Pete Davidson 

Pete Davidson and Kim Kardashian are being driven somewhere to eat food they’ll be paid to eat if they take a picture of it, and I am stuck here, in this old section of the city that was restored to the time when the residents had slaves. Ah—the Port is nice enough and it is great to be at this house party with Aja, although our Problem feels close to slipping off the tip of our tongues when we drink. 

Inside the party, I notice a few things that I hate—the insecure boy who cannot stop flexing, the woman with the mullet who is trying to flip her hair but forgets—but I try to focus on the orange wine that Aja took a bus across the city to purchase for me and this party. I also enjoy the fact that the host’s pet alligator is meandering around the party as if they have seen it all before but would appreciate a Dorito. 

Here, says Aja, giving me another mug of the wine, which washes the problem back to my tonsils. 

I love you, I say, just to hear the return of the phrase. It doesn’t arrive because Aja is distracted by a friend who has touched her shoulder for attention. This is a friend who—I am sure you can guess—I hate because of their taste in films that consider troubled characters deep whereas they’re just narcissists… why does everyone else have to do the work, while these self-help individualists get their laziness excused because of x? The alligator approaches and breaks me from my hating thoughts and nudges my ankle with its long green snout. I lean down, exposing my neck to the animal, with my mug in hand. The alligator opens its mouth. I turn the glass so that a splash of wine lands on its enormous tongue. Although the orange wine barely wets its gums, the animal’s eyes widen with sugar high.

I stand up and the animal does not move. I try to distract myself as I feel the problem reentering my mouth and I repeat the therapist’s line about not-i-cing the emotions instead of allowing them to guide my decisions. I count one negative thought on a nearby mullet, another on an alligator tooth, and another on Aja’s wrist that has coiled around her friend’s shoulder. 

You look terrible, says the friend, to me: they’re right and I naked. 

Thanks. 

What’s wrong? 

He is an alcoholic, says Aja. I found him on the street in Ankara. Luckily, I speak some Turkish—he promised that, if I brought him to live with me in Montreal, he would help me perfect the language. 

Bu doğru mu? 

Evet, I say, to the friend. 

Burada gerçekten neler oluyor? 

Sorry: evet is my extent. 

When I notice Aja’s hand in the friend’s pocket, I excuse myself to the washroom. The door is closed. I knock. Some whispers and then the door opens as two wide eyed people smile and emerge. Inside, alone in the washroom, I look in the mirror and feel generally quite attractive, feel less and less like I care about whatever Pete Davidson and Kim Kardashian are doing in the moment. By the soap, I notice a vintage cd case of Celine Dion’s Let’s Talk About Love. On the toilet, I can hear the two whisperers outside the door, perhaps remembering that they’ve forgotten the smudged case.

Life. But only if you eat it quickly. That’s number six on my top ten favorite cereals. 

Minimalist American twentieth century writing was a bunch of dudes trying to hold in their farts. And now you have the dudes farting. Nobody wants that. That’s not what I’m saying. 

While the two aren’t listening to one another, it is nice, although drug induced, how transparently their thoughts move from abstract idea to language, how honest their bodies are being. I hear a swooshing sound, as though I’d already flushed, but hear it from above. I look up, to the bathroom ceiling, and notice a glass skylight that seems to be at the bottom of a pool. When the alligator floats over and looks down to me in the room I leap from the toilet and pee inside the crotch of my blue jeans. 

TIMES UP says a voice behind the door. 

No, I say, as I blow on the spot of the jeans that has turned from baby blue to navy. It’s futile. 

Two: Lucky Charms. But only if you take all the brown crusty things out. Marshmellow only. 

Brown sugar mini wheats, I say, leaving the washroom. 

That’s a very dramatic entrance—if you don’t mind me saying—says the one, a very dramatic way to enter, like all shitty British and American dramas, nobody cares about hieroglyphics: oo but it’s so much deeper if it’s a reference to something else: smoke signals! Right? 

No, I say. I do not understand you. 

When I can’t find Aja, I realize that the Problem is a marble about to slip off the tip of my tongue. I feel a tickle on my Achilles tendant and look down to find that the alligator, wet from the pool, has put a little dragon claw against my heel. I didn’t know that alligators could give a paw, but I feel it is a sort of apology and I shake back with my foot to feel the ancient slimy scales against the rubber skin of my toes. I wonder what Kim is eating, and then decide to be as friendly as possible with everyone for the rest of the night. I see Aja, finally, dancing in a closet. 

