We’re excerpting parts of Meredith Turits’ second novel, which is still in progress. This is part two of three. Check out part one here, and come back next Wednesday for the third and final installment.

NATE

SO OBVIOUSLY I’M thinking no more pretty girls.  If there are any new girls at all I mean and I’m like, “Really Nate, well done again, being in a city where there are only pretty girls, nice going.”  I am like a lefty in a room of righty scissors and I need to cut myself out of a paper bag or something.  No more pretty or skinny girls because you don’t deserve anything nice anymore.

When you’re angry or depressed or something and you work at a law firm the nice thing about the whole thing is that no one notices.  I guess that’s sort of like the same story with being a dick or a cheater or a womanizer.  Everyone else is too so there’s like this sort of like “this isn’t a big deal” thing to it.  I was a dick and angry and a womanizer so that was okay.  Like fitting in I guess, but people really don’t notice paralegals at all no matter what.  Like I probably could have been a Nobel Peace Prize winner or some shit and some dickbag would still probably tell me to staple something or to go open the conference bridge with the New York office.  Since that’s what I’m supposed to do or something.  Actually, this is how it was supposed to go.  I was supposed to go to law school right out of college but I didn’t get in.  I was supposed to marry Paige and that didn’t happen either.

Like twelve hours after I proposed to her, after the whole conversation with Anaïs, after Paige jumped up and screamed and put her spaghetti arms around my neck, which actually kind of hurt now that I think about it, I fucked it all up again. We had sex, not particularly good or not good, I don’t know if I was really paying attention, and went to bed with her practically lying on top of me. I told her I was going to pick the ring out with her the next day, and she kept looking down at her bare left hand and holding it up to the light and doing this wiggling-fingers shit while we were lying there.  I turned onto my stomach, put my hands under me and against my dick, and just thought about what Anaïs said at the restaurant.  Paige was asleep, I knew she was because she does this little wheeze thing when her nose is stuffed up which it was, and I went over to the couch and kind of sat there.  It was really stupid and dramatic of me, sitting there completely aware of the fact that I was about to ruin Paige’s life and what was supposed to happen and that I actually already had ruined it all.  But that’s what I did.  I sat there fighting off sleep, because I told myself this was how it was supposed to play out, me awake all night and Paige waking up to find me on the couch not having slept.  So, I stayed up and in the morning she woke up way earlier than usual.  It was a Saturday.  And just like that, I erased the proposal the easiest way I could—admitting the whole thing with Anaïs. And actually now that I’m explaining all of this I don’t think I really want to talk about what happened next anymore.  I’m sick of even thinking about it.  That’s the one thing that’s still good about free choice because it’s like even if you do really stupid things and even if they get you in trouble you also can choose just not to deal with any of it.

OVER THE NEXT few days, I started talking to myself a lot and saying strange shit aloud like “What the hell is wrong with you though actually you sort of deserve this all.” And, five days after everything exploded, after Paige moved out and Anaïs stopped answering her phone, I was at work and saw this awful fucking lecherous guy who’d fucked basically every first-year associate girl in the firm talking to the new paralegal, and I realized that we had the same absolutely nothing waiting for us at home.  That I was basically no different than him.  I got up from my desk, got in my car and instead of going back to my house I just drove.

The doctors said it was basically like physically impossible that I survived, never mind that I actually remember anything about the first accident. There was really no point telling anyone that I remember everything about it.

I don’t know why I did it, but I went out and bought Paige this card that I knew I shouldn’t send but I decided I wanted to anyway.  So I went and got her this card and I think I wrote that I was sorry.  Yeah.  That’s what I wrote. I probably should have written happy birthday or something even though her birthday isn’t until June but that isn’t what came out and I’m not stupid, like I know I’m not exactly the most articulate guy or whatever, so that’s what I wrote.  I addressed it to her parents’ house in Arizona because how am I supposed to know where she is now, right?  So I go and I get in my car and I’m seriously dealing with the worst fucking headache I’ve ever had and it’s fine because I fucking deserve it but really it still hurts like a bitch and I start driving towards a post office because no one actually has stamps or anything and I’m going north but I see one mailbox after the other and a couple of post offices but instead I just end up on PCH and then I’m up past Pacific Palisades and then past Ventura and then I’m above Santa Barbara and I have no fucking clue why but I’m just going.  Like going where no one from LA goes except to get away, and that’s exactly what I wanted to do.  There was no point and my air conditioner was broken and there were just a shit ton of signs telling me that I was way too many miles away from LA but as the odometer started to climb it got kind of exciting so I just drove more and my shitty little sedan started shaking and I just kept going north.  And then it started to rain.  Like really really hard.  And obviously that makes sense because it rains like six days a year here.  I’d wandered off of PCH and there were a shit ton of trees.  The rain just started to fall even harder but I kept driving anyway because I figured that if I didn’t come back alive I wasn’t supposed to.  The rain let up for like half a second and I saw this bend coming up and then it was coming down in sheets again so I just sort of chanced my luck on the curve in the road.

I remember what the car felt like in midair and I remember being inside when it flipped over the guardrail, and the wind and rain shattered the windshield and all of the glass on my side even before the car hit the pavement and then the tumble down the short hill on the shoulder of the road and right into this tree.  I remember the sound my neck made and I was totally sure it was broken and I guess almost relieved it was and then I thought about all of my bones smashing and snapping and wondered what Paige would think if she heard the sound.  And then what I remember most is how my mouth tasted like bile and it was burning my throat and then this heavy slimy blood from my sliced tongue and both sort of like came together and congealed in my mouth as more rain fell on me.  I remember thinking that maybe all of this shit would be over and that I was really free for good.

Images by Jacob Van Loon.