That’s the Sound Mitosis Makes

Today I saw a bird crash into a window and die. I couldn’t help but agree. There’s nothing much else to do in situations like that, just nod along and accept that this is the world, and another dead bird is just a part of the new reality you must endure. It’s this exact mindset that I bring to the table when James calls one midnight in early December and in a slurry of words asks, “Are you sober? Of course you’re sober. Are you awake? Yeah. I need you to come over.”

A different midnight, I wasn’t awake, until I was, when Imogen rapped on my door like a sputtering fountain. When I put on my pants sufficiently enough to open the door, I found her sitting there like an abandoned puppy. She couldn’t say a word. I leaned out into the hallway, glancing into the shared kitchenette of our townhouse. The light was on, but no one was there. I decided I’d turn it off once current issues were resolved, and sat down in my own doorway, leaning against the frame.

“I’m here as long as you need me,” I said. I may have dozed.

“I need to go,” I tell Tapeworm as I search our living room for my hoodie. Her real name isn’t Tapeworm, but we’ve reached the point in the friendship where her actual name sounds fake and her fake name feels real. It rounds her out as a person, and that’s the most we can ask for.

“What’s up?” She rises from our living room couch.

“Imogen’s sick.” I grab my wallet from the coffee table, shove it in my back pocket. “James is too drunk to drive to the ER, so I’ll be taking them.”

“But you can’t drive.”

“Legally, no.” I stick my arm into my hoodie, and a bunch of fruit snack wrappers fall out. I pause. “I don’t think James knows that.”

“Hold tight. I’m coming with you.”

“But you can’t drive.”

Tapeworm claps my back. “I don’t have to. You’re driving.”

I enjoyed living on the first floor of the townhouse. It gave me an air of centrality, like I was the foundation of the community. I’d been there the longest: two and a half years, and people came and went as people do, but I stuck around. At such a chaotic point in my life, it felt good to have somewhere so regular to be.

And every morning, I would wake up at seven, take a shower, venture out into the living room, and eat my breakfast, watching news or listening to music on my four-year-old laptop that, when you’re my age, feels like it’s been there forever. Every morning, I would sit and watch the world materialize around me as everyone would wake up and come downstairs, say their polite, groggy good-mornings, and wander off to classes and jobs and what-have-you.

I began to memorize the ways people would come downstairs, so I could gauge how excited I should be. They had their own rhythms and personalities. Tapeworm skipped every third stair. Imogen would take each step one at a time, careful not to trip because her backpack was loaded with books and one misstep would send her to her death. Sometimes the steps would come with an empty fury, and that would be the loud girl at the end of the upstairs hall whose name I never bothered to learn. Sometimes, James spent the night with Imogen, and he’d try to sneak down the stairs, but I could always hear him. I heard all. And then there was the very specific way Bianca would pad down the stairs, like it was the gentle slope into Hell’s mouth, and she excitedly welcomed her fate.

It was this padding that broke the silence the night of Imogen’s unspecified disaster, and I watched Bianca, her hair in a pristine bun, head quietly to the kitchen sink before noticing the people on the floor in front of my door, locking eyes with me. She gave me the sort of look that meant, “Is there anything I can do to help?” and I gave her the sort of look that meant, “Just go to bed, I’ll take care of this.” She nodded. I don’t think she even knew my name yet at that point. She’d just moved in, brought here by a friend of a friend who knew there was a spare bed in our house and knew that Bianca was about to lose hers.

After a while, I’ll decide I’m in love with Bianca. Perhaps I only have feelings for her because she’s available, a stone’s throw away from my room door, but when you really think about it, isn’t that all you need, is presence? We’ll decide that maybe we like each other one day, but right after that happens, I’ll have to move out, and that presence will be lost. Just as accidentally as people crash into each other, so, too, with that same vigor must people fall apart.

James’s car roars to life when I turn the key in the ignition. Instinctively, I say, “Ooh, she’s an angry one today,” as I’ve heard James say numerous times. Tapeworm squints at me through her dark thick-rimmed glasses as I try and figure out what the fuck I’m doing.

“Jimmy, how do I turn on the defroster?” But James is busy in the backseat trying to keep Imogen awake and responsive.

“If you roll down the window,” says Tapeworm, “that might help with the fog on the windshield.” And it does, but it’s also about twenty degrees out, and as James’s so-called Sexy Beast grinds her way to the county hospital, the influx of cold air freezes my hands to the steering wheel and sends my hair all akimbo.

“Imogen?” says Tapeworm. “You okay back there?”

“Nnnnnnnnno,” Imogen slurs, and then there’s the unmistakable noise of vomit hitting the bottom of a plastic bag. James wipes her mouth with limited drunken dexterity.

I can’t stop shivering. We’re on the Strip now, going a solid fifty in a fifty-five. I realize I’m drifting right when a truck behind me blares its horn and I rush to correct.

“You okay, dude?” asks Tapeworm, tapping my shoulder. I nod. “Cool. Next right.”

“What would I do without you?”

“A whole lot better,” says Tapeworm as we take the exit to the hospital. I’m grateful it isn’t snowing.

“This is my depression couch,” Imogen made clear as she spent five days straight on the couch. At night we could coax her upstairs to her bedroom, but during the day she would just lie there, refusing to eat, breaking into tears without warning every twenty minutes. James took things less hotly. We got food together every day that week, and every time the conversation turned to Imogen, he’d frown, fall silent, stare at his glass of water until the topic shifted.

“He said I was mean,” Imogen would say. “I’m not mean. Am I mean?” And I’d tell her what she wanted to hear with nary an opinion on the matter. All the red flags were there, I told her, and when she asked me which red flags there were in particular, my mind would play loud carnival music. A defense mechanism.

