Fade Into You

Short Stories

Dear Friends,

I’m sharing a short story called ‘Fade Into You’ from A Songbook — each story is tied to a particular piece of music. This one is a little more emo than what I usually post.

At the partner site

Inner Life

,

Joshua Doležal

reflects on Montana and nostalgia.

Lyle McKeany

talks to his past self.

Best,

Sam

FADE INTO YOU

Several nights the same thing.

Found himself stingingly awake at 2 in the morning. Angry at himself — not just at himself, all the usual recriminations, his decisions, etc, angry at the deep structure of himself, the part of him that insisted on springing awake at two in the morning, primed for something or other, not realizing that there was nothing at all to do, everything was past.

It wasn’t exactly that he was completely alone with this. They texted frequently. She wanted to be friends. Justin felt that there could be no possible worse insult.

But he replied to her messages. Went, as it were, lurching from one crisis of hers to the next one. And, in there, among the money problems and the family problems and the hypochondria problems there were, inconspicuously at first, the Noam problems, the little ways in which Noam was being a jerk and, sorry to ask, but it really would be nice to have a guy’s advice on this.

And what could he do — he did want to hear it, actually, wanted to know about Noam’s jerkiness. Wanted also to be there for Lydia as she parsed it out, understood who her prince really was. Yes, speaking as a guy, it was not a great sign that he hadn’t gotten a divorce yet. Yes, speaking as a guy, it wasn’t ideal that he had exploded into a rage when she had just suggested that they might one day have a checking account together.

But not his business. That was the cruel word of the hour. That chill, cas word, the kind of thing he used to say all the time. All the things that used to be his business, that now no longer were. Another complaint for his pillow.

What his life seemed to be. Hard to believe that it was. But what, exactly, was supposed to relieve this?

“I think you need to forget me,” Lydia had said sorrowfully at one point. They had been talking on the phone, late night, when she was still in her own place. She had said it really tragically, like this was the word they were both dreading and then it was whispered spoken and that was the verdict – five years together, the songs they made together, the plans. Forget it.

Which sounded like the cruelest kind of closure except, actually, that there was nothing to it. She continued texting. They continued talking, from time to time. What did forgetting mean in any case? He’d never heard a clear answer to that.

She was his counselor in other ways too. “I think you should start seeing someone else,” she’d said at the end of the forget me conversation. Yes, that was the way – Lydia was, beneath everything else, pragmatic. She knew that all this talk about feminine mystery, feminine beauty, the endless self-cultivation, the endless riddles, that, at the end of the day, they were interchangeable. He’d meet somebody else with willowy long hair, an eager smile, some knowledge of the arts. He'd forget all about her.

But, really, with all due respect, he didn’t need his ex to tell him that he could look for new tail. And it was there – hard work always, but it was there. Girls exactly how Lydia had advertised them. Girls from different countries, with complicated back stories, with ambitions just as wild as Lydia’s own. What a wide world of pussy it really was.

He texted with some of these girls too. Texted dirty. Texted him asking all sorts of things — what was he thinking about, what was he reading, what was his week like, what was he passionate about, and he wrote back, chatted. These conversations had ways of mazing out, spiraling on and on, and he was spending far more of his time than he would have liked lying in bed waiting for a text message alert on his phone. Goofed around online of course. Played music. It was just YouTube algorithm, bounced around — seemed to intuit his mood, gave him sad sack music by bands he thought he didn’t like. Wicked Game by Chris Isaak, who’d once had a reality show — that was a good one. That summed up a lot of his mood at that time. Fade Into You — that was a masterpiece of the algorithm. He lay on his bed with his pants down, involved in his dirty talk with the girls he was messaging — it was the phase when sexting was still possible; that had run its course so quickly with Lydia — waited for the dots on his phone to formulate themselves into descriptions of how they were easing their jeans off their hips, of how they were running their fingertips oh so gently over their clits and the music on his laptop circled through its familiar cycles, Chris Isaak, Aimee Mann, Natalie Merchant, Mazzy Star. Fade into you I think it’s strange you never do.

Yeah, a strange thing, out of the all the possibilities there were in life — all the women — that it was a song like this got to him, that looped through his system over and over again. A strange thing, but not worth asking too many questions about that — that was like asking why all the songs were love songs.

***

He and Lydia had a big fight around this time. She told him that Noam was jealous of her texting him and checked her texts sometimes. She wanted to switch to Signal like it was a military operation — or maybe Snapchat, so the conversations would delete. He told her absolutely not, no way, if she was ashamed of him then it was better that they not talk at all.

“You don’t mean that,” she said.

“I do. You can’t sneak around on Noam and talk to me,” he said. “You have to choose.”

And finis. His phone with the sound off, on his bed, her messages rattling through. His determination not to reply to a single one. She wasn’t ready for an ultimatum, would talk forever to put that off. If it did come to that, he didn’t like what the result would be.

Stayed up late again, the stinging part of his brain keeping him up. There was nothing to do. He wasn’t going to block her; that was tacky. But he was going to ice her. He’d made his point and was going to stick to it, however much she tried to negotiate with him.

Scrolled through his phone. Texted with the girls he was texting with, as one by one they fell asleep. Browsed the web. Played his games. Let the algorithm do its thing — found himself back with his familiar songs. Fade into you I think it’s strange that you never do.

He had no idea how all this worked; as far as he could tell no one did either. It wasn’t like he was a better person than Lydia or anything. (Although, to be fair, a better person than Noam.) Had no idea why he got this and she didn’t. Or, to put it more precisely, why he was stuck with this and she wasn’t. All her talk about closure, forgetting, moving on. The new apartments, new men, new life. Healthy talk, reasonable talk. And him on the pillow, fade into you over and over again, what he wanted more than anything, would always want.