It only took a few hours. Not as long as I’d thought it would have. I figured there’d be all kinds of awkwardness, maybe some hesitance - but there was none of that.
I’ll lay out the timeline - a sunrise flight South that I slept through most of. A cab ride, spent watching the gaps between buildings get longer & longer until there was nothing but flat scrub and cracked earth. Huge machinery, like stalled robots, studding the landscape. The driver said nothing the entire ride, and I was glad for that. I had enough rattling around in my skull.
It would be the first time I was meeting you, and I had some to go on. I knew a little bit about your life: where you worked, what you did in your spare time. What your boots looked like. I knew you smoked Marlboro lights, liked cheap beer. We had a lot in common, and there’s even a few things that I picked up from you because of reasons that would make me blush a little.
It wasn’t like that, though. It wasn’t a date. It felt more formal than that, actually - almost like an interview, but not an anxiety-causing interview. More like a friend of the family was gonna be interviewing me as a formality, that I already had the job. But still. My brain worried away at images, nibbled around on what-ifs and maybes, all as a sort of hum in the background. On the outside, I was still. Maybe a gnaw on a fingernail, or a sudden tic of my head.
I remember that my shirt felt tighter than I would have liked it. My body wasn’t doing what I wanted it to, but that’s also because I wasn’t doing what my body wanted me to do. I’d been so keen on the gym, on working out - I’d been going five times a week, for fuck’s sake. I’d worked with a trainer. I worked out until my limbs were rubbery - my body in such an endorphin-fueled haze that it almost forgot to obey my brain’s commands. I lived in that continual haze, with a contented glow and a constant ache in my muscles. I took a few selfies, secretly admiring the slow burgeoning of my body.
Everything changes when you change your body. It could be as little as going to sleep earlier, or pulling an all-nighter - your body responds to your brain’s choices - and you pay the price, all right. If you suddenly start to listen to its demands, you find yourself in a whole new lifestyle before you even notice. Your nutrition changes almost without thinking about it. What you consume is more heavily weighted towards your goals. You think to yourself - Fuck, how did I not do this sooner? This makes so much sense! In a way, your body gets the upper hand on your brain - and you’re pulled along. You start not trusting your brain. The little things it tells you that you want; things that would only satisfy a quick impulse, like candy, or soda. Or just skipping the gym and watching TV for an afternoon. Just once. And once turns into twice. Turns into a slow, slow sink into that pearlescent fog of indolence.
Of course, it helps when there’s huge, moving parts involved - big life changes. I’d moved to a new city and I’d started a new career all in the same bracket of time. There’s only so much upheaval the brain can stand - and so, in the muddle and muck of cerebral consternation, the body’s demands withered to a whine, and then emaciated to a whisper. The brain, triumphant, steered me into the trap of comfort - and, as the winter coddled the city with its enveloping arms, I lost all track of my goals.
A whole year passed before I met you, online. And if you gotta ask me, I don’t remember, honestly, how we met. Maybe one of those forums about mind control. Yeah, I frequent those - lot of weirdos out there, into a lotta crazy shit - but somewhere in there, my future was nosing at the door and I was starting to feel restless. I needed something, and the nameless craving was driving me to Edwardian levels of insanity. You came along at just the right time, I think. We started chatting, and soon enough, we were chatting every day.
It only makes sense then, that I would want to make our relationship manifest in reality. I wanted to fucking meet you. It didn’t seem possible that we had so much in common - guns, trucks, muscles. I’d always been fascinated by that shit, even as a kid. My memory flickers in & out, here & there, but there’s a few things I remember that shine like lighthouses through the fog. It’s probably all the weed I smoke, but that’s neither here nor there.
Y’all know how the 20s go. You cast about in a dark sea, looking for anywhere to land. Half of the time you end up on an uninhabited island, but every time you cast off again, you’re that much wiser about the map. I was coming to the end of that particular ocean, and I’d found nothing that satisfied me - nothing, except that year at the gym.
