The 21st Floor

6. Something Just Like This

I… Ahhh…. I’m sorry, what? This was… this was insane. Glass tinkled and twinkled as it rose through the air reforming. Dust disintegrated, stains slipped away, wood reformed, and… and… and… and my brain felt too big for my skull. My eyes threatened to roll out of my sockets. That was so cool. Correction, this was supposed to be cool. In reality, my blood sat in my veins like ice and I hated it, because I could see no logical reason why. He cleaned this whole place up with the snap of his fingers, and here I was about to pass out. Not even from excitement, and that meant that this was bullshit. Not that I got to think about it at the time, but later I was absolutely positive that it was all bullshit. The whole place screamed nineties when he was done. The walls were actually supposed to be a light blue, and under all the dirt and… other stains, it had been hard to tell. There was a glass coffee table that had CD’s and actual videos piled on it. The window… the window wasn’t fixed, and I knew myself well enough to know that I was not in a place to ask about why exactly that was. It was just as scratched up and smashed as it was before, and I said absolutely nothing about it. Purely because I wasn’t sure if I was capable of hearing the answer right now, and still remaining someone I respect when looking in the mirror. I collapsed on the couch, the black leather squeaking, and I felt him sit down next to me. Jason was still between me and the door though, so I was leaving when I allowed myself to and not a second before. It didn’t even occur to me that he could choose not to move when I asked. Words, I thought belatedly. Words were a thing that needed to be coming out of my mouth.

“Can you do mine next?” I asked brightly, because there had to be words. I have to say something: I wasn’t born in a barn. I had manners. Ones that I had forgotten to use, but I had them. It’s just… This was just the only thing that came to mind that wasn’t directly confrontational. The bottoms of my feet still itched with the urge to run. It was brutal, but fortunately he answered, so I didn’t have to dwell on it too much. Small victories, right?

“I can’t even leave the apartment,” Jason quipped, and I blanched at that. Right, trapped here for twenty years, I remember now. I didn't like how easy it was becoming to forget things. “Can you do mine next? It wasn't the question you wanted to ask, was it?” he said quietly, after staring at me for a little while. At least I assumed he was staring at me, because it sure felt like it.

“No… it just seemed like the safest way to go about it,” I answered with a sigh. If he was going to go through all the effort of noticing, the least I could do is tell him the truth.

“Then what did you want to say?” he pressed. I laughed, and it sounded kind of bleak, but I liked that so little that I simply ignored the fact.

“It was a combination of something along the lines of, ‘The whole time? You could have snapped your fingers and fixed it? The whole f*****g time? Why? Heathen!’, and letting my brain continue to melt out my ears,” I said, snorting at the surprised noise he made in return.

“I like that you found option number three then,” he replied, “Asking if I could do your place was probably the easiest way to distract yourself.” It was said pragmatically enough that I wondered briefly, with a sharp pang in my chest, just how badly he had been affected. Not just by being trapped here, but by dying in the first place.

“Why didn’t you? Fix it, I mean. If you could have done that the whole time, then why didn’t you?” I asked, feeling uncomfortably called out by his statement, and staring absently at the walls.

“Because it makes it easier for me to forget that I’m dead,” Jason said quietly, and the shock that accompanied that was something like what I imagine being shot was like. Before all the pain kicked in. You could… Being dead was something you could just up and forget? I suddenly had this overwhelming feeling, like I’d drunk too much and then walked out into the freezing air. It sort of felt a lot like being on the verge of passing out.

“That sounds terrifying,” I admitted hollowly, “How… No, that sounds rude. Forgetting that you're dead... That’s on the table?”

“Yeah… when things don’t look like the set of a horror movie, and I stop looking like its star… well you just sort of go about like normal, and after a while it just sort of… slips your mind,” he explained, “And then you think that you’re living your life like normal. Until things start to stop adding up. It's… way more scary to remember that you’re dead than it is to forget.” See, my brain latched on to what he told me, and it just wouldn’t let go. It was horrifying because everything in me just demanded that I hug this poor guy. Now, dead or not. Unnatural freak out or not, this was just… He needed a hug, I didn’t care if I had to open my eyes and chase him. It was happening.

“Right, I’m going to close my eyes again and in a minute, hopefully, neither of us are going to freak out,” I said, committing to my decision with full force as my eyes closed.

“Why would I be freaking out?” he asked, sounding so amused that I didn’t even feel bad about it.

“Because this is happening,” I told him seriously, before leaning forwards and wrapping my arms around him. My skin crawled. Not in a bad way, but in a way that distinctly said ‘Huh, this isn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be.’ He was cold, and there was a clammy feeling to his skin, but there wasn’t some kind of God Almighty smell going on here. If I had stopped and thought about it I would have just figured that being dead, he would have smelled… you know, dead. Something like the poor cat that someone had run over and left on the road when I was a kid. He didn’t though. He smelled like fresh wet dirt and smoke. He didn’t… well he didn’t go squish, which was another thing that I realised in hindsight.

