I Have To Go

Rose Hannaford

I think it’s time to change my name again. I know I recently changed my name to Basil Fobb Clarkton, but it’s been three days and I think it’s time to move on. Delford Morbox. Not Morbox as in More Box, because if there’s one thing I hate, it’s boxes. People like to try and fit me into them. Morbox as in Morbid Ox, I think. That’s where the idea came from. A Dell and a Ford, sounds idyllic, a little valley with a small stream, but you know who lives there? A Morbid Ox. That’s how I feel. I like that anachronism. I’m gonna go tell my SO. I think they’ll like it too.

I go to talk to my SO about my new name, but they’re real distracted tonight. I come up to hear them muttering to themself over and over again about how they gotta find God. They gotta find God and they gotta find him quick, they’re saying. I try to tell them that God exists but he doesn’t hang around this dump, but they ignore me. So I ask where they’re gonna look and they say they’re going to this town called Bug and I ask why they thought God would be living in Bug of all places? Bug is more than just a dump, it’s the dump of all dumps. But they still seem to think that a place like that would be the most likely spot for God to hang out, so to keep them safe I ask if they want me to come along and they say yes.

My SO and I are always distant, we’re a strange arm’s-length kind of couple, but for a while now they’ve been even more remote. We get philosophical sometimes, and when words are tumbling out of each other, I can see some truth hidden behind their mouth and I’ve tried to figure out what it is. See, my SO changes a whole lot - they change so much, they can walk through walls. The way I think my SO thinks, things changing implies that things need to change, they have somewhere to go. So it makes them sad because they don’t like needing change or somewhere to go, they think it makes them fickle. Pretty often now, they’ll tell me they have to go and they go away, and I think they just find a nice peaceful spot where no one will bother them and sit there for as long as they can stand it, to calm themselves down. They want to find some nirvana, a place where there’s nowhere left to go, any change would be downhill, and stay there so they never change again. Though they know it won’t just come to them, they’ll have to change in just the right ways to end up there. So eventually they come back to my apartment, because I make the search for those changes bearable. And you know, I want my SO to be happy, but I can’t help but hope they never find their unchanging nirvana. I feel so damn guilty when I think about it, but I love them the way they are. And I’m afraid that when they find that nirvana and stop changing, I’ll wake up in bed with a cold stiff, beatific expression over folded hands and they’ll never ever move or do anything again. That’s probably the scariest thing I can imagine. But I don’t even know if this is true, so I’ve never brought it up to them.

We take the train, the Bug train, and we have to work a little to make sure my SO won’t fall through the seat. They’re real agitated, but at least they’re not moving so fast that I can’t hold their hand. I’m more afraid of Bug, but they’re more afraid of not finding God at all. I ask them during the train ride why they want to find God so bad, but they don’t answer me so it must be bad. I ask them what God do you hope to find? And they don’t understand my question, so I say it a different way. Do you want the God from the books, the Bibles, the one everyone makes a mess over, or do they want a God, someone omnipotent and omniscient? They think it over and say they don’t care if it’s the first as long as it’s also the second.

No one else is on the train except for an old man a few seats ahead of us. He has a wrinkled old face and a beaky nose peeking out from behind the hood of a gaudy, oversized yellow raincoat and he’s staring into the wall of the train like he’s seeing through it. I feel kind of nervous about him, since anyone going to Bug has to be out of their mind, including us, but he never looks at us and my SO doesn’t pay attention to him.

My SO is nocturnal so when we arrive at dawn, they’re exhausted. Bug’s a little wart of a town in the middle of nowhere, where trees and farmland bicker over the available space and the swamp just settles there like a fat cat sitting on your dinner. It’s near the coast so it’s raining all the time. I have to carry my sleeping SO and we look for a hotel. Usually my SO and I attract some stares but the hotel manager doesn’t blink when I walk in and ask for a basement room. Come to think of it, the manager doesn’t blink at all, not once, and I don’t like that and I hurry us to our room. Most hotel rooms smell like soap or mold, and ours fits the bill both ways, but my SO’s already asleep so I put them to bed and stay up reading a book while they slept. I read that book all day but I’m not paying attention, I’m thinking about why my SO wants to find God and why they think He or maybe She or They or even We would be here in Bug.

