Characterization
by Amelia Nason
He appears sometime between February and May, though none of us can agree exactly when. The first time he asks me to bout—in the drizzly murk of April, according to my own self-centered memory—I can’t help but wonder why no one has told him he’s in the wrong place. He fences like a saberist, slashing his blade over the careful epee preps my fencing club preaches and its students take as gospel. There’s a correct way to behave in this sport: arm extended but never audaciously so, actions set up from out of distance, a deliberate attack in a standard line as a reward for your restraint. There’s a wrong way, too. It’s right in front of me. But twenty seconds in, my lifetime of technical training is obliterated by a string of wild ripostes and out of distance flèches. His chaos counters my order with a smile when he pulls his mask off, salutes.
They teach you in Physics that a closed system tends towards entropy, that the world spins gradually into anarchy.
His dark hair needs to be cut, falling in his eyes with every abrupt movement. He leaps over the gear lockers and falls into the splits in the middle of bouts, bouncing out of them with ease, like the world will collapse under his feet if he stays still. Gravity doesn’t have the same hold on him that it does the rest of us. I wish I, too, could take flight.
We aren’t friends his first year in Portland. I’m graduating high school and can’t fit anyone else in my suitcase. He disregards me too, busy getting himself into trouble I won’t hear about until his second year at the club, when I come home over summer, and he signs up for that one adult fencing clinic because I do.
He confesses as much in a letter, months later: I didn’t know you yet, but I wanted to.
Every fencer there is easily ten years older than either of us, me at nineteen, him at twenty-two. Perhaps this is why I barely think twice about our own age difference, even long after the clinic. At dinner, on the last night, they sit and drink too much Willamette Valley Pinot Noir, while he and I make faces at each other from across the table when my coach launches into yet another story about the 2004 Olympics. He could have a glass, but doesn’t. I see the fear in his eyes when they try to pass the bottle to him. I understand it.
He picks strawberry cheesecake off the prix fixe menu. “You’ll regret that,” I say, and order the chocolate gâteau. We trade bites of each other’s desserts, a hesitant acknowledgement of friendship. One of those casual intimacies you take for granted after the first time it happens. The remorseful look he gives me goes unnoticed by the rest of the group, still enthralled by my coach. I savor my triumph, then let him finish the slice of cake.
chocolate is always the better choice, I text that night, one of the first times we speak outside of practice.
You were right, he admits.
i’m always right. you’ll learn. where did you live before portland?
“I’d make a good urban legend,” he remarks wryly at practice, in between telling me his father is dead, and he wants to kill his mother. His nonchalance is persuasive, though I don’t think anyone’s ever told him so.
He only gets more enigmatic from there, somehow. He drove his car up from Reno a few winters ago and flipped it into a Klamath Falls ditch, then fixed it alone in an icy parking lot. He married someone for a discounted housing scheme and keeps forgetting to ask her to sign the divorce papers, even though it’s been over a year since she broke his heart. I can’t take him seriously, can’t quite believe he’s a real person, but he fascinates me with his apocalypse survival plan and refusal to pay taxes because the government literally forgot he existed a long time ago.
He says the idea of getting coffee with a friend scares him. I say that’s a stupid place to draw the line, if you’re reckless enough to order antidepressants online and decide the dosage for yourself, as he tends to do. So, we practice, meeting up at a coffee place in August, October, November, December. I’m home often this semester, and he’s a fixture of Portland. He files the divorce papers, finally enrolls in community college. I sit glued to my front row seat while the election tears my plans and the world apart. He tells me to come home and let it burn.
***
That winter, my sophomore year in college, he shows up to yet another fencing camp with my coffee order in hand. “They were out of oat milk,” he says, in the same way you might tell someone you ran over their cat while backing out of the garage. There’s a wary look on his face, and I wonder what happens when he disappoints the other people in his life. Ever the half-assed Portland vegan, I drink it anyway.
Camp stretches through the holidays. He brings me coffee every morning—on the third day, they even have oat milk, but he doesn’t stop after that success. I’m surprised by the effort, and I’m even more surprised that after I lose an awful bout on New Year’s Eve and emerge from the bathroom puffy-eyed, I find him waiting for me in the hallway with a chocolate cupcake from lunch. “Always the right choice,” he says, then manages not to look too scared when I break down in tears again.
