Tan-ya

So she's standing there on the blacktop in front of her car, and I can barely see her from the sunlight reflecting off the driver's side mirror. And she tells me her name is Tan-ya, over-emphasizing the Tan, just in case I didn't catch her Southern drawl. Tan-ya explains to me how no one ever gets her name right, how they always call her plain old Tanya, like it's some Cardinal offense. She repeats herself quite a bit, 'it's Tan-ya,' she says, 'Tan-ya,' and I don't care one way or the other, just trying to kill time before work. She keeps up her defense, me nodding and agreeing. 'I just don't understand,' she tells me, and I have nothing to offer as comfort.

The way she curls her brown hair around her index finger and then pulls it down is remarkably childish, but it pulls me in, nevertheless. 'I'm twenty-four,' she blurts, momentarily sidestepping her defense, 'and I just can't stand it anymore,' then she stops, and another lock of hair wraps around her finger, her eyes x-raying my thoughts. I wonder if she caught the rhyme in her complaint.

The summer's days here in the valley, they're brutal. Looking closely enough, I can see the heat colliding against the blacktop, forcing wavy laminations upward into the transparent air like some exotic dancer way out East. Yet I can't see her, only the air pushed by her hips is visible, shifting and popping in the bright sunlight.

Tanya's still upset. She doesn't understand why people don't call her Tan-ya, like it's some ancient and foreign thing, Tan-ya. She's about as exotic and foreign as plastic palm trees and canned pineapples. 'I can't believe I actually said that!' she goes, after she picks up on her rhyme. 'Like, why didn't you say something?' I just shrug; the heat keeps me from thinking too much during the day. Sweat's beading on my forehead now, this damned heat. It's a blanket, smothering everything and thickening the air.

Standing in the shade is useless; the heat still hugs the way unwashed wool sweaters do, itchy and sticking. It amazes me, though; how I can carry on this conversation with Miss Can't-take-it-Anymore- Twenty-Four-Tan-ya. I let her field the question, but she hasn't a pen to use, so I give her mine. She had a slip of paper, but she dropped it when I gave her the pen; so she uses my hand to jot her number and her name, Tan-ya—like I forgot. She even spells it that way, somehow emphasizing the Tan, letting the "ya" fade off into some distant corner of the universe. Work is simple: I listen to what people have to say about their taste in music, and then I offer up some suggestions they might not have heard of. Invariably, there's always that one guy—or gal, but mostly it's a guy—who swears that all I listen to is hippie-shit, and stomps his steel-toed black combat boots back to the metal section.

After he cools, and I turn up the volume on my hippie-shit, he comes back to the counter with a copy of Metallica's "St. Anger," wanting to know, 'Hey, you heard this one? Y'know 'fit's any good?' and even die-hard Metallica stooges know that "St. Anger" is terrible, white-noise crap. Even so, I tell him a good buddy o'mine loves it, and that it's definitely worth the purch. He bites—they all bite, for some reason—and I win—I always win, for some reason.

Work is slow: I listen to music once all the people have cleared. When the store's busy and sitting's out of the question, I only hear the music. Yet the store's never really busy, it only seems that way. Usually, I can escape to the backroom a few times a shift to smoke a cigarette. I'm trying to quit. I understand it's best to just do it, but I like to think I'm a realist. I'll quit when the time is right. That's the problem with this city; it locks people inside its bubble, as if there's no other life beyond the surrounding mountains: nothing out there but darkness.

But when they've all gone away, I listen.

Then it's over and I turn off the neon "OPEN" sign and sit down to count money and close the store. The rest of that's mainly drivel, clockwork stuff, list-like and all. Anyway, the store closes at nine and I'm usually out of there at nine-thirty, depending on my eagerness to leave—it's hard to escape a dark room full of booming, kinetic sound surrounded by nearly limitless potential sound, damn hard.

But I'm almost always out by nine-thirty anyways.

The summer's nights here in the valley, they're gorgeous. The city lights up like a pile of diamonds sitting in an endlessly black pot, with the barely visible mountains jutting out the top. Tonight I'm heading to Antietam Street; it's this road in the middle of a severely upper-crust neighborhood. A convenient mart and a coffee shop and a bar line the short expanse of cracked asphalt like buttons on a tattered shirt. Antietam Street doesn't fit into the neighborhood all too well. But like Irony's kid brother this section of town was originally built around the road, so it's likely not going anywhere for some time—one of those Historic Landmarks— yeah, real historic.

