Chapter Two Idle Hands, dir. by Rodman Flender
“You could just kill him,” Rose says from the kitchen, shuffling around in the cabinets until she lets out a satisfied “Aha!”
and pulls free the unopened bag of Cool Ranch Doritos.
“Keith or Michael?” Eli asks her, setting down the remote and picking up another still-warm brownie from the tin on the coffee
table.
After the disaster of the informal interview, he’d texted the group chat with Patricia and Rose, telling them to disregard
any and all celebrations they’d planned. Rose still stopped by the liquor store on her way home from the school where she
teaches, and Patricia set about making her weed brownies the moment she set her bag down at the front door, despite Eli’s
protests.
They even gave him the remote, begging him to throw on whatever movie he wanted, promising to sit through it without complaining.
He couldn’t even bring himself to pick from the digital catalog on his TV; he ended up throwing on cycle six of Top Model to have something to focus on.
A pitiful way to end a pitiful day, as far as Eli is concerned.
“Why not both?” Rose prompts, crunching loudly.
“I’ll help you hide the body,” Patricia offers, her focus shifting toward the television as one of the contestants burns their
caramel sauce. “My cringe true-crime podcast phase has to pay off somehow.”
“You have a spare woodchipper?” Eli asks, resting his head on the pillow in her lap.
“No, but I know a guy.” Her hands find his hair, slowly playing with the curls. Her long nails just barely scratch at his scalp, and he’s convinced he could fall asleep.
He feels that specific combination of being so light yet so heavy at the same time that comes with eating the cannabis butter
that Patricia bakes with. He almost wishes that he’d stayed sober, preferring to avoid any substances Sunday through Thursday,
but tonight called for it.
That, and he can never turn down Patricia’s brownies. And it helps that she packs them with enough chocolate to avoid the
nasty weed taste edibles tend to have.
“What if you deleted the other guy’s application?” Patricia asks, taking a sip of her beer. “You have access to Michael’s
emails. And he never remembers a thing.”
“He’s expecting it. Besides, his friend will just check in.”
“I’m sorry, babe...” Rose flops onto the other end of the couch, taking just enough time to lift Eli’s legs before she
plants them on her own lap.
“It’s fine!” he tells himself. Two words he’s been repeating for hours now. “I shouldn’t have expected anything.”
He should be grateful for what he has.
But there’s still that emptiness he feels. Like he’s fallen behind. He’s twenty-eight, he hates the job he’s stuck at, and
there’s no possibility of moving upward. He’s buried under a mountain of student debt that only seems to grow larger the more
of it he pays off. He has zero prospects beyond his writing, and thus far that’s gotten him nowhere. And the only person to
ever break his heart works twenty feet away from him.
Maybe it’s the weed, and maybe that’s enough of a reason for Eli to swear off substances while his heart is still healing.
Eli knows all too well what it’s like to miss Keith.
The smell of Keith’s shampoo on his pillows, that lingering scent of Keith’s cologne on the clothes that Eli stole.
Early morning walks down to Amoeba Music where Keith would spend too much money on records and Eli would spend too much on Vinegar Syndrome Blu-rays.
They’d get a coffee at the café nearby and walk the length of the Panhandle, stopping at the playground if it was empty and just swinging next to one another.
From the moment he laid eyes on Keith, Eli knew he was the person he wanted to spend the rest of his life with. Which was
hilarious given that their relationship began with an argument.
It wasn’t anything dramatic— Eli and Patricia had accepted an invitation to one of their friends’ parties, and Eli just so
happened to overhear Keith say Mad Max: Fury Road was “overrated and boring.”
Eli couldn’t keep his mouth shut and spent the following hour explaining how it’s a perfect movie from beginning to end: the
acting, the directing, the sets and locations, the cinematography and color choices, the costuming, the action sequences and
stunts.
Apparently, it only took three shots for Eli to decide that he had to defend George Miller with his life.
Keith just stood there, his mouth painted in this confused expression that transformed into a smile over the next sixty minutes,
like he couldn’t believe this guy was lecturing him about a movie.
And when Eli was done, slightly out of breath and more than a little heated, Keith asked a simple question.
“Do you want to get out of here?”
He could feel it, at that very moment: Keith was the man he was destined to spend the rest of his life with. There was just
a... a something about the moment, he couldn’t explain it, not even really to himself.
Keith defined it as best he could, though.