I have a song going through my head when my SO wakes up. It’s a slow song, sung with a lot of hidden feeling and the only instrument is a guitar doing most of the talking. You dug a well, you dug it deep, for every wife you buried you planted a cedar tree. I can hear the rain outside the hotel, but my SO still insists on leaving to go look for God so I figure we’ll ask the Noblink manager about umbrellas, but when we go up to the lobby, Noblink isn’t there. At this point my SO is so uptight that they walk right through the door without opening it, so I gotta hurry if I’m gonna follow them, but I take a quick peek behind the desk to see if there’s an umbrella there. I don’t see one but I do see a map, so I nip it and run out the door to find my SO.

I see them in an empty intersection, they’re turning left and right and looking real confused and frustrated, so I show them the map and ask where they want to go. They don’t get it, so I point where we are and say Bug is a big town, we can’t search the whole dang place, where do you think God is most likely to hang out here? And they slow down enough that they stop moving for a bit and look at the map, and they say well let’s start at the jazz bar then. And they hurry off before I can ask them why God would be at the jazz bar, and I start running after them as soon as I think to myself, I guess why wouldn’t God be at the jazz bar? You dug a well you dug it deep…

The jazz kind of interrupts that song in my head and makes me all confused, so I stop thinking about it. In the bar, I see instruments with no musicians, but I’m hearing music. I’ve suspended my disbelief for my SO’s sake, I ask what if the music is being played by God right now? But they don’t look at the instruments and look instead at the bartender. No one looks as us, and while my SO is asking him questions I wonder if he and Noblink the hotel manager are related, because while he’s blinking, I don’t see his chest rise or fall like he’s breathing, so I dub him Nobreathe. My SO gets impatient and starts talking so fast I don’t understand what they’re saying, but I think they’re asking why aren’t you listening to me don’t you know how important this is? And that’s when he finally speaks up though he still doesn’t look at us, of course we know how important it is but there’s nothing we can do about it is there?

I can see this throws off my SO a lot, and I don’t know what Nobreathe is talking about any more than they do, so they just ask again, where is God then? I know God is here. The bartender just walks to the taps and pours some beer out in a glass. I can tell my SO is seething mad since they hate to be ignored but before they start yelling, Nobreathe slides them the beer and says take it, it’s all you’re gonna get here. My SO looks at it and at Nobreathe for a while. Then they sweep their hand out and smash the glass against the wall, spilling beer everywhere, and I think the music stopped. They stare at Nobreathe a little while longer before turning around and stalking towards the door, madder than anything I’ve ever seen. I sweep up the glass and quickly ask how much, but Nobreathe just shakes his head and says you should go after them or they’ll get lost. I take his advice and run after my SO out of the bar, shaking off the jazz that had settled on my shoulders so I can hear my head music again.

They’re at the intersection again and this time they take the map from my hands without a word, though again it takes a few tries because their hands phase right through the paper. The song in my head goes on to the next lyric, The best, the best you ever had and it seems kind of ironic those lyrics when I’m seeing my SO the worst I’ve ever seen them. The only time they’d cried before now was when we broke up for the first time and they came back telling me they had no one else, they were crying so hard that the tears themselves were falling right through the floor and even me when I was hugging them. I hugged them so tight that even if I phased through them they’d still feel me hugging them, and we had stayed that way for a long time. There are a lot of things I’ve never asked my SO, usually when they want me to know something they tell me, so I decided that day that I wouldn’t ask about their family or friends. God knows, or maybe not even he knows, my own situation was complicated enough that I wouldn’t know what to answer if they asked me the same. After that day, we still had a lot of problems but we pushed through it because that’s all we have now, each other.

So thinking about that and seeing my SO struggle with the map and thinking about how the people have been acting, I take the map away and say let’s just go walking and see what we can see. My SO looks at me before nodding and I take the third path from that intersection.

But before I go very far, there’s something that brushes the palm of my hand and I turn back to see them reaching for me. Whatever intensity or energy that’s been driving them onward has suddenly slackened and I see their face, actually see it for the first time since we’ve come to Bug. It nearly breaks my heart just seeing their face like that. I take their hand gently and they huddle next to me, their haggard breathing beginning to slow. I walk them slow across the road with my arm over their shoulder until they’re ready to walk themself. I stand where you stood, I stand for bad or good, and I am green, and you are wood.

