Object at Infinity

I prayed to God for the first time yesterday.

Well, it was sort of like praying. It was me kneeling at the edge of my bed, my knees firm against the ground and my overgrown nails digging into my bed sheets. Jesus probably thought I was trying to kill him. I wonder if he’d listen more if I was friendlier. I’d always thought that adults like me were supposed to pray in more dignified places, like church, even if nobody told you those kinds of rules. I felt like a kid kneeling at the foot of my bed and looking up at my popcorn ceiling. I hated God for it because he was the easiest to blame.

***

“You think he misses us up there?” Sam spoke while turning to me, a crooked frown on her face as she held her ginger ale. 

“I really don’t know how you drink that crap,” I muttered, my hands tiring from me leaning on them for nearly the entire time we’d been at the funeral. “Also, it seems a little crude to be drinking ginger ale at a funeral.” I looked at Sam and spoke with the grimace that had painted my face for a week now.

“Crude? You’re crude for ignoring my question.” I sighed as Sam said that. Instead of replying, I looked down at her next to me. She looked strange in all black. It was unsettling enough that Ruben was dead, so I was secretly glad that Sam was still mostly herself. The black clothes were temporary. It sucked that the ginger ale was the constant part, but it was more than I could say for all the other mopey faces around the room that I wished I could punch in.

“You know what I like about this funeral?” I said to Sam. “Jeez, who’s being crude now?” She chuckled.

“The fact that I could go up to anyone and punch them square in the face and still get away with it because my best friend is dead. It’s the best excuse, really. The whole ‘excuse him, he’s going through a tough time’ bullshit. Thanks, Ruben. I get something out of this mess you put me in. Couldn’t even bother to mention me in that fucking suicide note of yours.” I wondered what I would’ve seen if I was in Sam’s shoes as I said that. It could only either be a cold, angry glare or one filled with melancholy. I hoped it was the former because I couldn’t stand making the same face as everyone else in the small church room at the time. I didn’t even want to see Sam get all gloomy about what I said, so I turned my head.

“I guess you’re right,” Sam sipped her drink from the green can clashing with the black and red embellishing the whole room, “but no good usually ever comes of something like this.”

“I think everyone knows that,” I sighed. I guess a pragmatic response was what I needed at the time. “He just… didn’t have the right. To mess around with our lives like that.” I flushed a little at that statement. “Sorry, I sound like a pussy.”

“Ugh,” Sam nudged me, “men are so hypocritical with that word.” I’ll admit she got me to chuckle with that.

Sam was dating some half-beaten, half-lidded guy named Carsen back then. He seriously always looked as if he was fighting back pain from always having sharp stones in his unnecessarily flamboyant combat boots, but I guess girls like Sam dig that kind of thing. Carsen had dropped Sam off at the funeral since he urgently had to “work” that day and couldn’t stay for it. I always called him her personal Uber driver— hell, his name started with the letters “car”— but I was the only one who found it comical.

Carsen owned a gray Ford Ranger which looked an awful lot like him with its boxy eyes and heavy look. I got in the backseat, agreeing to a ride because I had taken a bus to the funeral and now it was raining and it was just an easier way back. It was the first time I’d been in his car. Sam seemed to mold right into her passenger seat chair, the seat of the car set just to the way she liked it. She put her nearly empty ginger ale can in the cupholder, but Carsen quickly swiped it and gulped it down.

“Ruben hated ginger ale,” I said from the backseat, immediately regretting it. Things were messy between Ruben and Carsen and I knew it. It was foolish, really; they only pretended to be at war because Ruben and Sam had dated for nearly a year and a half and fighting over the girl would be the manly thing to do.

“Hm. I didn’t know,” Carsen said in that monotone of his. He might as well have said “well, he’s dead now, so who cares anymore, dipshit?”

I leaned back against the seat, wishing I could see Sam’s face when I said that. I hated that she wasn’t more angry about Carsen ditching the funeral. In my attempts to catch a glimpse of her face, hopeful it was a depressed expression, I noticed something on the dash in front of Sam’s seat. It was Sam’s name, written in silver metallic Sharpie on the wood. To top it off, she had drawn the “m” out to create a little heart with its tail. 