Your house wasn’t really a house, not in the traditional sense. It was low-slung to the ground, looking like more of a hallway than a home. Some part of me rose to the surface, spraying scorn - but, surprising even myself, another part of myself rose up and calmly dismissed the other. This was my Chief’s trailer, of course, and Chief knew better than me. The idea of living in a trailer even kind of appealed to me a little as the cab pulled up out front. The idea tweaked a bundle of nerves in my brain that I didn’t know I had.
I left the cab, sticking my head out into a heat that nearly knocked me over. It almost had a noise of its own, a sub-aural roar that I could feel in the depths of my organs.
You didn’t call out. The front door swung open, banging into the side of the trailer. I noticed the A/C unit, and was overcome with relief. That wasn’t like me, either. Normally, I hated conditioned air - found it stale, and without comfort. Again, that same part of me rose up, implacable and firm, dismissing the earlier feeling. I felt clean in a strange way. I looked down at my sneakers. The dust of the ground had already clamored around their sides and seemed to age them 5 years before their time.
I packed light. You’d told me to. Some underwear. Not much else. Necessities. I moved forward, out of the sun’s raking gaze, and up to your trailer door.
Inside, the cool air coiled expectantly, like someone crooking a finger. It was impossible to ignore. My body stepped into the trailer before my brain could voice a concern, and the door snapped shut behind me.
“Howdy,” you said. I remember it because your voice had such a full pulse of amusement behind it. You were surprised, a little, but mostly confident. You knew I would come. You’d maybe known it since day one.
“Howdy,” I responded, the sound coming out of me a little faster, a little more automatic, than I’d intended. My brain was still buzzing, stunned by the intense heat outside and the intense, placid chill of the trailer.
“Glad y’all could make it.” I hadn’t really even been able to place you, yet. Your voice was familiar, even nostalgic?, from the phone calls we’d had. “Knew you’d come.”
“Had to,” I replied. “Chief knows better than me.”
Your laugh, too, amused. Everything about you was amused by me. Some part of me was alarmed by the casual condescension, but it was so distant that the noise could have been anything. The slam and purr of the A/C unit, perhaps. “That’s right. You’re a much better grunt than I thought.”
I felt your eyes before I saw you. You were looking me up & down, like someone at a museum, eyeing a sculpture. Trying to figure out if it were really “art.” “Sir yes Sir,” I said, and felt the words fill my mouth, surrounding my tongue, exiting between my teeth before I could clamp jaws down on them.
“Been out of the gym for awhile though, huh, grunt.”
“Sir yes Sir,” I said again, too fast for myself.
And it was then that I got my first real view of you. It gave me a little stir to realize you were an inch taller than me. Not much, but just enough that I had to tilt my eyes up to meet your gaze. Maybe it was the Ariats you had on, with your denim tucked into the tops, giving you that little extra lift. Or maybe we were the same height (I’d thought we were) and I was just projecting.
My brain was, in essence, doing somersaults trying to keep up. We’d lived in a sort of pseudo-reality for so long, my Chief and I - a relationship conducted with still photography and text messages batted back & forth, phone calls sprinkled in when the time was right.
You had dark hair, and a well-maintained beard. You had some ink. You had on a dark t-shirt, and even though it was dim in the trailer, you wore shield sunglasses. They fit your face perfectly, and sat just below a repeated RealTree camouflage baseball hat.
On the wall behind you, I could see guns in their resting places. Rifles, a few shotguns. Handguns. These were placed right next to the outstretch of a well-known flag and big block letters - COME AND TAKE THEM.
“But that’ll happen in time,” you drawled, letting the unspoken threat hang in the air before allowing it to dissipate. “Your future starts now, grunt.”
I felt the body underneath my skin start to twitch and squirm. My bones, my muscles. All the way from the tightly-clenched temporalis muscle around my ear & jaw down to the slender but taut muscles of the calf & ankle. The ghosts of the past, the whisper of the gym, the distant clang and grunt in big warehouse-type spaces.
I saw you start to grin as you saw my body remember. I saw you shift and cross your arms over your chest, your jaw working on something. “That’s a good grunt,” you repeated. “Can’t wait for you to put your boots on.”