We walk for a while on the faded concrete and I think about the town we’re in, how none of the people seem to look at us, how I haven’t seen any cars despite the road. I think that maybe this town is as weird as I am or my SO is, maybe it’s one of those things that doesn’t box too well. Maybe I don’t like that last name I came up with, Morbox, because no matter what I say it sounds like More Box so I think about what I might change it to. Thinking about this, I wonder if maybe I misjudged the town, maybe I should just back off and give it another chance. The best, the best we ever had...

Soon the road starts getting twisty, and the pavement’s all cracked up. Both of us nearly twist an ankle but we’re still holding hands so we can steady ourselves alright. It’s real flat all around but it feels kind of crowded until the point when the road curves in front of some overgrown farmland. Soon the road leads right out of town, into farm and swamp, but we keep walking because both of us feel something, we don’t know what we feel but we know it’s there.

The rain’s getting pretty rough and I hold the map over our heads like an umbrella. We’re approaching the forest the road disappears into when we see a man on the side of the road. He’s wearing a thick raincoat, a gaudy yellow color.

We go up to him and he looks at us. I break the silence and just say hey. He says hey back. I ask are you God? And my SO stiffens next to me when the old man says yes, I think so.

You think so? my SO asks sharply. If you’re God, wouldn’t you know it?

The old man looks at us with such anguish that we both shut up for a minute.

My SO then asks well then you know why I’m here don’t you? And the old man says yes I think so and he looks sad again. I can hear my SO getting angry next to me and they ask is that all you’re here to say? If you know why I’m here then why aren’t you apologizing?

It’s hard to see the old man’s face, the rain is streaming off his hood so thick it’s like a waterfall, but he says nothing. I turn to look at my SO and I’m so startled I almost drop the map umbrella because I’m seeing through them now, usually it’s them who sees through me. For me this has been a journey of a single day, but for my SO it’s been building, winding, growing for days and days and weeks and months, boiling and brewing in their head, twisting round and round until the only thing that’ll untwist it all is to unwind the spool and find the source of the confusion. My SO balls their fists and they’re vibrating so fast that their fingers go right through their hand and they say, why aren’t you apologizing for making me this way?

And like that it’s as though a spigot has been turned and they’re just shouting, shouting shouting, you know I hurt all the time, everywhere in everything, to the point where just seeing something in the world is enough to make me hurt, why would you do this I thought a creator would want their creations to be happy, I can’t even tell if happiness exists or if it was just ignorance all along. I didn’t do anything wrong to be like this I didn’t choose anything that lead me here, it just happened, and that means there’s no choice I can make to go back either so what am I supposed to do? It was you who made me this way, you who made the world work like this, and don’t give me that bullshit that you’re not responsible, you fucking made everything and now you’re just letting it all blacken and fester. Everything's all gone to shit and you’re not trying to help, you’re just trying to blame, and you’re blaming me.

At this point my SO has to stop for breath, the air itself is going right through them, and I can barely see them anymore they’re so transparent. I can see now that I was wrong earlier, when I thought that whenever they said I have to go they’d go to some place where they can slow and settle down, but it’s the opposite. Every time they said I have to go they go out and move so fast that they don’t exist anymore. Instead of chaining up the beast tighter they release it and let it rampage, and when it slows down, they come back together and return to our apartment until it needs to come out again. Only for a while now, it hasn’t been slowing down, this coping mechanism isn’t helping them move on for a while longer. I know for myself that finding those takes a lot of work, and for them all that work has led up to nothing much. And now they’re reaching critical mass, they’re about to blow apart in the rain, and they came to find God to make him fix it all.

But God is just standing there in a stupid yellow raincoat, looking sad and saying nothing. I feel anger welling up in my own throat. I drop the map and grasp my SO, I wrap my arms all around them to hold them together and I glare at God. Help them, now, I tell him.

I can’t, God says back. Why not? I demand. You’re God, for fuck’s sake. Can’t you do anything you want? No, he says somberly.

That throws me off a little, but I push on for my SO’s sake. So what can you do? I ask.

I can’t see his face anymore, the torrent going over his hood has gotten so thick. I can’t unmake, he says like he’s explaining himself. I can only make, I can make peace, I can make hope. But I can’t make it and just give it to someone. They have to find it.

My SO is shaking, I can feel their whole being fragmenting apart. Terrified that I’m about to lose them, I scream at God then you better fucking make some right here and right now. Because we’ve been looking for that our whole lives and we’re just about at our wit’s end.

