Meet Ethan

            It is late, not so late that it’s early, but to be specific, it is just past midnight, and held in front of Ethan is a heavily marked-up and thumbed-through printout of Engel v. Vitale.  He’d been studying it relentlessly like some sort of manic gambler, scanning over a losing scratch ticket trying to square the circle and will the numbers into a winning alignment, but so far, he had no luck, and there’s been no luck for a while now.

There had been an incident during movie night a number of weeks back.  As some sort of symbolic gesture, Ethan had begun to quietly boycott the Discord server until late one evening, when he gave it the dreaded French exit altogether.  October had come and gone before anyone had noticed his departure, and when someone did, theories were debated for all of an hour before it slipped from the server zeitgeist; there were far more important things to tend to, for instance, the upcoming 25 Days of Christmas that would return to Hallmark Channel movies, something Ethan detested terribly the first go around for reasons similar to the incident.

. . .

He’s had a few too many tonight, and his buzz is wearing off, replaced by a dull throbbing ache just above his brow and right below the base of his stylish undercut.  Infrequent as drinking was before twenty-one, he had done a relatively incredible amount compared to his peers, including Levi (who had been known to drink like a fish), and now of age to legally purchase alcohol,  Ethan certainly had a penchant for overindulging in the stuff, and the comedown was a feeling he’d never gotten used to.  Dark liquor had been removed entirely from the cabinets on account of it seemed to leave him the most hungover.  While champagne did a similar amount of damage, it was kept on hand for the ball drop on New Year’s or other celebratory dates.  Otherwise, it was seldom imbibed.  IPA was his weapon of choice; a perfect concoction of zesty flavorfulness and a resinous bite!  In fact, an age-old cherished Ethan dictum for each can he cracked open was, ‘a good day to IPA’.  Had you lived above or below him, you would hear this Ethanism in successive order following the hissing pop of a can, again and again, late into the night

On either side of the desk where Ethan is seated, there’s nearly a dozen empty cans of Lagunitas IPA, all of them crushed at the center, a habit he’d picked up from Clint, with whom he’d spent last summer delivering for FedEx.  Clint spent much of the time loudly gloating that drunk driving was a skill that one could master, and it was seemingly true; he had not been (directly) involved in any car accidents.  Ethan would sit on the collapsible passenger seat in the truck and watch Clint slam beers, talk about beating up gay black Jewish guys, and pitch cans into the street.  It turns out, according to Clint, it makes the cans easier to huck from a moving vehicle when it’s crunched up; otherwise, he’d say, ‘the wind catches it, or some shit’.  There was a magnanimity to Clint, an older, blue-collar, no-nonsense guy willing to take in a young fella like himself, and Ethan saw something he could maybe cling onto, a sort of role model.  And so, the two of them would deliver packages, Clint driving and Ethan running the boxes all summer, stopping only at West Side Beverage for another case of Lagunitas or Stone IPA, maybe a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos, but the boys both got sleepy after a meal, so their diets were mostly liquid during working hours.

However, because Ethan was subcontracted out by Clint, FedEx strictly enforced that he not drive.  And while Ethan would daydream about how cool it would look to drive the FedEx truck while intoxicated around the neighborhood, he would have to practice drunk driving on his own time, which he did.  Before he could surprise Clint with how good he’d gotten behind the wheel after having a few too many, fate would have other plans.

Only days before, there had been fevered conversation about getting an apartment, somewhere in town and overlooking the bay, and they searched Zillow together with laudable zeal.  With Ethan’s post-ironic eye for design and vast collection of video game figurines, Clint figured a woman would sooner euthanize herself than miss out on a pad like this.  And, sure, maybe it would be good to have a nice lady around to clean up the beer cans, but the companionship of Clint is what he truly pined for.  By the end of summer, their interactions throughout the workweek began to feel fleeting, and the occasional interactions on Discord were distracted by everyone else’s presence.  This sort of evanescent tide of friendship was becoming unsatisfying, where Ethan’s life was reduced to a binary state: waiting for Clint and talking to Clint.

Even before the incident on Discord, Ethan had grown distant, attending movie night with a particular absent-mindedness on evenings when Clint had other plans, but showing immediate engagement the second Clint had joined the call, laughing extra hard and glazing all of his takes.  He shouldn’t know it, as very few of us can truly be aware of our own conditions, and I mean truly aware, with a surgical acuteness, the sort of pensive temperament found in a suicidal, but he was stricken deeply with a platonic limerence.  Clint abruptly moved away to the big city without so much as a ‘smell you later’.  Ethan was crushed.

He sets the document down and takes the final swig out of a can he’d been nursing and swallows it with an audible gulp.  In his hand, the can feels almost weightless, like a feather.  Funny how that works; when the beer is still at the store and not yet paid for, when the cans are still filled and sealed tight, they have weight, and the many of them together have an immense weight, so much so that he needs help getting a twelve-pack into his trunk, but when they are pulled apart and drank, their form is reduced to something he can crush.  His dizzy eyes look at the empty can but struggle to focus on it for very long; instead, they begin to wander around the room and to the front door.  An incipient, dangerous thought occurs to him, and his head rolls back and then forward again, snapping back to the can, squeezing it tightly and folding the aluminum walls in.

Someone he can crush.