KASHAWN TAYLOR

Dead Air

When Albert gets off the bus, the air, he notices, seems stiller, less alive, than he’s ever felt it before. Dead air, he thinks, like on so many of those phone calls home to friends and family, where we couldn’t even find, through all the years of memories, small talk for fifteen minutes. Silence, he decides, is one of the loudest human experiences. Through nothing, it communicates a multitude of sentiments.

It is mid-October, and Albert has only been home a week. He spent two years in prison for his fifth DUI, and despite becoming a substance use counselor during a long period of sobriety, he relapsed again. Relationships, he told the prison staff, are like poison for the mind. Women have too much control over me and my emotions. Don’t you think that’s something you should explore? asked Counselor Jane. Albert looked off over her shoulder, seeing in the faded brick wall a vision of recovery, of happiness and freedom once he served his time.

Remembering that conversation, he walks down the street, his hands tucked into his pockets as the wind picks up. He is shaking and tells himself that he is just cold, but he knows better. He walks past faded storefronts and corner stores, blocking out the noise of the city he’s lived in his whole life. He gives a bum some money – a five-dollar bill – thinking, I really should have bought him food instead, and then, I probably shouldn’t think of him as a bum. Albert rounds the corner, and freezes at the sight on his left.

It is Upton’s Wine and Spirits, a place one could find him almost every day just a few years ago. He had been rushing to get where he was going, he hadn’t thought much about the route he was taking. It is as if his feet know, as if his body remembers though his mind does not. And that kind of scares him.

He stands there, staring through the window panes on either side of the door. Displays for new seasonal drinks, like pumpkin spice rum, shine in the windows as if under spotlights from heaven, or in his case, he thinks, hell, and a humorless chuckle escapes him. He notices his jacket moving in the breeze, and realizes his hands are now trembling; despite the cold air, he is sweating. A familiar longing (a need, Albert thinks) bubbles up from his stomach, hot and prominent, up his esophagus, and settles in his mouth, which feels both dry with want and wet with anticipation. It is a feeling he remembers well; one he finds he cannot explain to anyone, despite his substance use education, despite the tools he learned in treatment.

Albert removes his right hand from his jacket and reaches for the door, but stops. A drink or two would make it so much easier, he thinks, but how would he feel about it? What would he want of me? Got one on each shoulder, he says aloud, which one is right?

He shoves his hand back into his pocket and pushes on, walking down the street. He feels as though he is walking through molasses, against a tide that wants to force him backward, not only to the liquor store, but to the past, a past he learned for two years to breaststroke away from. A past that would surely drown him if he allowed the tide to sweep him off his feet. He pushes on, against what feels like gale force winds, but the air is as dead as when he stepped off the bus.

The gravestone in front of him reads simply:

Ryan Byrne

1992 – 2024

He is sitting on the grass, staring at the gravestone thinking, All the phone calls and letters, but no one told me anything. Albert reads Ryan’s gravestone over and over again, as if the words might change if he looks away for just one second. He remembers the two of them together as kids, running around outside when ten trees felt like the Amazon rainforest, playing Power Rangers and scraping knees; he remembers how, throughout middle and high school, they grew into their own but remained best friends, how they experimented with each other, as practice for the real world; he remembers how Ryan was there when his father died in that drunk driving crash – he ran off the road and into a tree – and how he stayed over for a week, sleeping in the same bed like little kids.

Albert realizes there are tears in his eyes, and though the last two years had conditioned him not to cry, at least not in public, he allows the waterfall to commence in the empty cemetery. He hears nothing around him, no ruffles or crepitations, no squirrels scurrying from ground to tree or tree to ground, no birds singing mourning songs from the heavens. There, in that cemetery, he wishes someone had told him – his mother or his sister, maybe – that Ryan had cancer in his brain, that he was on his way out and the whole world knew it, the whole world but Albert. No one told him, and he curses them in that cemetery, sitting cross-legged like a petulant child.

He cries, and thinks, this is okay. This is okay, because of all the shit I’ve missed—the holidays and birthdays and celebrations—nothing compares to this. I didn’t even get a chance to say goodbye, or tell him I loved him.

Goodbye, guy, he says aloud, choked through tears.

Albert?

He turns and sees her, and wonders quickly how long she had been watching him. She is holding a baby, maybe seven or eight months, in her arm. When he looks at her, she smiles warmly, a small smile which says all it needs to say: nice to see you, it’s been too long.

Albert gets to his feet, dusting whatever debris might be on his butt. Celeste, he says, I jus—

Don’t, says Celeste. The baby laughs and smacks Celeste gently on the chest. This is Ryan, she continues, bouncing the baby once or twice, that same sad smile across her lips. She’s almost nine months.

I didn’t know you had a—

Celeste shakes her head. I know, she says, Ryan wanted to tell you, about everything, really, but didn’t want you to worry while you were in there.

But—

Stop, Celeste says. Do you want to hold her?

Albert inhales deeply, exhales. His eyes still glassy with tears, he nods his head and holds out his arms. Celeste hands baby Ryan to him.

And suddenly, as he looks into Baby Ryan’s eyes, the same green eyes of his late friend, the world comes alive again, the dead air reanimated with a sense of wonder, grief-tempered hope multiplying in his brain and swimming his veins, warm and golden like bathing in honey.

A feeling, he thinks, better than any shot of whiskey could give me.