EASILY OBTAINABLE SELF DESTRUCTION

OLIVER ROSEN

Mark Fisher is a lot of things: recruitment chair, player, king in his court. He is a man everyone knows, a hard thing to be on a campus this large. His presence turns the nastiness of the moldy Pike basement into a place worth being. Around him, the party expands and contracts, in for a dab and then out of his way, leaving space for the next waiting hand and overflowing cup. An ocean of boys, and none of us matter, not when a real man like Fisher is in the room. In his midst, we are nothing.

“Dude!” he shouts, spotting someone from across the room. He ambles in my direction, stepping over the twisted body of a fallen freshman without even a glance. He’s used to such navigation, of course he is.

And then, in his loose-limbed pursuit of someone more worthy, his eyes land on me.

Shifting, I try to manufacture a cooler stance, something unclenched. My smile pulls to attention, stretched sideways across my face in a way I hope is charming but is just as likely to be creepy or cringy or any swirling combination in an endless list of terrible things. Yet, by some miracle, I am searched in the awesome fire of his gaze and found worthy, rewritten in gold with a casual “so fucking good to see you, man,” and a firm pat on the back. In his presence, I forget that I’m not very funny, that I’m freckled and kind of stretched looking in a way that Becky, my roommate’s hot girlfriend, once described as “slenderman-esque.” That I’m here, not at the invite of the friends I don’t have, but at the request of my father, a man who says he is worried I’m not doing anything in college and that video games don’t count. Instead, I become a treasured-but-silent guest, the jester a king loves too much to let suffer alone.

Fisher sways slightly, beer sloshing over the lip of his cup and forming a sticky trail down his forearm. I can’t stand that kind of texture, the way my wet arm hairs clump together, but Fisher is unphased. There are names for people like him—names like GOAT and badass—and there are names for people like me; names that don’t bear repeating. I didn’t even know that Fisher knew me. I’m not sure how he could. I tend to hang back at parties, talk to a couple of friends, and then get bored and leave before anything is really over. I try to catalogue what might be different, daring to hope it may be my new haircut: a mullet just like Fisher’s.

“This music,” says Fisher, swallowing heavily, “is shit.” And he’s totally right because it totally is. It’s more of a series of sounds than any sort of melody. The backbeat pounds in my head, taking up space between my eyes, and pulses there.

I don’t really speak. I’m too busy maintaining my casual smile. But he must sense my agreement because he grabs my arm with an extended cry of “partyyy” and manhandles me to a fold-out table arrayed with shot glasses and bottles. There’s jagger, gin, vodka, a mostly empty tequila that strays pretty heavily from the Oktoberfest theme. Fisher takes eight plastic shot glasses and pours us each four. I have never been as close to greatness as I am at this moment.

He lines up the shots, looks me in the eye, and then they’re gone, swallowed away like they’re fresh water and he’s dying of thirst. I eye my own shots distrustfully. I’m not much for hard liquor, but he tells me to just fucking do it, man, and to not be a pussy, and I’ve spent too long surviving without living. So, before I can think, I’ve put back all four and I’m coughing. My eyes water, but he’s cheering, and when Fisher cheers the world cheers. I may be no king of the party but, in his midst, I am for the first time within the court.

Fisher introduces me to a girl whose name is Cindy. She’s pretty, really pretty, and I fumble as I tell her that, but she seems to find it charming. She’s exactly the kind of reason my father, so concerned about my missing out on life, wanted me to go to this party: classically gorgeous and wearing a tube top.

“I like your costume,” she says. “Phineas, right? From the cartoon?”

I look down, confused, at the stripey orange shirt my mother bought me at Target.

“Exactly,” yells Fisher. “My boy, Steve’s a man of culture.”

It becomes clear, in this moment, that Fisher thinks I’m someone else. I do consider telling him that my name isn’t Steve—it’s Garren, after my mother’s second least favorite Uncle—but Steve is a good name. A better name even. Steve is the kind of guy who gets to be Fisher’s boy. He’s a part of something bigger than a nothing-dork like Garren could ever dream.

Steve is, apparently, wearing a costume at a completely costumeless party, but I shrug, real cool, and pretend it’s intentional. At her request I say, “I know what we’re gonna do today,” in my best impression of a show I’ve never seen. It’s totally working, and she’s totally feeling me.

Fisher hands us each a shot, downing three more himself as Cindy giggles. I hold the room temperature liquid in my sweaty palm, putting it down and to the side when they get distracted in an effortless conversation about something I can’t really follow. Fisher talks like he’s underwater, and he’s practically glowing, just like he always is, so I don’t care that I can’t tell what he’s saying. Not many men can have this much presence this many shots in.

The song cuts off midline, harshly switching to something loud and Mr. Worldwide, and then another guy is calling for Fish Man, and Fisher slips away from us and out the door, taking the easiness of the conversation with him.

There is a moment of silence. Cindy looks at me. I search the room for something to talk about. In the corner, the sound of a girl retching is just loud enough to be heard over the music.

“So,” I ask Cindy, stilted. “What’s your major?”

In my mind I calculate how long it will take me to fumble this girl.

We talk for a little while longer. She’s undecided in her major, and from just outside of Philly. She seems increasingly eager to get away from this conversation, but her friends ditched her for another party, and they forgot to tell her where they’re going. Apparently, they do that a lot. Apparently, her friend Jessica is, what she calls, a total bitch.

She asks if she can borrow a cigarette, and it goes against every fiber of my being to tell her I don’t smoke, thinking of the videos my mom likes to send about lung cancer and the fentanyl crisis.

