June 23, 2018, 12:20 AM: Kingman, Arizona
“There’s this idea, right, that if you’ve done something bad, you need to make up for it in order to be forgiven.”
After a couple of beers, Jae started rambling. Drinking always made him sleepy, but it also made his tongue loose. He didn’t drink alone, the same way that he didn’t talk out loud to himself. Combine drink with company, then, and it was easy to speak, even if he slurred the words. He’d never been able to completely shut up when conscious, thoughts always running even when he managed to stop his mouth.
Kasey was stretched out on the couch in his sweatpants, laying on his stomach with his arms folded over the side and his chin resting on them. He was similarly tipsy, though probably a little less than Jae. His work schedule meant that he didn’t drink often, but he held his alcohol pretty well. The lights were low in the living room, but a slice of bright yellow emanating from the kitchen nook threw half of it into sharper relief.
Jae sat out of the beam of light's reach, sprawled sideways in a chair in t-shirt and pajama pants, turning a mostly-empty bottle around and around on the side table. He’d showered before dinner, and his hair was still damp, leaving spots on the shoulders and back of his shirt. He had put off washing his hair for a while, stuck between the options of having to let it air-dry or going back to his parents’ house to retrieve a hairdryer. Neither was incredibly appealing under the current circumstances, but he’d eventually settled on the path of laziness.
Their empty plates sat on the coffee table between them; Jae kept meaning to get up to take them to the sink, but the tipsier he got, the less he felt like getting up. He still hurt when he moved in the wrong way, bruises and scrapes he hadn’t even noticed making themselves known.
Kasey hadn’t done anything to prompt Jae to launch into a monologue, but he encouraged it with a mumbled, “Yeah?”
“It’s this idea that’s really, um… religious, in a way. Being forgiven for your sins, and that being the only way you can move forward. That if you’ve done something really bad, then everything you do after that needs to work to make up for it, so you can eventually get forgiveness. It’s kind of like, you can’t ever be a good person again until you get that. It’ll always be on you.”
“Mhmm.” Kasey toyed with a frayed bit of upholstery, nudging him on.
“I don’t really… like that idea,” Jae said haltingly, trying to get his syrupy thoughts together so he could explain them.
“I don’t need that. I don’t want it.” His fingernail caught on the damp label of the beer bottle, and he dragged an uneven tear through the paper as he spoke. “I shouldn’t be forgiven for what I did.
“The people I did it to, or their families or whatever, shouldn’t have to pat me on the head and say it’s okay so that they can move on with their lives. I don’t want a clean slate. I don’t want it to be forgotten.
“You can’t make up for it.” Jae paused to bring in an uneven breath. “There are some things that are done to you that you can’t ever, ever forgive.”
This was probably something he should have said to his therapist, instead of impulsively spilling it all over the person who might be his only actual friend. Jae didn’t like bringing up the island with Dr. Peralta, even with the time that had passed since he’d started therapy. He struggled to explain the ways it still clung to him.
He didn’t dream about the island specifically. His dreams were mostly nonsensical, when he remembered what they were about at all. He didn’t feel like sitting down with a dream journal and trying to assign some symbolism to each thing he remembered. He had nightmares about things catching fire, about his mouth filling up with too many teeth, about being out in public and seeing someone in a crowd who looked exactly like him but never being able to get a clear enough look at them to be sure.
Hazel was there. Her ghost was there. She never spoke. Just looked in on him, once in a while. He still didn’t know why she was the only one who seemed to have never moved on. He could go months at a time without an incident, but he never expected it to be the last time anymore.
“Sometimes you have to- you have to be able to hate, to be angry, if you want to go on. I can’t see how feeling like you’re forced to forgive somebody would help.”
“Yeah,” Kasey said again, quietly. It wasn’t clear if he was just encouraging Jae to go on again or agreeing on a more personal level. Jae kept talking.
“Anyway- I’m not Christian, you know, I don’t believe in a capital-G God. But if there is something like that out there, that’s supposed to be the only one who can actually forgive your sins, then you know, that’s its privilege. Who the hell is here on Earth thinking they have the same power as a god, or a God?”
Kasey shifted on the couch, turning to cradle his head in his hand. “What do you believe in?”
“People have the wrong idea about karma,” Jae said, instead of answering the question directly. “They think it’s just consequences. That you get what you deserve. It’s not that. Or it’s kind of that, but not exactly. It’s the future you make.
“There is no forgiveness, with karma. Just earning your future. And it has to be deliberate. Your intentions and the actions they drive, that’s your karma. No outside force deciding for you. Just you, your actions, and the place you make for yourself in the universe.”
He gave Kasey space to interject, but Kasey just gestured for him to go on.
“It kind of pisses you off, right? The idea that there’s no great justice.”
“I guess. It’d be nice to think that people really do get what they deserve.”
“Yeah.” Jae kept picking at the bottle’s label. “I don’t believe in God, but I do believe in Hell. The difference is that the one I believe in has a way out. If there’s no way out, there’s no point. You earn that too.”
“And you’re okay with that?”
“I don’t know,” Jae admitted. “It’d be really nice to believe in a heaven where you get everything wiped away in the end. But I don’t. I wasn’t raised to, so it’s easier than if I had been raised to believe, I guess.
“Either way, I’m living with it. I have to keep living with it.”
Jae paused, started to say something else, and then didn’t. He took another sip of beer. It wasn’t very good beer, to be honest.
“And?”
“No ‘and.’ That’s it. I keep living. I keep trying to want to live.”
Kasey was silent for a while, watching him. “I’m glad you’re trying,” he said finally.
The corner of Jae’s mouth twitched. He looked out the window, into the night. The other buildings in Kasey’s apartment complex pressed too close, the lights too bright and artificial. He longed for the open air of the desert, just so he didn’t feel everything pressing in on him on all sides, but they were both too drunk to drive.
“You know, I wanna…” He set the bottle back down and rubbed the bridge of his nose. The catch where skin became scar tissue was familiar under his fingertips. “Sometimes I want to be a dick to you just because you’re nice to me.”
“At least you’re self-aware,” Kasey returned dryly.
“I don’t know why I’m like that. Was like that even before everything happened.”
“Most people don’t know why they are the way they are.”
“Sometimes I just want to tell you that you can’t feel sorry for me, or- or whatever the fuck, because you can’t understand what it’s like to watch people die like that.”
Kasey was silent again, for longer than before. When he spoke, he didn’t sigh, but the quality of it was in his voice. “Jae, I see people die all the time.”
Reality didn’t slap Jae in the face, but it settled heavy on him just the same, like a weighted blanket draped over his shoulders. His drink-hazy mind was slowly and achingly aware of it.
“Yeah.”
It made him feel stupid and selfish, but he needed that reminder sometimes, that his pain wasn’t the only pain in the world.
Kasey didn’t press the issue, and Jae didn’t look back at him, but he could feel him watching.
“When does it get easier?”
Another long pause before Kasey answered. “It doesn’t. You just get used to it.”
Jae turned his gaze away from the window and tipped his head back, instead looking up at the ceiling where beams of light wavered with the movement of the blinds in the air conditioner’s breeze. “You live with it.”
“Yeah.”
Quiet filled the space between them after that, growing too established to break it again. It stayed that way until dawn.