Suicide's Girlfriend by Elizabeth Evans

cracks of upholstery.
    With a jerk, Crocker stops at a car wash and in its gloomy parking lot he vacuums the seats, the carpet. He stomps his feet on the creaking snow and vacuums himself, too.
    His wife would never in a million years guess that he might stop (stoop) to eat these pastries. What does his wife know about him, after all? She pays close attention to the child, a beauty of two with blond curls and every movement a dance, and for this Crocker is happy; but he also sometimes feels that he should have killed himself or entered the Peace Corps while there was still a chance, back when particular people did not need him quite so much.
    As Crocker left the house this morning, his wife sounded both weepy and peremptory. “You come home right after you run tonight!”
    (Around and around the dirt floors beneath the high school, alone in that panicky miners’ dark, the ceiling lit only here and there with incandescents. He might have been on the lam in a future, subterranean world, running from something inexorable in its hunger.)
    Mr. Fitness, his wife calls him, and it is true, even in high school, back in the days when no one ran except members of track teams, Crocker put on his grays, regularly, and ran to a neighboring burg, a round trip of fifteen miles. Other kids drove past, some kicking up slush and laughing, but most rooting on what he knew they considered bizarre behavior. In college, he kept at it even during that period when he wore hair so long it cupped at his shoulders and he resembled Buster Brown. He cut weight for the wrestling team while windowpane acid and his very own brain caused the fishnet hung from his ceiling to cast an entirely new order of shadow over the world. Somewhere in the duplex he shares with wife and son, there exists a maple rung from a dorm room chair that is pocked with the teeth marks of his former zeal. His wife believes the thing a memento of a favorite dog, but many people from Crocker’s past have offered up for the delectation of more recent acquaintances a tale of a crazy, starving wrestler who paced dormitory halls, chewing on a piece of wood and spitting into a paper cup.
    In three days, Crocker will be thirty-nine years old.
    He no longer dreams the dreams he could share with everyone he knew, dreams in which he must take a test in a class he never attended, or perform in a play for which he has not learned the lines. Worse, he now wakes terrified, sweating, and longs to cry out like his little son: Daddy! Mommy! The other night, his son awoke crying just this, and—not yet aroused by his own terrors, still half-asleep, terrified—Crocker sat up in bed, heart drumming for that cry in the distance. With hallucinogenic clarity, bare planets—rocks—hurtled through space, and Crocker was out there with them, and he knew as if he were God: There are no mothers and fathers.
    â€œDaddy, Dad!” the child cried again.
    And then Crocker settled back into his soul, became a father once more, took shape as if called into being by desire.

    Beneath the driver’s seat lies a fuzzed and sticky can-opener. Crocker nudges the repellent thing farther into the dark with the car wash vacuum, unaware that the opener pushes his missing chrome pen, too; the pen edges beneath a newspaper Crocker once saved. The newspaper features an article on one of Crocker’s Vietnamese students and her family. The article tells, among other things, how Dep was forced to watch her mother and a younger sister be raped, thrown into the sea, devoured by sharks.
    Why he saved the article Crocker no longer remembers. Some testament to the awful world? Or survival? A reminder that what private perversity invents to rack his own nights has no weight when poised beside the memories of others?
    Dep in class today—silent, silent, her conversational partner waiting—and then: “She my best friend, but I never forget her.”
    Crocker has abandoned the outmoded