Same Drink
By Craig Kelly
The bleak bridge had not changed.
He had.
He sat in his car near the go-kart track on Production Way, watching the wind worry a loose plastic flag against a fence. He and Sasha used to walk the perimeter collecting cans and bottles for the deposits.
They made a game of it, competing to fill their bag first, arguing over whether a crushed can counted. Once, Sasha held up a half-full bottle of orange pop like a trophy.
Look at us, she'd said. Living the dream.
He remembered her laugh. He couldn't remember what he'd said back.
That was how their life together survived in his memory now: the sound of laughter without the joke, the shape of a room after the furniture was gone.
Since the divorce, he'd tried to find the precise moment their life had come apart. An argument. A sentence. Some small, identifiable failure he could pick up and examine. Instead, there were only the empty closet, her mug in the cupboard, and a pale rectangle on the wall where a photograph had hung.
On the passenger seat sat a plastic bag containing a thin blanket and a bottle of Captain Morgan.
He switched off the engine.
The route beneath the bridge returned to him in pieces. Thorn bushes caught at his jacket. The wire fence beside the auto-body shop had been bent back for so long that it might as well have been a gate. His feet found the gap without help from his memory.
Traffic rolled overhead. Every few seconds, a truck struck the expansion joint and sent a metallic shudder through the concrete.
At twenty, he had died here.
Not figuratively. His heart had stopped after an overdose. Someone brought him back. He had spent years trying to decide what that meant. Some days he called it luck. Other days he felt like a clerical error, a life returned to the wrong address.
He had survived. He had built something resembling a life. He had loved someone, lost her, and found himself driving back to the place where he'd once believed there was nowhere left to go.
He told himself he had come to remember where he started.
He didn't even know if he was lying to himself or not.
The shelter stood between two pillars, assembled from pallets, flattened cardboard and plastic sheeting. A shopping cart leaned on its side. The workmanship was familiar, a little ingenuity, a lot of desperation, and the hope that the rain would find somewhere else to fall.
He stopped.
A young man emerged from behind the plastic. Early twenties, perhaps. His jacket was too thin. He rubbed his hands together, then let them hang at his sides. One shoulder sat higher than the other. His chin dipped as he studied the stranger, his eyes flicking toward the slope before returning to the man's face.
The older man knew that posture.
He'd worn it himself.
"You lost?" the kid asked.
"Probably."
"Then you're in the right place."
The older man almost smiled. The way the kid delivered the line could have belonged to him.
"Fair enough."
The kid looked over his coat, his shoes, the plastic bag.
"What do you want?"
"Nothing."
"People don't usually come down here for nothing."
"Maybe I'm not usual."
"Sounds about right."
They watched each other. The older man nodded toward the shelter.
"I used to stay here."
The kid's expression changed by a fraction.
"Yeah?"
"Years ago."
"Like minded.
"
He looked at the ground.
"Me and my wife..." He caught himself
Well... ex wife Sasha."
The name seemed to hang there, too personal for the place.
The kid waited for more, but the older man had nothing he wanted to explain to a stranger.
Not the years of trying, the promises made when they had nothing, or the strange fact that two people could survive sleeping under a bridge together and still fail to survive living in a home.
The kid let it go.
The older man pulled two twenty-dollar bills from his wallet.
"Get yourself something to eat."
"I didn't ask you for money."
"I know."
"I can look after myself."
"I figured."
The kid stared at the bills. Eventually, the kid took the money.
"There's a store up the road."
"Good."
The kid tucked the bills into his jacket. He glanced at the bag again.
"You staying here?"
"Just visiting."
"Right." He started toward the slope, then looked back. "I'll be a bit."
The older man assumed that meant goodbye.
When the footsteps disappeared, he took out the blanket and spread it over a piece of cardboard. He smoothed the corners, though there was no reason to. Then he sat against the pillar and set the rum beside him.
The concrete was colder than he remembered.
He took a drink.
The taste brought back nights he hadn't thought about in years: cold hands, poor sleep, the arithmetic of deciding whether the last few dollars went to food or something that made the hours until morning easier to endure.
He'd once believed drinking made him less alone. Later, he'd learned it only made loneliness easier to sit with.
He took another drink.
The kid kept coming to mind. Not his face, exactly, but the way he'd stood. The defensive humour. The look that said he'd rather be thought rude than vulnerable.
He remembered being twenty and despising anyone who tried to help him. He wanted someone to tell him he wasn't a lost cause, but if anyone came close to saying it, he'd find a reason to hate them.
He wanted help without the humiliation of needing it. He wanted to be understood without having to explain himself.
Mostly, he wanted someone to notice there was still a person underneath everything he'd done to survive.
He wondered whether the kid wanted the same thing.
A truck hit the joint overhead. Dust sifted from the concrete.
He thought of Sasha beside him in the cold, rubbing her hands and insisting they'd figure something out. He'd believed her because he needed to.
Maybe she'd believed herself.
He couldn't decide whether their promises had been lies or whether they'd been true for as long as they were able to keep them.
He leaned his head against the pillar and closed his eyes.
He wasn't sure how long he sat there before footsteps came down the slope.
"You're still here."
The kid stood a few feet away, holding a white pizza box.
"Looks that way," the older man said.
"I thought you were passing through."
"I was."
"So what happened?"
"Didn't feel like leaving yet."
The kid looked at the blanket, then at the man, as though he were trying to work out what kind of person deliberately returned to a place like this. He lowered himself onto the edge of the cardboard and opened the box.
"Why the hell would you come back here?"
The older man watched him separate a slice. The cheese bad already begun to stiffen.
"Had a lot of good memories."
The kid looked at him.
