behind him, Jeremy’s voice crooned. “Work tomorrow? And where the fuck is Camby?” Adam Cambridge was another occupant of the house. The only one to appear well-fed and the only one to have a steady cash flow, Adam had been the original leaseholder. Through partying and other associations, he had drawn Sebastian, Adeline and their fourth roommate, Carver, into the house. Jeremy was a later addition, arriving during a party, wowing the pseudo-intelligentsia with his (what appeared to be) non-pseudo knowledge, and then never leaving. Aside from a brief confrontation with Carver over the belief in a god, no one had minded his existence on the living room couch or the constant strain on the alcohol and drug supply.

“Yes, around three… or maybe three-thirty, I don’t really know. And how the hell am I supposed to know where he is? I thought he was here,” Sebastian retorted. When the young live together for extended amounts of time, their responses to each other often become sharp and angry, even if the intention to appear so is never there. Another evolution in the life of the pseudo-commune of the drunks and the addicts and the lumpenproletariat, Adeline had once hypothesized.

Jeremy sipped his drink again, its taste showing little to no signs on his face. He placed his left hand on the counter and wiped a piece of fuzz off of his shirt—no, Sebastian’s shirt, and flashed his teeth. “I have the day off tomorrow.”

“Damn, how surprising. You had today and yesterday off as well. And if memory serves me correctly, the day before that,” Sebastian said coolly, putting the last of the dry stock into the cabinet, haphazardly. He didn’t bother disguising his sarcasm around Jeremy; his bullshit detector was flawless.
“Live and let live, boys,” Adeline exclaimed as she strolled into the room, apple core in hand. Why had she assumed there was animosity between them? Or had she simply been joining in on the sarcasm cesspool and Sebastian was assuming the animosity on his own. Was there something different now between the two of them, or even the three of them?

“I was simply joking. I know how he feels: ‘employment is the opiate of the masses,’ right?” Jeremy smiled and raised his glass as if to toast Sebastian’s memorization of his golden rule.

“I thought Marx said religion was the opiate of the masses?” Adeline interjected, dropping the apple core in the trash and smoothing out the wrinkles in her tank-top. Sebastian took the role of observer, as usual. Jeremy set down his drink and let a mischievous smile slide across his lips. They had been fucking.

“Dear, quit believing every word out of the pens of old white men. Besides, when’s the last time you saw a sensible person dropping everything and rushing off to church?”

“By the claim, it sounds like you’re calling the assholes on Wall Street sensible people… or just employed people in general,” she said gaily. Sebastian admired her ability to poke holes in Jeremy’s theorems.

“Touché,” was all he could reply, but his smile was still present. Nothing anyone said ever seemed to wound or even affect him. Sebastian admired that quality. Jeremy nudged his glass with his finger, indecisively, and then took a small sip. “I have to piss.” He pivoted on his right heel and trudged towards the hallway and eventually towards the second door on the left, which contained the unfinished squalor of the downstairs bathroom.

When he was out of earshot, Adeline said (to no one in particular), “Oh Jeremy, you can be quite the fucking fool, can’t you?” Sebastian raised an eyebrow and shot Adeline a glance from across the table.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” he inquired. Adeline snapped out the intense stare she had been giving the empty hallway and glared at Sebastian for a moment before looking away and heading back towards the living room.

Before completely exiting the kitchen, she turned to him and replied, “I don’t know, Seeb. You’re up his ass all the time; you should know exactly what I mean, unless you just choose to ignore it like the rest of the dumbasses in this world.” And with that, she was gone. Sebastian heard her feet hit the stairs and she disappeared into the third door on the right of the upstairs hallway, her bedroom.

“A moment for a rebuttal would have been nice,” he mumbled and creeped into the living room, resting his weary bones in the computer chair and silently logging on.