Doug in, Again

From the milk-dotted window we watch the alluvion rain splattering the street outside. A calm and selfless pedestrian, soaked to the bone, holds his groceries in one arm, and fumbles for his keys with the other. The place was hardly snug, but at least its warm. Doug's apartment.

"Balance," Doug says reaching for his coffee cup, "I'm consumed by it. And once I find some and start to purview a new kind of manumitted joy, she goes and rips it all away." The neighbor drops his keys and reaches down to retrieve them, dropping his groceries too.

"You don't become somebody else when you fall in love," I say, dreaming of a vodka tonic and an ecdysiast I once knew named Libby...

"She just... got... everything right..." he says with more than a slight pang of loss, like a man reaching for something delicate in the dark and grasping a hot iron instead.

My buddy Doug is a scientist. One of my 'adult' friends. No matter how old I get I feel like I still calibrate a large portion of my interactions in my head as if I am still a boy and everyone around me is grumpy old and has-been. I guess we all feel like that sometimes. But Doug has always been an adult. I met him at a function at the University. We started talking and found we could respond to each other's uncompleted thoughts with almost a kind of foreknowledge. Sometimes disparate elements form bonds, as Doug would say. Our conversations were places where things really get said. I thought it would be cool to have an overly educated smart person around. The guy has integrated science into almost every facet of his life, but Doug started turning to me more and more as a sounding board for his love life, and so now we don't hang as often. I can only take so much of lovelorn rationality. He tends to make points quickly and then rehash them in intrinsicly detailed diatribes that sound painfully like mathematical proofs, and if you don't pay attention it all starts to slide by like the background loop of a Saturday-morning cartoon.

A plantpot in the window catches my eye. It looks like it was smashed against the floor and then meticulously glued back together.

"It was hers," he says with a singular solitude. The universe is full of bodies pulled by quiet inertias. I knew I needed to stop in today concomitant with my reception of a lengthy letter from him a month or so ago informing me his fiancé had left him, and he was free-wheeling towards a dégringolade.

"Hey, I'm sorry. All this talking about me… what's new with you?"

"A boy I knew back home committed suicide yesterday," I say and immediately regret saying. "But I'm trying not to think about the long winters anymore. Just stepping back into my life."

"So's'it nice to be back?" he asks, thankfully not listening to a word I say. Absentmindedly dabbling a cloth at coffee stains.

"Yeah man. I love the city lights. I just wish all my nights could be days..."

"See, I'm partial to staying in. That was part of what I loved about her," he cuts in, and off he goes: "On, like, all temporal levels she could meet me on both micro and macrophytic levels." I imagine Doug talking like this to some poor girl filled more by curiosity and pity than anything resembling love or desire. I can see her gentle heart congealing quiescent and slowly freezing over. "…When I wanted to stay in and discuss the programmatic queries of group, she'd be all for it. Open up a bottle of wine and listen. Ask really good questions, you know, like I fascinated her more than the possibility of anyone else in the world!"

His hand shakes. Life's little reverberations, I think. Now that she has left him he's fallen apart, but was he ever really together?

"Failure is the most fundamental feature of biological, social and economic systems" he says, unsteadily spilling more coffee, this time on his hand, and swearing under his breath. I find it unnerving that this man is in charge of unstable and potentially unpredictable isotopic chain reactions on a day-to-day basis. He used to be a grad student. Now he oversees them. The world is a fluke of tiny cataclysmic physics.

"Sometimes she could be like ten girls at once. But my hypothesis is that all girls are like this. Unbidden complex theoreticals. My mother had enthusiasms that changed so often my Dad once asked her what her favorite book was, and in the time it took him to read it she'd decided that she hated books and refused to talk about any of them ever again."

"What did she do?"

"She was a conceptual artist, I only met her once. My father raised me. He worked as a chemist."

Doug, the result of a chemical reaction gone haywire. The rain outside slows and feeling that the recourse of despair lies in either comedy or alcohol, I suggest we go get a drink.

"Let's do the town!"

A door opens down a nearby street and we are greeted by the smell of sadness and futility. In all my agony I have smelled this familiar foul reak. Death, and last night's overflowed taps hastily wiped away on the surface but still stinking everywhere else. Ruined forms huddled against brass rails, falling into foul alleys and steamy darkness. The city within every city, the dark heart of the sun.

It didn't take long to talk Doug into coming out. Later, after a few shots he's opened up to the other guys around and I realize how disarmingly charming and forthright he is for such an otherwise modest guy with a really shaky view of reality.

"She said I changed after we moved in together," he confided loud enough for everyone to hear him. "Like I was some monster all of a sudden. I never would have proposed if I'd known that was how it was going to turn out."

"Yeah man. Marriage is terminal," someone offered. Once, a long time ago, Doug told me that we didn't need to invent computers that could think (A.I.) we just needed to create a program that could evolve. Intelligence wasn't a neccesity for survival, he argued, it was capacity to meet change.

The rain starts up again outside a dim window filled with the buzzing neon signs and I want to hide from all the draughts of life in a shadowy corner and die. Sometimes living is only waiting for dying.

Whenever the clouds tremble like this I am back in Minnesota and its raining. She is there angrily waiting as I stand obstinatly beside the house in a dim spring downpour. My T-shirt clinging to my scrawny frame as I shiver and reek to high heaven of cigar darmp smoke and spilt Wisconsin beer.

Until the rain becomes me

and I become the rain.

"It's who we are in moments of crisis that define who we are." Doug says. "Like how we can tell what gases are in a star but the colour of the reaction."

"The fires we burn!" cries the besotted inebriant.

"Yeah," I say, "Under the necessities of pressure, we all boil down to what we truly consist of. Who we truly are."

"When she was walking out,

I didn't do anything to stop her.

I just sat there

and didn't move.

I just watched her go."

My buddy Doug starts to cry and I scooch in closer and pat him on the shoulder.

"Just breathe," I say as he sobs and sobs in the secret language of remorse and regret. "It'll be alright. It will. Just breathe." And after a minute or so he feels better, or seems to, and straightens up and wipes the tears from his eyes.

Looking suddenly sober he turns to me and breathes deeply. "We are all indebted to oxygen" he says, and I laugh at the scientist. Sometimes its the most serious people who can tell the best jokes.