Before she left, we vocalized. Things were said. She asked why I didn’t trust her, and I called her a cunt, which was malicious, because I know how much she aggressively hates that word. That was me lashing out. I said, I have no reason to trust you, and she said, You were the one who, you know. The door swinging after her, slamming back into the wall, the handle cracking a hole into the plasterwork, noise like a distant thunderclap. A period after her leaving, punctuation marking the end of us.
In the wake, I stared at her things; or, I tried to stare at her things, only I couldn’t see any of them. I fucking knew how things happened from this point forward, because everybody’s broken up with somebody before, everybody’s been a we then a you and also separately a me. It’s a scale of how entrenched your lives are. Everything in the apartment was going to be split up into either Mine or Hers, a harsh line drawn in the hardwood floors, but in that moment I couldn’t see anything that didn’t have the taint of Ours about it. I knew what she was like, and I knew she wouldn’t come back for any of it. I knew how it would go. She would tell me that she didn’t want anything. She was good at leaving things, at not wanting the pressure of the responsibility.
I walked to the kitchen. Put ice into a glass, then bourbon. That’s what people did in the movies when they were sad, or when a thing had been ended. They drank. They sat in their chairs, and they drank. After a while, they would get up, and they would pace, and try to call her cell, but she wouldn’t answer. Then they would drink more, and lie down and watch the ceiling, spinning, around and around. They might watch the rose in the middle of the ceiling, from which she insisted the light hung, and they might try to focus on something else entirely. How do you stop the room from spinning? One single moment. They would hear something, think that it was the telephone ringing, or the doorbell, or the alert of an email, but it would always be nothing. So they would hit the wall. A fist, and they’d never hit anybody in their life. Not a single thrown punch until that moment, and they would be pleased that Laura wasn’t there, because if she had been, she would have seen that, and she would have been disappointed. That’s the thing that they would hate the most: the feeling that she would be disappointed.
I got to work early the next day. Territorial, because this was war, now. HR said before: Don’t get into a relationship unless you think you can get yourself out of it at the other end. And we said, Okay, sure. I mean, we’re adults.
I hadn’t slept, partly because it felt as if there was mucus or moss or something behind my eyes. I sat at my desk, and I blogged. Blogged. I wrote. I carved. I didn’t know who read the blog – I kept an eye on my hits, because what’s the fucking point in not? – but that wasn’t the point. Maybe some of them knew me, sure, but a lot of them didn’t. But it was like feeders, you know? People who like to give other people food. Make them fat, keep them reliant. I checked my stats every morning like some compulsive hatefulness that I couldn’t actually shake; an addiction that there was no moving past, because it was so there, so constant. All I knew was that I was writing this shit, and people were reading it. I was feeding them; or, they were feeding me. I don’t know.
At work, at Bow, we were constantly being told about statistics and the importance of clicks. The importance of clicks, like the title of some novel Laura bought because she’d read some piece about it on Wired or Engadget or McSweeney’s, but that she never got around to reading.
Everything went back to Laura. I wondered how many days that would happen for; when I would move past it.
Not it. Her.
I blogged. Spent too long trying to think of the right word, Current Mood: sad or pissed off or agitated or free or something else entirely, because what if Laura read the post? When I was done, catharted as hard as I could stand, I Bowed to find out how long it would take to get over her. How long it takes the average man to stop thinking about them. At the time, Bow’s software did some things well, but searching wasn’t one of them. The algorithms had been bought from some shitty start-up in the early part of the century, and sure there was a team on it, but they were the drags. Interns given jobs with big ideas and no coding skills. The search engine was kept around as a presence, a part of the ecosystem it was important to have fingers in. Same as the emails, the weather site, the video site. So I opened up a private tab, because I didn’t want anything hanging around on my system – there were always rumours about Mark Ocean wanting us only to use Bow software, like dressing in flat beige chinos because you worked at the Gap – and I went to Google. Better. GQ told me that there were seven stages; FHM said there were five; Men’s Health, ten. The one I settled on, on some Gawker site, said that it was twelve. Mourning is all illusions, sleight of hand: because twelve feels more comprehensive, twelve you’ll definitely find something that you associate with, and then you can pinpoint your own pain, and that illusion will help you to move on. Five? Five is nothing. Five could leave you in its dust.
But anger, they all started with anger. I think that would have been obvious. Nobody searching for this stuff wasn’t going to be feeling at least pretty angry.
I called Laura a cunt. Was that angry enough for me to start moving on?
I kept my head down. Blinkers on as I stared at the screen. When they broke up with you, the website said. Like the person who instigated it – the breaker, not breakee – wouldn’t need these things. I broke up with Laura Bow. I said that, I think, out loud. Under my breath, blown out when I exhaled. Laura had a mantra she liked, when she was stressed – she used to say, I have things in my head I don’t want to say, so I say them internally, get them out that way – and maybe that was mine. I did it, so I would have to deal with this. Own it. That’s just the way it is. I read the things that will help you move on: bury it; try to forget; get rid of all reminders of her, all memories; delete her from your life.
I wasn’t ready for any of that; not yet.
Park walked in. Blinkers on, I reminded myself. Don’t look up, act like you’re not going to see anything out of the corner of your eyes. He waved. Lifted his headphones. He wore those enormous things, like he was in a recording studio. He listened to nothing but country. Old country, as well. He was a surfer guy, could have been into metal or indie or trashy European dance music, but no: Merle fucking Haggard. The twang of slide guitar seeping through the oversized studio headphones, a hipster before we even had a word for such a thing.
‘You booted her yet?’ he asked.
How the fuck did he know what I was going to do? And he must have known what I was going to do even before I did, because I didn’t know until gone eight the night before, when we were sitting there, across from each other, and she wasn’t looking at me; she was looking at her files, scanning through them on her laptop, and I realised that I wasn’t even in the room, not for that second. She was somewhere by herself, and it was like I didn’t even need to be there. She didn’t need me, so I—
‘I put some new routines into her last night,’ he said. ‘Didn’t even get out until three or something, and then my alarm went off, and here I am. You know when you’re so excited to see what it’s done?’
SCION. He was talking about SCION, not Laura.
Charlie, you fucking idiot, I told myself, get your head in the game.
‘I haven’t done anything yet,’ I told him. ‘I just got in.’
‘Dude! I sent you an email,’ Park told me. He was disappointed. His face was more emphatic than anybody else’s I’ve ever met. It creased like indelicately folded paper. I had seen the email, right before I finally went to sleep. Pretty sure I deleted it. Park used to send about ten emails a day, all excited about something he’d managed to do, always with italics or full caps or bold or underlined in there, like everything he wrote or thought was meant to be consumed in one immediate rush of slanted words, hurrying to get to the edge of the page. Exclamation marks at the end of every sentence. And that was how you knew to delete it: the more excitement there was, the less it was going to matter. ‘It’s a fucking breakthrough,’ he said, and he came to my desk, cleared