Commander Venus, or, The Lorax (2007)

The day that I found out, I put on a Commander Venus album and danced about the house, jumping up and down on the couches and knocking over all the garden statues. Your brother came over and scolded me, telling me I should be more upset.

"You're not crying, either" I said, skipping across the kitchen floor to "Showcase Showdown".

"Yeah, but that's different. I'm just not crying. You're dancing around to Commander Venus like nothing even happened."

"I like Commander Venus," I said. "They were a good band, especially considering how young they were. And almost all of them went on to front successful bands."

"That's not the point and you know it. Now turn this weird shit off and cry or something, you're making me feel weird."

"Would you rather I turned on Tilly and the Wall instead?"

"You're hopeless. I'm going home."

His eyes hadn't even been moist, the damned hypocrite. Besides, I didn't see what the big deal was. You had wanted to be dead, and now you were. When I spoke to Dustin later on the phone, he told me that when your car had hit the tree, he didn't hear the scream of the engine folding in on itself or the shattering glass of the windshield, just one line of the song that you were listening to at the time. Soon I will follow. Don't say shit like that, I said, it freaks me out. At which point he had called me a fucking poser and hung up on me. I didn't see what he was all bent out of shape about. I lay in bed and tried to think about who you had been on Earth, but all I could conjure up was a rather small boy, usually wearing a large hooded jacket, who liked video games and authors who had been so cool for so long that they were really quite the opposite now.

I read that it was raining in Seattle, and a cliché frost fell over the bleak Midwest on the day of your funeral, making the high school football fields look as if they went on forever. Outside of the church I smoked a cigarette to look cool and stared into the frozen, hungry eyes of a statue of a girl with an animal's body. Your brother came and put his arms around me, the bones and meager triceps squishing into my parka and making me warm.

"I'm sorry, Vikki. About yesterday, I mean. I shouldn't have said the things I did."

"You didn't say anything."

He pulled away from me and sat down slowly on the marble bench as if he were old. He sighed, pulling the hood of his jacket up over his head. "Vikki, talk to me. Please. This can't possibly be the full extent of our reaction."

My eyes glazed over then, not with tears but rather with the visions of the story that I, oh, that we, were a part of. I could see the toy rockets hurdling reckless to the ground, marigolds and sunlight mean and blinding in the summer. And I could see us, you and I, my friend, while you were here still, having parties at your house that only the two of us came to. This was Iowa and no one understood us as far as we were concerned, and so on Fridays and Saturdays as our classmates all met up in supermarket parking lots to go drink out of kegs, you and I would stay up in your bedroom and dance to our favorite bands. We could go all night, sometimes, and on into the morning, your little beige house at the end of that cul-de-sac shaking with the sound. We rarely even bothered to take our goddamn parkas off.

So what was I supposed to do now, I wondered? There was a whole wide world out there full of people who might understand me perfectly, and I wasn't particularly excited about meeting them because that would mean admitting that I wasn't special or original after all. I preferred the coddling, familiar alienation of the little town I'd been complaining about having to live in for as long as I could remember.

But I would go away, I decided, become a traveler, riding the interstate buses. I would ride until I came to that cemetery in Missouri, and then I would lay down with my ancestors and sleep. Not forever, but for a while, maybe. I won't expect it to make me sad, but it will. That and the vague recollection of a story I read in grade school; something about a boy with no name who's only friend had died in a car crash. She had promised to find him a name, but she never got the chance. It was the saddest thing that I had ever read.

And the word "mine", and the fact that certain places only exist anymore inside of certain people's memories. And the realization that the act of one person missing another is, perhaps, at once the most lovely and the most painful aspect of the human condition. Except for now it just felt like being kicked in the stomach; nothing less and nothing more, either.

"I'm sorry, Dustin" I said finally to him. "I just don't know what to say. I hope you're okay, though. I think you're going to be okay."

I knew that this was where we were supposed to have some sort of breakdown; where we finally realized the stark reality, the tragedy of all of this and cried on one another's shoulders, Dustin and me. But this isn't a fucking indie-movie, sorry. He and I had never cared for one another much, if you want to know the truth. Besides, I liked my emotion ready-made and packaged fresh in Nebraska, wrapped in clumsy metaphors and delivered to me via my stereo at a frequency at which I could revel in its depths but never really had to get my hands all gross and dirty with it. Anything else would have been just too weird.

But I read your favorite book aloud at the service, at least. I am the Lorax, I said, I speak for the trees. They fall and fall and fall until there isn't one left, no not one. And oh, for the tears that I wished to feel running down my face like hot tea with lemon and honey, making feeling curl up inside of me and trickle out, a fast school bus in a movie that we watched in kindergarten.

For days afterward, Commander Venus was playing in my head. Fine disaster. Fine disaster. Fine disaster.