The air at night is crisp, refreshing. It fills my lungs: it recharges. The passing houses or estates, rather, are monstrous and foreboding affairs. None of them resonate comfort; not one of them is necessary. They stick up—pearly white teeth chewing on a wad of tobacco—and gradually decrease in size, from outlandishly big to laughably small, the closer I get to Antietam. A product, I guess, of the way in which they built this neighborhood: backwards, rotting from the inside out. But that's how it works; things rot inside, pressing towards the shell like a great big venom-filled blossom. We grow on the inside of our mother, slowly rotting her from within. Then we're born and we start our rotting process; this place, this town, this brave old world feeding on our core, turning us all to beasts. Tanya's number's still on my hand, the "ya" off investigating universe.

Damn squirrel, right there in the middle of the road. Like a speed bump. My headlights hit his eyes and they glossed over with fear, the pupils expanding and then narrowing to a point. They were penetrating; somehow reminding me of Tanya's eyes, the way they went straight through and out the other side, pulverizing everything in between: then thump and gone. To end something is terrible, to truly end something, something that was breathing and living moments ago is fucking terrible. That squirrel knew me in that instant, knew my thoughts, my fears; it knew me and I ended it. Usually I meet Cohen, tonight's no different.

Cohen's a nice guy; I've known him since middle school, a real coin. He arrived home from college this evening and we're meeting, per usual, at Antietam. Neither of us live near Antietam; Cohen and I live off in Newport, but we both attended this snappy private school in Aperiens. Most of the students who went there live in Aperiens, specifically in this neighborhood; hence our ever-presence.

We've got nothing in common, Cohen and I. He's prep to the hilt, bred and raised in the private sector. He's going pre-law, double majoring in History and Psychology at the state university. Like I said, a real coin. He's severely upper crust, but it doesn't bother me much. I first met him in middle school. It was my first day at Shriver (the private school) and I just waxed this one kid for calling me ignorant. Why call someone ignorant? It's useless.

Anyway, I waxed this kid, slammed his head against the wall and Cohen was there, in the hallway, and he says 'fuck those schleps, they're empty shells; you, my man, you're the egg.' And that was that. Antietam's a wide road with a fat, grassy median separating the two lanes of traffic, often used for parking or, if there's enough heads, a game of soccer. Soccer's the sport in Aperiens, especially at Shriver. I'm alone pulling into an angled space in front of the convenient mart, Antietam's dead. Miles Davis creeps into the blank street out of my car while I'm sitting on the curb waiting for Cohen. Ten till ten, 'I'll be there square at ten' he said earlier, on the phone. I pull a drag and see Tan-ya again on my hand, and behind that Cohen's white pickup blurred in the distance. The rust spots materialize the closer he gets, then the load in the bed of the truck: some old furniture he's taking to the salvage store. Cohen's always taking something to the salvage store; it's how he makes money during the summer.

'Egg! Where ya' been all my life?' he says. 'Come give Cohen a hug,' the sarcasm thick and wet like fog. He rattles and rattles, mostly about exams and how fit it is to be back. 'We gonna get tight tonight?' he goes, always referencing, trying to get a rise out of me—it never works. 'Let's go, this place is a ghost,' and we're gone, off to Flamingo Street for a party.

Street names always baffle me. I'll never understand who came up with 'em. Flamingo, Antietam, Colonel, Caroline, Dawn, etcetera, etcetera: hmmm, this street conjures thoughts of the bloodiest battle of the United States Civil War. Yeah, the way it winds, it's like musket shots waving and dodging particles in the wind. And that one, that road's definitely an exotic pink bird with ankles for knees. It's all dilapidation, fading out like a flame burning through the last threads of a candlewick, popping and cracking, then gone. The cool night air trots between the squares of the screen door, cooling the wax and dissipating orange spices—all of it fading. Cohen's pickup heaves through the hills of Flamingo, and we grow darker with each mile traveled deeper into the forest. 'This place is in the sticks, man. Way in the sticks;' and I know. But it's nice seeing the darkness of the mountainside and the dimming lights of the city beneath us.

There's not much of this left in the world.