Sometimes, if you’re not focusing on anything - if you’re kind of zoned out, if you’re maybe a little overwhelmed by stimulus, you blunder into a new feeling. It’s happened to me a handful of times, now, and the result is always the same - it’s like having a vision, or a revelation. Something peels away the rotten layers at the top of reality, and you get a glimpse of the future.
My muscles started spasming, like eager, restless children. I found myself in a double-guns pose in front of a man I had just met for the first time. I found myself flexing so hard that the blood was rushing to my face, my clenched jaw. “Sir yes Sir!” I gasped out. A reel of images was flashing in my brain. Images of myself at the gym, performing careful, focused squats. Gritting out the last reps of the biceps curls. Climbing into my jacked-up pickup after my workout. Flexing my biceps and watching how the new ink moved, almost hypnotically, on my skin.
The rustle and snap of fabric in a hot wind roused me from the immersive reverie, and I winced at the breath of the South coming off of the asphalt. Lines of the same jacked-up pickups sat in a gleaming array, all leading to a pair of double glass doors. In the distance, I could hear the slam and clank of weights. A blip of panic crossed my mind - was this a memory? Was this now? I was having a giddy, almost loopy-laugh moment of vertigo. Everything was at once familiar and foreign.
I felt the weight of your hand on my shoulder. “You’re only here for a few days,” you said. “Let’s make the most of it. First things first.”
I remember following my boots and your boots down the cracked, bleached asphalt, past all the trucks, towards the door - and the same cooling exhalation of the A/C as we entered the gym.
I’d like to say it was just like I remembered it, but it felt like I was making new memories. I changed in the locker room, right next to my Chief, nodding along to the constant stream of his directions.
And if I’m honest, that was the moment it stopped mattering whether or not this was the present, the future, reality, or a dream. My brain had finally juddered to a halt. My face had picked up, like a burr or a magnet, some kind of dopey-ass grin that I couldn’t shake no matter how hard I tried. My legs had acquired some kind of wobble, and my face itched. The sun’s constant glare had made my skin tight, especially on my arms and my shoulders - at some point, I’d changed into a sleeveless t-shirt. Something soft, something worn, something lived in. Something I’d lived in?
A deliriously dizzy sensation started crowning me as we went through our workout. My muscles were eager for it, barked at me as we went from weight to weight, and finally, as we came to the end, went silent. My whole being was quiet, exhausted - my brain, my muscles, everything.
“Good grunt,” you said from the driver’s seat. I closed my eyes and let the cooling tongue of the A/C in your pickup doodle airy circles around me. “Rest up. Tomorrow you work.”
Whatever that meant, could wait. I felt drunk, I felt high, I felt whole - for the first time in years, and furthermore, I felt tireder than I ever had - but I couldn’t shake the sticky, dopey grin on my face, and felt like I never would.
Somewhere in there, between leaving the gym and arriving back at Chief’s trailer, is when it clicked. I knew I had to sit down and write this down before I lost it entirely. Maybe it’s my brain’s last defense. Maybe it’s like my last attempt to figure out what I’m doing here before I get lost forever.
All I know is you been sitting there watching me write this the whole time, and the whole time, your grin ain’t left your face. You’re amused at me. You know that this won’t do nothin. You know that the fight, if there ever was one, is over. Maybe I keep writing because I know that if I stop, I’ll be giving up, and I’ll be someone new.
And is there a reason why I should be fighting that?
You didn’t see it, but there was just a solid three minutes of white space before I typed this line. I don’t have an answer to myself.
In a moment, I’m going to turn around. I’m going to look at my Chief, and I’m going to submit totally. To muscles, guns and trucks. I might not even do the reverse of the beginning of this story - I might not ride the cab back to the airport, fly the plane backwards to the city. I can feel you smiling over there. I can even smell the strength of the whiskey you’re sipping, the clink of the ice in the glass. The herbal, pungent smell of the weed from the pipe. Oh, god, if I could just stop typing. If I could just turn around and inhale and give sound to the words. If