When Eli woke up next to him in the mornings, Keith was still asleep, his eyes closed, soft snores slipping past his lips.
Or on lazy Saturday afternoons when Eli made dinner while Keith did his crossword puzzles.
Or those bus rides in the morning when Eli was still half asleep, laying his head on Keith’s shoulder and breathing in his citrus smell.
That was before things became... not bad, but indifferent. When Eli could feel that there was something gone from their
relationship. What was worse was that it wasn’t a fight or an argument—no one burned dinner, their jobs didn’t interfere,
no one cheated.
Nothing happened.
It was just the slow, gradual death of a relationship, neither one of them admitting that there was a problem until Keith
mercifully ended things.
It was one thing to feel so deeply for someone that it hurt to think about them, to have feelings that were so impossible
to explain. But to have had that love, to have felt the connection with another person, to have accepted what they had to offer and to give back what
you had, only for them to decide that you were no longer worth it.
That bled worse than any wound.
And now there’s just this dull ache. A discomfort.
Eli despises how much his heart still lingers there with Keith, and he hates himself for just how much it still bothers him.
“How long does it take to get over a person?” Eli dares to ask.
“I think it’s supposed to be like double the length of the relationship,” Rose says, digging further into the chip bag, leaving
her fingers coated in fine Cool Ranch dust.
Eli feels his stomach twist.
“Really?” Patricia sounds confused. “I thought it was half?”
“Is it?” Rose asks. “No, no, I think it’s double. So, what’s that, Eli? Fourteen years?”
“I meant for the two of you,” he clarifies. “Like how long did it take the two of you to get over your past relationships?”
“Two months, two weeks, and three days. It was a Friday; or, technically, a Saturday morning, one thirty a.m.”
Eli and Patricia both stare at her.
“You know it to the hour?” Patricia asks.
Rose nods. “It was ladies’ night at Kelly’s. I met this girl, we were talking. Turns out Alecia had cheated on her too, so we hooked up in the bathroom.”
Patricia nods her head in respect. “Huh... Was it good?”
“Not really,” Rose says. “I mean the sex was; we met up later that week too. But the floor was sticky. She was hot, though.”
She steals Patricia’s beer. “But my example is an isolated incident. You can’t really predict when you’re over someone, Eli. You just kind of... get there.”
“But how ?”
“Well, meeting someone else does wonders for you,” Patricia adds, sprinkling a little salt on the wound. Eli can’t roll his
eyes fast enough. “Don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“Roll your eyes. You haven’t gone out with us in months, let alone on a date with someone.”
He huffs. “I haven’t felt like it.” He hasn’t felt like much lately.
“But you’ve felt like going to the theater down the street to watch some weird black-and-white Swedish movies from the fifties?”
Patricia gives Eli a look that’s supposed to make Eli feel ashamed, but that sounds like a perfect night to him.
Eli turns defensive. “I only have four more Bergman movies to watch before I’ve seen all of them in my Criterion set.”
“God... That is the saddest thing I’ve ever heard.” Patricia sighs, finally pushing Eli off her lap to walk to the kitchen
and grab another beer since Rose had snatched hers. “The point is that, like Rose said, it’s different for everyone. And you’re
not going to get over these feelings just sitting alone and doing nothing all day except going to a job you hate and watching
movies a hundred years older than you.”
“But I like staying inside and watching movies,” he says. “And the job is... the job is the job. There’s nothing I can do about that.”
Patricia stops her sip short. “We’re not even going to touch on Vent right now.”
“You could at least try to date. It seems like all the guys you showed us were perfectly fine,” Rose says. “But you always found some imaginary problem
with them.”
“I don’t want to date,” Eli tells them both. “I’m done with that part of my life.”
“You’re twenty-eight,” Patricia reminds him. “Stop being so dramatic.”
“I had my soulmate,” Eli says, his words slurring softly. “And he broke up with me. So, it’s done. I’m done. No more guys
for ol’ Eli.”
“Jesus.” Patricia throws her head back. “You’re far too young to be so jaded about love, Eli.”
“Doesn’t matter. It’s my choice.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Eli can see Patricia’s and Rose’s eyes meet from across the apartment. Patricia crosses the
living room in just a few strides, walking back over to where Eli rested his head, nudging him to sit up straight, but he
doesn’t budge.
“What?”
“I want to sit here and your head is in the way,” she says, trying to take the arm of the couch.