"Okay," the older man admitted. "Not a lot."
The kid laughed, a short, rough burst that seemed to surprise him. The older man laughed too. "Tm serious," the kid said.
"Why come back?"
"I spent a long time trying to get away from who I was here. Thought if I got my life together. I'd never have to think about this place again."
He looked around at the shelter.
"Turns out you don't leave everything behind just because you change your address."
The kid chewed and nodded.
"Sounds about right."
"I guess I wanted to remember where I came from."
The kid reached behind a pallet and produced a small bottle of Captain Morgan. The label was scuffed. and there was only a little left. He set it beside the older man's bottle.
"Captain?" the older man asked.
"It's what I had."
"Yeah," he said. "Me too."
They looked at the two bottles.
The older man had bought his deliberately. The kid had arrived with the same thing.
He couldn't stop looking.
They ate the pizza. It was cheap and lukewarm, the kind of food that was barely worth buying when you had options. The kid ate quickly. They talked about the weather, the traffic, the city spending money to move homeless people from one place to another.
"Government's good at making a problem look like it went somewhere else," the older man said.
The kid grinned. "Guess I'm somewhere else now."
The joke fell between them and stayed there.
"You got anybody?" the older man asked.
"Not really."
"Family?"
"Some."
It was an answer the older man had given himself once. Some family.
Some friends. Some people who might answer a call if the hour was right and the circumstances weren't too complicated. They drank a little more. The kid told him he was thinking of leaving, though he didn't say where he might go.
He spoke about the future as though it were a rumour he hadn't decided to believe.
At last, he asked, "Did you get out?"
The older man turned to him.
"Out of here," the kid said. "Did you actually get your life together?"
He could have said yes. He could have talked about the years he'd worked, the home he'd had, the distance between the man under the bridge and the man sitting there now.
But the kid wasn't asking about work or an address. He was asking whether the pain stopped. Whether a person could get far enough from the worst years of his life to become somebody else.
"Yeah," the older man said. "I got out."
The kid studied him.
"Then why are you here?"
The older man looked at the rum in his hand. He thought of the empty apartment, the photograph, the side of the bed that was no longer hers. He thought of how he'd driven here carrying a blanket and a bottle, as though he could recreate an old night and finally understand it.
"Because sometimes," he said, "getting out doesn't mean you never end up lost again."
The kid gave a small nod.
"That's pretty fucked up.
"
"Yeah."
"Seems like a lot of work, getting out, just to end up back here."
The older man laughed despite himself.
"Tell me about it."
The kid laughed too. Then he tilted his head, studying the older man's face.
"You look familiar."
The older man went still.
"Do I?"
"Not your face, exactly." The kid frowned, searching for the words. "I don't know. Something."
The older man looked down at his hands. A pale scar crossed one knuckle. He couldn't remember where he'd got it.
The kid had a scar in almost the same place.
"Funny," the older man said.
"What?"
"Nothing."
The kid smiled. "You're doing that thing where you say nothing but look like something."
The older man stared at him.
It was his own line. He'd said it to Sasha once, years ago. Or he'd said it to someone else. "Maybe you're old enough to see things that aren't there," the kid said.
"Could be."
For a while, neither spoke. Traffic passed overhead. The two bottles stood side by side, their labels turned toward the dark.
The kid's head began to droop. He rubbed his face with both hands.
"You all right?" the older man asked.
"Yeah."
The answer came too quickly.
The kid tried to stand. His knees buckled, and he dropped back against the pillar. The colour drained from his face.
"Hey."
"I'm fine."
But his breathing had changed. He stared at his hands, confused by them.
The older man knew that look. He had seen it in himself, in the awful moment when your body stops feeling like something you own and becomes a room where something has gone wrong.
He didn't know what the kid had taken, or whether he'd taken anything at all. He knew only that the kid was in trouble.
"Look at me."
The kid didn't.
"Hey. Look at me."
When the kid raised his head, the older man saw fear without its usual disguise. For one impossible second, it was like looking at a photograph of himself at twenty, taken moments before everything went dark.
He could leave. He could tell himself the kid had made his own choices. He could climb the slope, get in his car and return to an empty apartment. He had come here with nothing he could name as a reason to keep going.
The thought of walking away arrived with a calm that frightened him more than the kid's condition.
Maybe he'd come back to see whether he still cared what happened to the person he'd been.
The kid swayed.
The older man caught him by the shoulder.
"Stay with me."
He reached for his phone and called emergency services. His hands shook as he tried to explain the location. He gave the bridge, the road, the landmarks he remembered. He followed the dispatcher's instructions, repeating them when the traffic made it hard to hear.
The kid's eyes opened halfway.
"What's your name?" the older man asked.
The kid's lips moved.
He leaned closer, but couldn't make out the answer.
"Again," he said. "Tell me again."
Nothing.
He held the kid's hand and kept talking. He didn't need to know whether the kid was a stranger, a ghost, or simply a young man whose life had turned too much like his own.
"I got out," he whispered. "You hear me? I got out."
The words sounded useless beneath the bridge. The kid's fingers shifted against his.
Above them, the traffic rolled on. The rum lay on its side beside the blanket. The older man stayed on the phone, watching the kid's face, afraid that if he looked away the years would close over them both.
He had thought he came here to remember where he'd started. Perhaps he had.
Perhaps he'd come to find the person he had abandoned, the boy who'd been returned to the world without knowing what to do with the second chance.
He couldn't change what had happened then.
He could choose what happened now.
When the sirens finally rose above the traffic, the older man tightened his grip on the kid's hand.
He didn't ask whether the kid was real.
He stayed until help arrived.
And when the paramedic asked him to step back, he did, but he did not leave.
End.
