Really

Adam had comported himself nicely with the linoleum floor; you only had to look to understand, to hear the mumbled “hello” offered in my general direction. He just lay in his kitchen, waiting. The kitchen’s brown and tan squares were adorned by a muddled floral pattern that merged with the russet of his hair. We looked at each other as if meeting inside a camera obscura. He lay spread-eagle across the food spattered terrain, inverted, profound, disquieting, terminal, etc. Subsequently, I noticed Adam had been growing his beard and commented as much, careful to avoid the more critical comments of how he needed a wash and how his apartment at this point might only have been made salvageable through an act of god(s).

“Told you,” he said. “It’s really coming along.” He pointed to his face.

His head lay at the base of the electric oven, bare feet almost connecting with the refrigerator. A spicy odor like unwashed socks and cumin rose from his rumpled clothes. The smell of a man who hadn’t washed in at least a week, at least. The Home Shopping Network droned pitiably in the background, and Adam’s gaze landed on the spackled ceiling after glancing off my face like a narcotized housefly.

The first thing I’d noticed after walking through the door was the thirty-six gallon aquarium stinking of dead swamps. Amber smears crawled up the glass here and there, and the fish inside the milky water, when visible, had a desperate glint to their disk-like eyes, their mouths opening and closing, opening and closing, opening

“And that’s really why I called you up, man. I really wanted to talk about my beard for a while.”

Okay, that’s fine, I said. I sneaked a glance at my watch. Have you been letting yourself go a little?

“The vacuum cleaner broke the sink’s clogged up, whatever. Water feels really strange on my skin lately.”

Adam blinked, his green eyes drooling little saline runnels from their corners. He brought his fingers to his thick, untrimmed facial hair and began to massage and stroke it at the cusp of his chin. Luxuriant wasn’t the word; try rank, pastoral (if poverty stricken and abject can fall under that) and, above all, lugubrious. When he took his fingers away, minute flakes of dead skin stood out in the tangled mat.

“Do you know Heidegger?”

Well, it’s been a few decades.

“So, it’s like I was reading Heidegger, and being-with doesn’t really mean being not alone,” Adam said. His lids drooped.

Have you eaten today?

“I should be at work, really, but they can do without me on the shift tonight … and, uhm, no, not really eaten. Yeah, okay, so I had some saltines and American cheese, then I decided to lie down for a while. So I did.”

Then I dropped by?

“Then you dropped by.”

I looked around. On the counter, beside a heavily scarred chopping block, stood several prescription pill bottles roughly the same color as the stuff growing on the glass of Adam’s aquarium, and a half-empty or half-full (pessimist or optimist, Adam?) pint of vodka—the really cheap stuff, in a plastic jug, coextensive with paint thinner. Plates and sundry pots and pans rose from the depths of the kitchen sink’s basin, collected in a formidable morass that looked as though it could topple at any moment.

Yes, I think I remember what you’re talking about. That’s nice. But how about I order a pizza or something? On me. And a movie. Have you seen Inglorious Basterds yet?

“To hell with the Germans.”

To hell with Katie. It’s done, right? What else is there to say?

“I started growing my beard the day she broke up with me.”

It’s not that long.

“It takes me a while to grow out my facial hair—is it true that your hair and nails keep growing after you’re dead?”

I told Adam I wasn’t sure about the details; that that part wasn’t my line of expertise.

He sighed and stretched out his arms above him, palms parallel, as if he were about to receive something from the ceiling. I snapped my fingers and told him I was down here. Adam’s arms fell with a loud, fleshy thump against the floor.

“Also, in Heidegger, there’s only the present, only now. There’s a past and future, but there’s only now, too.”

How can there only be a now?

“To be honest, I’m really unclear on that part. It got really confusing. But how can I have a beard, man? How can Katie really be with someone else?”

These things happen. There’s always choice. So is this beard a terminus ad quiem or terminus a quo? And why the fuck are you so goddamned interested in Continental philosophy now? It’s really just about translating these mundane aspects of life into really esoteric terms.

“Well,” Adam began. He paused, hearing something in his body. His figure quaked and convulsed, the spasms of a fish deserted on the Saharan floor. After several seconds that were taffy in his gummed-up head, he curled on his side, fetal, anguished. I lowered myself to the floor, a flattened shadow, and looked Adam in the eyes. Sweat broke out over his sallow face, but his green eyes were clear. They extolled a febrile sanity and lightness.

Really it’s all a matter of care, he said.

 

Bio: John Kuligowski currently lives and writes in the midwest. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in a number of places including Clockwise Cat,  Gloom Cupboard, The Legendary, Prick of the Spindle, Crash, The Northville Review, and Word Riot. He is married, and, somehow, his wife puts up with his  weird obsession with semiotics.