“I don’t either,” she says. “Drunk cigarettes don’t count.”

She walks up to some other guy, giggling, and places her arm on his bicep. I look away. Check my phone. I haven’t been here nearly long enough to leave without facing the despondence of my father, who so badly wants the type of son who posts pictures in backwards baseball hats, six friends and a girl under each arm.

I am deciding if the light mockery is worth withstanding when there’s a tap on my shoulder, and there’s Cindy. She holds her closed fist out to me, and says, “guess what I found,” before opening to reveal two cigarettes. She takes me by the arm and pulls me up and through the door. I laugh a little uncomfortably as I follow, but I know better than to let an opportunity like this slide.

I’m through the door, and then outside, swaddled and hidden by the surrounding fence, and there’s a cigarette in her palm that I don’t want to smoke. There is a beautiful girl in front of me, and all I’m thinking about is charred, blackened lungs. I wonder if I’ll end up coughing out tar. I see my life stretched out in front of me, cut short by lung cancer at 38.

“I’ve always liked dorky guys,” she whispers like a secret, like she’s seeing some pathetic piece of me and liking it anyway, holding my clammy hand in her pretty one as she passes me a mistake I know I’ll make for her.

Her lighter is a piece of shit, and it takes three tries for her to get the flame steady. In the struggling light I see a beautiful future, a friendship with Fisher that last decades, that pulls me into his glorious world. In the beautiful future, Fisher gives a speech at my wedding, bragging how he set us up, how he always knew Cindy and I were meant to be. My father thumps me on the back and tells me I’m a good man, a lucky man, and he always knew I could do it. In the future everyone calls me Steve, and I don’t even care because I know I deserve the title.

It’s when the cigarette finally lights that we hear him: Fisher, singing a stretched and wobbly Pledge of Allegiance. We walk around the fence and there he is, on hands and knees on the rough pavement of the quad. We watch as Fisher crawls forward, shredding his own knees on the coarse ground. Behind him is a trail of blood that extends in a circle around the whole quad. As we watch, he pauses to hack up a wet splatter of bile, before continuing, crawling right over the vibrant, orangish liquid. Dotted around the circle, we see more such splotches, and watch as a salsa-like chunkiness is slowly replaced by just an outpouring of liquid, remnants of a body turning itself inside out.

It's almost mythical. One must imagine heroes of old. Bruce Willis, battered and broken and bleeding, glass wounds and gashes on both feet, and yet unwilling, unable to surrender. Mel Gibson, despite all his years of military training, tortured and dripping, but only more heroic for his pain. It’s glorious.

Cindy, unable to understand the beauty before her, drops both lighter and cigarette to run to Fisher. I follow.

She steps in front of Fisher, earning a wet noise of frustration when she blocks his path. The singing goes quiet. She leans down toward him, then sinks onto her knees in front of him on the cold concrete. It looks nearly religious, a beautiful angel kneeling in front of a triumphant king, both faintly haloed by the streetlight and the light of the party, a night so awake, it’s almost day. If I could paint them, I would. But I’ve always been shit at art.

“Are you alright?” she demands. Fisher replies in only sounds.

“He’s fine,” I tell her because he is. “He’s just a little drunk. He’s fine.”

“Are you fucking stupid?” She whirls around. “This is your fucking friend. And he’s bleeding.”

“Yeah,” I admit. “But in, like, a cool way.”

She just looks at me.

“Like Iron Man.”

She doesn’t understand, of course she doesn’t. She’s effortlessly cool. She hasn’t had to spend time watching like I have, standing in corners and nursing a single beer. She doesn’t know Fisher like I do, months spent trying to be just like him. She doesn’t know that this is normal for him, that blackouts just make cool stories to tell your kids. That he’s having fun, that fun isn’t a crime, that he needs to be fun because if even Fisher can’t make it then we’re all absolutely screwed. Even the idea of Fisher as anything other than magnificent sets the entire world off-balanced and angled. It rushes through me and spins away with what’s left of my drunken composure.

“He’s just fun,” I try to explain, tongue heavy and unwieldy in my mouth. “He’s just like this. It’s normal. It’s cool, he’s cool. Everything is cool.”

She rolls her eyes, big and annoyed like she wants me to really feel it, then turns back to Fisher with a, “Hey, Mark, I’m gonna make sure you’re alright, okay?”

“He’s fine, Cindy. Don’t be a buzzkill. He’s Fisher.” She isn’t listening to me, no one ever does. I pull on her arm, growing desperate. “He’s always going to be fine. He’s a fucking god, Cindy. Come smoke with me.” I’m pulling her arm, dragging her up and away, and she turns, and she backhands me, every finger and ring connecting with the side of my face.

It hurts.

“Get the fuck away from me,” she says.

And with that, I’m dismissed. Unimportant. Ignored. Relegated back to a nothing, away from the glory and the action.

In the light of the porch, the world seems far away. From the ground, I pick up one of the cigarettes, craving some easily obtainable self-destruction, but, finding myself obviously lighterless, I just put it in my pocket. Emptiness consumes me, every piece of my body weighed down with the wet sloshing of my stomach. In my mind, I am already retconning the details, preparing what I’ll tell my father. How I spent the night with a girl on my arm, a pretty girl who gave me her number. I might take her on a date. How I might rush or bed a thousand women or drop out or go to every party and get so fucked up that I forget what happened and what didn’t. How Fisher—heroic, godlike Fisher—became my friend.

I turn around, walking towards the party, stumbling against the pushing crowd, squeezing out the door.

And then, just like that, I’m through.