You First: A Joe Goldberg Prequel (You, #0)(124)

Those people who say computers will be the death of us…They’re not wrong.

You keep pausing on the stairs like you don’t know where you’re going, what you are. That’s good, Vail. Take a beat. Give me time to get there. Sounds coming from your body. Gurgling, muttering. I don’t have a concussion and I’m closer all the time, but then you’re moving again. You hear me coming, calling and you drop the dog tags. Clink. You don’t bother to retrieve them, your imaginary smoking fucking gun. Maybe that’s your version of an apology. I’m sorry too. This was a bad day, but there’s still time for a happy ending.

We’re so close. We live in a world without Dick. You didn’t lose me and I know. I know! No one in their right mind would choose this adventure. Am I in my right mind? Is any mind in love ever right? It’s not easy with you, Vail. I’m still trying to catch up. Dizzy and spent. As always, you’re a million steps ahead of me. Fast on your feet. I never get to you, not really. I’m slow and tired and a terrible little roach of a thought scuttles across my throbbing mind.

You might not be the only one in the world for me.

No. Fuck that. I want you to be the one and I won’t judge you. I won’t nitpick. I like wanting you. Letting you lift me up and put me down. That’s how it goes, right?

Love chooses us. No perfect people, only perfect matches. We knew it day one. You can’t read, and I can’t kiss. But that’s why it works. I never loved you. Bullshit. Craig brought us to the corner of Houston and Mercer. That was destiny. I was the Romeo in black jeans, and I still get the butterscotch-scented butterflies when I see you rounding that corner. All that potential, that feeling I only ever read about in books. Serendipity. Yes, the honeymoon ended and yes, my picture of us in the future is blurry, given what you did to us. But it’s still inside me, driving me to put one foot in front of the other.

I know you now. You’re capable of brutal acts and you love things that are bad for you. Dick and your blue fucking cape. Cigarettes and Cynthia. Rom-coms. You’re not good at life, you almost took mine, but the skin around my heart is thickening in real time. I accept you. I belong to you. Doesn’t matter if you deserve it. It’s not a choice. It’s an instinct.

I scoop up his dog tags. I love you. I’m your zombie. I don’t quit. I picked up your scent and I want you in my life, even if it kills me, even if it means knowing you might never love me the way you loved him. One slice of bad pizza doesn’t stop a guy from grabbing a slice two days later. I am a pizza guy. I want you. That’s it. The end. And that has to mean something, right? That has to mean that we are meant to be, because if not I might be…Focus. If I grip the banister and close my eyes it’s still there. The image of us on a sofa like Harry and Sally. We’re older and wiser and calm. We made it to the place where the words flow like wine and—

Screek. Something smashes into something. City noise. Screams. The squeak of brakes. Bus brakes. High. People now, strangers. Call 911…. Did you see her? Oh my God, is she dead? There is no need for me to go back into our love nest and look out your favorite window, the one by your chair. I don’t need to see it to believe it. I know the way you know about a melon. I know because of a hole in my gut.

That she was you.





Epilogue


It’s been almost four years Since U Been Gone, and I still hear you.

I can’t be here, Joe.

If you were here, you wouldn’t believe the state of the world. I think that’s why I take so many long walks. It’s the only way to escape the noise, not the pretzel carts and the sirens—I love that shit, I do—but the noise that’s more invisible, everyone so distracted, so “connected.”

Your friend Cynthia has something called a MySpace page where she uses her pain about your untimely demise to attract suitors. Vagina is even worse. She has a Facebook page where she shares photos of her new life in San Diego, as if we don’t know what it looks like when the sun fucking sets. In some ways, you are the John Cusack now, my dear. You are Better Off Dead. Did you ever see that movie? Will I ever stop asking questions that you can’t answer? But I mean it. I stand in line at the Angelika, and girls are not looking at me. Girls are looking at their phones. Everyone Poops and now…everyone texts. You would not be able to handle the botanical garden of friends festering in the hands of every woman in this city.

What is so urgent? Why do people talk so much? Why not talk to me?

No, you didn’t live long enough to own an iPhone and go on Facebook, but then again, you didn’t live long enough to see them make Closer into a movie, to meet me at the Angelika. I buy two tickets and a box of peanut M&M’s. I find our old seats, where it all began, but then again, that’s not true, is it? We didn’t begin on the corner of Houston and Mercer. We began with you and Dick, and that’s the problem.

And four years is a long time. I’m still mourning, still missing. Will I ever love again?

Closer ends. They cut the part about temptation, and you are not here to spout off on the good and the bad, the ugly and the beautiful. I am alone, going east on Houston, torn between Mister Softee and Tasti D-Lite. I choose my own adventure. A vanilla cone for Mr. Tongue. It tastes like you because everything tastes like you, because four years is a blip. I still censor every semicolon; I still see you everywhere, in the bus that passes by because that is what buses do in this city.