“Wha-?” he squawked, his throat closing up as he tried to get the word out so badly that he didn’t finish it. I rested my head on his shoulder, and the fabric under my cheek felt raggedy and dirty. As in with actual dirt, rather than just carelessly filthy. I could feel a fine layer of grit beginning to cling to my cheek.

“I’m sorry all that happened to you,” I said to him heartfeltly, “And I’m sorry that you’ve been alone all this time. You didn’t deserve that, and it must have been awful.” All of a sudden, I felt his arms come up and wrap around me, tilting backwards until we both leaned back against the back of the couch, and Jason just held on. I’m not sure if his arms are so tense because he’s squeezing as hard as he possibly can, or because he’s doing his best not to, but I seemed to be noticing all of this in an almost detached manner. Which was good, because I wasn’t freaking out. I was too busy trying to apply the right amount of comfort that my heart could take a rest from breaking for this poor man.

“Hey Maggie,” Jason said softly, cheek resting on the top of my head, “I’m really glad that out of all the people that could have come up here, it was you.” That’s because anyone else never would have come back up here after the first time they ran screaming, I thought to myself. Almost amused as I did, if it wasn’t such an awful thought. Which was such a crappy thing to speculate on, that I decided not to comment on the fact that it looked like Jason had no intentions of letting me go. This hug had formed more of a cuddle situation, and I couldn’t find it in me to be mad. We all need a hug sometimes, and I’m not sure how long into that twenty years that sometimes had been, but I believe that we had long gone past it.

“Sooo… does Gen Z have any redeeming qualities?” he said, and for a second there it didn't occur to me what he was doing, and then it dawned on me. He was hoping to distract me with a conversation, while we sat here and literally cuddled. I had about 2.3 seconds to make a choice about whether I was going to let that fly or not before it got weird, and then something would be made of it anyway. In the end, I settled on the part where touch starved was the term rattling around my head. That’s the reason that I caved. So I don’t even bring it up. I just answered, like this was all perfectly normal.

“Yes… Many more than the tide pod incident would leave you to believe. I can’t believe that we’re still being punished for that when others have more than made up for it,” I said, sighing, “It’s a small percentage of people who were that dumb in the first place.”

“Still happened,” he retorted.

“Yeah, but if you screw up badly enough, we’re the generation that’s going to put your name, number, address and credit card number on the internet to help everyone else further express their feelings on the matter,” I said matter of factly, and that drew a startled laugh out of him.

“I’m sure that ended well for those people,” he snorted, and I just laughed.

“Usually I have a lot more sympathy for people, but there’s a reason that the church and state were separated,” I commented, and this was definitely one of the weirder conversations that I’d ever had. I was feeling comfortable, and strangely confident with it though, so I wasn’t going to ask too many inconvenient questions.

“That sounds like a decent story,” he said, shaking his head. So I told him, and the conversation just twisted from there. I can’t tell you all the things that we talked about. I don’t remember, and it was such a random conversation. We jumped on topics at the drop of a hat, and it ended up being one of those talks. The kind that you usually have at three am, sitting in an empty bathtub with an equally empty bottle of Smirnoff, and your best friend. Hey, on a side note, I learned a lot about cars… scratch that, I would have learned a lot about cars if any of it had made any sense. He seemed to like anything on wheels, and the way he talked about it… it made me wanna go out to the skate park with him. No matter how poorly it would have gone, because I should not be on wheels, period. It was always like a punch in the stomach when I remembered that I could leave, but he wouldn’t be able to.

“I always thought that people going down mountains on wheels were crazy. I shouldn’t be allowed on a flat surface,” I told him when he explained about how he used to go extreme bike riding. No. No way, not unless I am already dead.

“Try it,” he tried to convince me, “Maggie, I promise that you will not regret it. I really wish I could take you out, we would have so much fun.” I almost wanted to ask what happened if I did, and I died. Would I be trapped there while he was trapped here? Don’t worry. I recognised it for the cruel question it was, and I kept it to myself.

“That would be about the only way you’d get me out there,” I snorted. I’d been here for hours, and I could probably be here for hours more, but at some point I had to leave. I had work, and other s**t to do, but um… the thing was, I didn’t know how to bring that up without hurting his feelings. I know, it sounds ridiculous, but I didn’t want to tell him that I was going to leave him up here all alone, and I was doing that to go back to my life. You know, that thing that he doesn’t have anymore. Yeah… so that was how I wound up staying another hour and a half. I didn't mind, silver lining, I could use more day like this.