It was of course at this time that I make the vital decision to consume a significant portion of purple hallucinogenic drugs. The alligator, who had followed me to the kitchen where I found a heap of the chewy things on a cutting board, seems to shake its head in warning. I feel judged. I consider not doing a significant amount of hallucinogens. I consider all of my potential escape routes from anxiety over the Problem. I pretend I hadn’t noticed the alligator—let us call it Al—'s shaking snout. I take one large handful of the mushrooms and washed it down with whiskey. The mushrooms are surprisingly sweet and I wonder whether they were simply extras from a pizza. To be responsible, I pour myself a tall glass of water. Under Al’s concerned glare, Aja’s voice returns to me from a washroom. I think about the Celine Dion CD case but she is a sober person who is addicted to the rituals of White Jesus. Hi, she says, tapping my shoulder the water graces my lips. Hello, I return. Let’s have a real talk now. Here? Yes: here. Mostly everyone is yelling personal drunken stories at one another and so I figure that this type of surrounded might be the safest place. Go ahead. I have a significant fear of monkeys, says Aja. I am afraid that I won’t live long enough to see the end of the world, and it isn’t that far away. Okay. I am not sure if I should be worried that we are through or relieved or if I am being paranoid. You seem to have done a lot of cocaine. I have. Not too much but I have yes. Just the right amount. Why are you worried about those things? What about living in the moment? What about our conversation about Pete Davidson? He has one of those names where you have to say his full name: Pete Davidson. You talk so much about him, but you never call him Pete. I turn to check on Al and find him sleeping on my shoe. I wonder if alcohol is poisonous to alligators but figure they’ve lived for millions of years. The scales on his long nose, now, seem to shift, ever so slightly, a shimmer, a trillion microscopic shifts, the long shallow grooves like a series of drained ancient lakes rumbling from earthquakes. Is that alligator real? I wonder about holographic skeletons of Jesus, phosphorus bones radiating from a tomb. Hello? Intricate ligaments twisting through stone by chisel of mason hand, forming J E S U S W A L K S on the door of the tomb. Yes. His name is Al. I didn’t know they had an alligator. So you don’t want to talk about it? You don’t want to talk about it at all. Drugs, I think, exaggerate some part of us to represent the whole, so that the version presented to a stranger is a single quality personified, as if curiosity can grow feet and ass to sell itself around a room: I know Aja better than this quality that her brain is enjoying, that she is in fact much smarter than I because of her ability to pause, reflect, think, and consider variables, consequences, alternatives, before making life altering decisions, while simultaneously engaging with teambuilding, active listening, psychoactive individual listening in the multitasking prowess of an orchestral maestro that defies socialized, gendered, emotional expectations and toward a shared healer whose love, like all of us, is learned through relationships, never from self to self, a leader like a drum beat that shakes group feet underwater instead of raising boat and cannon. Can I get you a glass of water? Yes: these mushrooms are making me thirsty. Aja does not comment about the mushrooms and I fear it will be held onto as a precious dagger reply in a future argument about the Problem. I regret speaking—I regret everything. She leads us to the washroom although there was water in the sink and I do not question it because I enjoy the tiny breeze that being pulled to the washroom allows, these tiny joys of a life lived that will not make it to your tombstone or your diary or the story-told-at-funeral-by-your-friends-colleagues-and-family, that simple joy of feeling air against your cheeks as you are drawn to an isolated space with someone that you love. You took mushrooms? I am totally okay, I am having a great time. Don’t look in the mirror. Where’d you get mushrooms, Kanye? How many did you take? I’m just happy to be here with you, I’d rather not fight, if that is okay. This is how I can tell you’re high: you don’t want to argue. I like what you said before, about wanting to live long enough to see the end of the world. I want to live long enough to see hologram skype. Imagine we could call Belcalis, and she could join us right now, from Miami. It’s only a two-thousand mile drive. Yes but we aren’t driving two days to spend five minutes with someone. Maybe we should. We can’t drive. You can’t. The breeze, this time, feels cluttered, filled with microplastics so that I will drown standing up everyone in this room is judging us I have forgotten all about Al we have abandoned Al we are terrible people kill me kill me kill me kill yourself. I try to bring Al with us. We can’t. How about let Al decide? Aja sighs and leaves the condo to the hallway. I follow. We turn back to the open door. Looking at Al and all of the very drunk people feels like putting on goggles to peel a view from beneath the surface of a river. See, he doesn’t want to come. Al rushes to us in the hallway with a speed that would frighten me should I consider him a stranger. I don’t need to tell Aja I told you so for her to laugh. Al seems to grin, too. Waiting for the elevator, I press my fingers over the button with the symmetrical down facing arrow that was lasered into the steel by some sort of extremely diligent robot. The doors have open and shut and I hear Aja telling me get in get in and, when I do, I am relieved to be leaving for the prospect of open air and trees and the outdoors, and then am shocked to see Aja lean down to pet an alligator. This was your idea, she says, when looking back at me. So much of our relationship is a glittered looking back at part of the other. I do not know who you are, this listener that you are, if you are hearing all of this through the drums of an elevator, but I want you to know that I was here, with Aja and Al, and that we tried our best to do our best and enjoy those little breezes that made us whole. 

Liam Lachance's work has appeared in The Feathertale Review, In/Words, and Headlight. He lives in Montreal with three wolves, and is looking for an artist to collaborate with on a graphic novel about art theft.