Later that night, I’m home too early to be celebrating New Year’s Eve correctly, but with a flight to catch the next morning, crashing on a high school friend’s couch isn’t appealing. Nor did I want to waste my entire evening trying to remind everyone I grew up with that I’ve taken myself apart at the seams, turned my skin inside out, become something unrecognizably East Coast—impassive, shrewd. Some of them had only seen me once or twice since I gave the address at our graduation, still had me in their heads as the salutatorian with a perky bob and a bad breakup. I fled the party an hour and a half before midnight and texted him that I was going for a walk instead. The invite was casual, almost nonexistent. Neither of us quite expected him to accept.
But I find him leaning against the powder-blue side of his car. It’s too cold to be outside, but he’s still scared to set foot inside my house, and I’m afraid of what happens when he does—I don’t know what to make of his slight contempt for the idea of family. The sky spits rain, and behind gray clouds, the red halos of fireworks bloom: a man-made Aurora Borealis.
My neighborhood always reminds me of California, transplanted streets that grow poorly in this climate. The palm trees planted behind the iron gates of low-lying houses would fit better in a San Diego subdivision than the outskirts of Portland, but they struggle on. It’s even more comical tonight, with Christmas lights strung up in palm fronds and a frigid, misting rain settling in our hair, on the stucco roofs, on the cars my neighbors refuse to put in their garages. I’m wishing the New Year will never round one of the sharp street corners, but I know my neighbors will peel down their Christmas lights tomorrow, leaving me the one afraid to rip the band aid off.
We don’t pause for midnight. He doesn’t look at me when the atmosphere explodes with a barrage of fireworks, just keeps walking. Inertia might be the one law of physics that applies to him.
***
We’re on different coasts again. He goes to my father when he dislocates his shoulder at a tournament, even though he’s afraid of doctors. It’s the most I can do to put him back together from afar, pulling whatever strings that haven’t snapped after being stretched 2,359 miles.
I’m returning a favor, in reverse: before I left for spring semester, he took his blade apart to fix one of mine, cheerfully dismembering the tip screws and barrel with my coach’s favorite magnetized screwdriver. His coach, too, I suppose. He belongs to the fencing club more than I do now, walks around the armory like he owns the place. We’ve traded places, same as we’ve traded the inner workings of our blades. I would resent anyone else for it.
I say good night, i miss you when it’s still evening for him. I wake every morning to however he filled the three hours between us:
The night he gets too high with his neighbor, starts counting everything in fourteens, my favorite number. This is going to be a lot to wake up to.
Accidentally flooded my house with mustard gas oops. He considers himself an amateur alchemist. Half awake, I scream into a pillow when I read the text. I’m getting used to his affinity for death, but it still makes me sick with worry.
Another night, he’s up reading Dorian Gray at my rather forceful request. Ok I get why this is your favorite book.
I’m going to sleep way the fuck in so don’t worry if I don’t wake up till later.
4:04 am EST: I got a random spam text, and when my phone lit up my first thought was why you had woken up so early.
I dread the days he sleeps late, waiting for Pacific Time to catch up, though I have nothing interesting to report when it does. My life pales in comparison to his chaos. I complain about the rules while he breaks them, sidestepping systems, swimming upstream like it’s the obvious choice. I don’t know how he isn’t bored of me.
There will come a morning where I wait and wait, but he never wakes up. It may be in forty years. It could be tomorrow. He makes no secret of his own impermanence; how little he cares if he lives or dies. It’s the one thing I wish he would lie to me about.
I’m supposed to be the writer, but he has better lines: If the next year was spent doing nothing but listening to you talk about something you love, it will have been better than the last. He buries me in words but often falls short of saying exactly what he means, afraid I’ll find the sad rot, the water damage, in him. I already have. There’s a world where he is given half the love he deserves, but it’s not this one.
He told me once that I only liked him because he was a good character. I hope this doesn’t prove his point.
BIO: Amelia Nason is a novelist and poet. She’s an alumna of the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio, as well as the Interlochen, Fir Acres, & New York Times summer writing programs. Her poetry is featured in Eunoia Review, the Aurora Journal, Diet Water, Yuzu Press, and Exist Otherwise, among other journals, and her debut chapbook poems i shouldn’t have written is out now with Bottlecap Press. She is represented by Elisa Saphier of MacGregor & Luedeke Literary. When she isn’t writing, Amelia fences competitively for George Washington University while studying Political Science & Creative Writing.