Water is gushing out of God’s raincoat, the hood and the sleeves and the pockets and the zippers. I stop looking at him and focus on my SO, who’s falling out in the spaces between my arms. I hold them tighter and try to think of anything I can do, I just want them to feel better.

And for some fucking reason, that song is still going through my head, it never stops, so with no other idea of how to help them I sing to them. But I start at the beginning of the song, because that’s how you’re supposed to sing it. You dug a well, you dug it deep. For every wife you’ve buried, you planted a cedar tree. The best, the best you ever had.

I have a sing a little louder to be heard over the rain. Do I hear a guitar? Someone must have opened the door to the jazz bar, the jazz bar on the other side of town where instruments play themselves, because there’s also a harmonica and a sort of violin. I stand where you stood. I stand for bad or good. And I am green, and you are wood. The best, the best they ever had.

My eyes are squeezed tight but the tears leak out anyway. The guitar and the violin give me some time to swallow before finishing the short song with a steady voice. I dig a well. I dig it deep. And for my only love, I plant a cedar tree. The best, the best we ever had.

A strum, a warbling stream from the violin, and both they and my voice fade into silence. My SO has stopped shaking. Maybe even the rain has stopped trampling and now it’s just falling. I open my eyes and I see my SO. They’re solid, they’re fully solid, and they’re breathing fine now. They’re hugging me back and taking deep breaths of the rain-soaked air, maybe having a drink along with. I wait a few minutes to make sure they’re really better and then I ask to make sure, hey how are you feeling? They say, thick and muffled against my coat, I feel better, and I say good. And they say where did you learn to sing like that? And I’m confused because I never learned to sing anywhere, so I say I just had that song going through my head all day and I figured it was time to get it out. And I feel shaking again and I get alarmed for a second before I realize they were just laughing a little, and they say I like your singing voice.

I look at God, who hasn’t moved from his spot, and with the rain slackened off I can see his face again. I tell him you’re not off the hook yet and he says yes I know, but he doesn’t sound as sad now. I say you still have a lot to answer for and he says I’m aware. But my SO doesn’t look so upset now, in fact they look more peaceful than I’ve seen for a long time, so I say I guess we’ll let you go for now and he says I’m relieved, and he sounds like he means it. And then he says that the rain will last until morning, and the next train comes in about an hour. I’ll leave some towels for you at the station. And then he says if you ever need to talk to me again, I’ll be here in Bug. It won’t be so hard to find me next time, I promise.

I have to support my SO on the walk back to the hotel, because even though we have a few hours of night left they’re pretty exhausted. They ask if I have another song in my head and I sing something by the same artist, I don’t sing as beautiful as I did the first one but it seems to soothe them and I resolve to look for lessons or something when we get home.

Noblink the hotel manager is at the desk now, though he doesn’t look irritated that we took his map. I let him know his map got soaked and he shrugs like he doesn’t care. I decide I kind of like someone who’s so laid back, even if he’s creepy. I tell him we’re checking out and heading home and he nods but doesn’t ask for money. When everything’s ready to go to the station, Noblink helps carry our bags the couple blocks it takes. It’s still raining, but we find some towels on the seats in the station and dry ourselves off before the train arrives. I try to give Noblink some money as a tip or for our room or something but he shakes his head.

Why does no one take money in this town? I ask, confused. He says what’s the point? Paper gets soaked real bad in the rain. He walks away and I think to myself, this town is weird but maybe I won’t be so mean to it anymore.

This time we’re really the only ones on the train. My SO’s head is lolling but before they drift off, I ask them what do you think of God? He seemed kind of disappointing to be honest. They wake up a little to answer my question and say, I think so too. I say I bet he doesn’t have the best singing voice, and my SO chuckles once and says I don’t think so either.

Then they fall silent, but they have an intense look on their face so I know the conversation’s not done. They say, you know all those times I said I had to go? I don’t think I’ll have to do that anymore. It hasn’t been working for a while now anyway. And they look at me, a little nervous, and say, if I ask you to sing again, will you do it for me? I say of course I will and I kiss them on the forehead because I love them and I’m so happy I can help them.

The train takes us back to our place easily and I sing one more time for my SO before they fall asleep at dawn.

Song lyrics by Indigo Girls. “Cedar Tree.” Epic Records, 1992.