The third day of depression couching, Imogen said to me, “He dumped out my vodka. That was expensive vodka. Like, thirty bucks. Tell him he owes me thirty bucks.” I never told him. Honestly, in his shoes, I would’ve done the same thing.

James stays by Imogen’s bedside, leaving Tapeworm and me in a semi-sterile ER waiting room. A rotund nurse walks out in purple-pink scrubs.

“We’re keeping her overnight for observation,” she tells us. “Won’t be out until 6, 6:30 in the morning at the earliest.” I check my watch. It’s quarter to one. “You two should head home.” And she heads back behind the desk, into the doorway. Tapeworm and I exchange sidelong glances. We’re not doing that.

I gesture to the vending machines. “Want anything?”

“Just some water,” says Tapeworm, and I get up with a grunt and brush up against the plastic potted plant on my way to the machine. I reach for my wallet, swipe my mom’s credit card, and select water. The machine churns, and a bottle of water slides forward, but catches on the window. Tapeworm cackles in the background. I’m surprised how heavy I feel.

I’m not angry when I slam my palm against the machine. When I do, the bottle of water drops into the bottom of the vending machine, and I toss it to Tapeworm before repeating the process for myself.

“Thanks for coming with,” I tell her. We split a bag of M&M’s and the pouches of fruit snacks I brought with me because I bring fruit snacks everywhere.

“Anytime,” she says. “Anything for Imogen.”

“Anything for James,” I add. She laughs.

“He’s not your boyfriend or anything. You don’t have to do everything for him.”

“Yeah,” I say. “And Imogen’s not your girlfriend, but here we are.”

“Lighten up,” says Tapeworm, smacking my arm. Then she takes a good, hard look at me. “You okay, man? You look pale.”

“I always look pale. I am pale.”

Tapeworm touches my arm. “You’re cold, too. Here.” She throws her jacket over me. “Warm up.”

“You don’t have to do that,” I laugh. “I’m not your boyfriend.”

She’s repulsed by the concept.

There will come a day when I don’t live with Imogen or Tapeworm or Bianca anymore, when James is no longer a stone’s throw away. He’ll ship up to Boston, and Imogen will find herself in Portland, Oregon doing Oregon things. I’ll work my old job at the library for a while, walk those old aisles where I found James and Imogen making out once at 2 AM and had to kick them out. But eventually I’ll lose that job, move back home, occupy that special space between two people who never will speak to each other again.

My last profound memory with Imogen was the day after she de-couched herself. At the end of my library shift, she pulled up in front of the building in her old hatchback, blasting Taylor Swift’s “We Are Never Getting Back Together” so loud it blew out her car’s speakers. “Get in, bitch,” she told me that night. “We’re going shopping.”

James dropped by my house as soon as Imogen left forever: joined me and Bianca and Tapeworm eating pizza and playing games, and it was like we were a unit. But the unit had to split up. That was just how things had to go. Bit by bit, pieces peel off.

“We’re here.” I put the car in park and shut her off, taking great pleasure in the Sexy Beast’s growl slowing to a purr before dissipating completely into the sunrise.

In the backseat, Imogen spits into the plastic bag we gave her.

“Thanks,” says James. “You’re a real friend. She’s gonna rest up at my place.” He regards Imogen for a moment. “Please never do that again.”

“You’re my… boyfriend,” says Imogen soberly. She’s still shaky, but at least she’s not going to die. Everyone gets out of the car, and I hand the keys over to James, who guides Imogen to his door and gives Tapeworm and I one resolute wave before heading inside.

The rising sun shines in mine and Tapeworm’s eyes on the walk back to our house. It feels uphill, but neither of us slept, so that might be it.

“I think those two are gonna make it,” says Tapeworm. I let out a sardonic chuckle.

“I don’t think so. Imogen and James? James and Imogen? That unit is lacking in poetry.”

Tapeworm rolls her eyes. “Not every couple has to sound good with their names side by side.” She nearly trips over a sewer grate, and I catch her.

“It’s just.” I sigh. “I think they’re meant to fracture. It’s like.” My brain grinds into lecture mode. “It’s like cellular mitosis, I think.”

“Cellular mitosis!”

“Yeah, and…” I lose my train of thought for a moment. I’m high on exhaustion. “Right. And our relationships are the cells, you know? Our house is a cell. That car was a cell. James and Imogen is a cell.”

“Are a cell.”

“No. Yes.” Our house is in sight, at the top of the hill, past the train tracks. “But, like. Eventually, two distinct cells exist in the body of one cell, you know? And they have to, you know, they have to split up, because there’s so much dissonance, and they can’t be one thing, so, like, fwoosh. Two cells.”

“Fwoosh!”

“Well, like, that’s the sound mitosis makes!”

“You didn’t stick the landing, Steve.”

“I never tried.”

We’re at the door now, and I stick my key into the lock, but before I turn it, I turn to Tapeworm.

“Thanks again for coming with,” I tell her.

“Hey, anytime.” She pauses. “You’re my friend, you know? I’d do anything for you.”

“I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

Silence. “You know I’ll be here, as long as you need me.”

Steven Christopher McKnight aspires to live in a small apartment above a bakery in some obscure Central European city, writing terrifying fiction until, eventually, he disappears mysteriously, clues to his disappearance scattered around his creative work. Is there a clue in this piece? Perhaps. Steven recently graduated from Susquehanna University. He is currently a cashier at a thrift store in Scranton, as he gathers his faculties for an explosive rise to niche popularity. He also presently manages The Lit Mug, a publication that prints fiction and poetry on mugs.

That's the Sound Mitosis Makes is part of a larger collection of short stories, "The Bird on the Other Side of the Window," which draws inspiration from the rise and fall of a relationship between Steven's old roommate and one of Steven's closest friends.

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