“Are you serious? That’s his idea of permanence? Get me some nail polish remover and that’s gone as soon as it came. Ugh.” Such thoughts flooded my mind upon seeing every imprint of Sam’s on his car. Her sunglasses that she hardly wore were probably inside the little holder on the ceiling of the car. I remember when she left them there prior to breaking up with Ruben. It was quite the fiasco to get them back.

“Hey. You think you could do me a favor?” Ruben had said, looking frazzled with his arm still poised in a position to continue knocking on the door even though I had opened it by his third knock. “Yeah, what?” I replied. He pulled out the white-framed glasses from his pocket. “Give these to Sam. Is she here right now?” Ruben said, talking quieter when he realized she might be inside. “Upstairs, yeah,” I said, noticing how he was wearing a v-neck tee in a color I had never seen him wear before. I expected him to turn and leave after that, but he pulled something else out of his pocket. “Um, it’s a bracelet. It was almost our 18 month anniversary, so I bought it. Don’t really wanna return it, so you can keep it. Maybe give it to her. Or just keep it for whoever,” he said.

“You should return it… it looks expensive,” I said cautiously, not wanting him to freak out even more.

“No, really… just take it.” Ruben put the box in my hands. He killed himself two days after that. Since then, the bracelet has been in a drawer in my room. I also hoarded the sunglasses for quite a while before I remembered to return them to Sam. If I knew they would be rotting in Carsen’s Ford for the rest of eternity (or at least until they inevitably broke up), maybe I wouldn’t have returned them.

I slumped back against the seat of the car. My nails were digging into the sides of my arms and I hadn’t realized it. I was strongly compelled to smash the windows in or hijack the vehicle and drive to somewhere in Kansas, but I guess no amount of grief could justify all that, so I settled for staring at the coarse black hair on the back of his head.

“You wanna stay?” He asked me, consistent with his habit of being as cryptic as possible with whatever he said. “Huh?” I looked outside and saw a standard apartment building and realized he was asking if I wanted to come inside with him and Sam. “Yeah, sure,” I stepped out.

Sam owned a small blue digital camera and, five years before then, she vowed to take a photo of herself every single day. She loosely held onto that promise, mostly following through on her good days. There were a bunch of photos with Ruben in them from when they were together, and some featuring me. I was glad to see the camera seemingly untouched on the shelf, though it was unsettling that it was in Ruben’s house in the first place.

But of course, that illusion didn’t stick around for long. Sam picked the camera right up and held it up so she and Carsen were in the shot. He didn’t smile, of course. Bastard. I never was one to have physical reactions to emotional things, but I felt my fists clench at that. I waited until he was in the next room to approach Sam about it.

“Really? This is a good day for you?” I said, my voice coming out more spitefully than I had intended.

Sam scoffed and set her camera down on her desk. “I don’t understand why you’re acting like I’m not bothered by all of this,” she said. Her black clothing was even more jarring here than in the church, like rivulets of ink spilling on a dreamlike watercolor painting. I shook my head, my hands fiddling with the insides of my pockets. 

“Are you? You seem the same as before. Maybe better.”

“What, am I supposed to apologize for that?” She was quick to reply. 

“At least you could act like you miss him,” I turned my head to look at some decoration to distract myself, but there was barely any. I recall fixating on potted plants or mini sculptures at Ruben’s house whenever he and Sam were fighting and I was caught in the middle of it.

“What the hell do you mean by act? Don’t you remember how much I missed him after we broke up?” Her tone took on that shrill timbre characteristic of her anger.

“You broke up with him,” I said almost bitterly, “you broke his damn heart, you know.” She gave me a look of regret that I couldn’t bear to see, so I looked away.

“Sure, I broke up with him. I’ve broken up with other guys who haven’t gone and killed themselves afterwards.”

I didn’t freeze at those words like I thought I might. I’d imagined this scene before, this supposedly cathartic exchange between Sam and I. They tended to be cliché little things ending with a mutual understanding of some sort. I guess I never accounted for the fact that maybe Sam didn’t have a festering sense of guilt about the whole thing the way I did.

“Are you trying to say it’s his fault?” I said. I don’t think I was visibly angry at that point. It was the wrong question to ask. Everyone knew it was nobody’s responsibility but Ruben’s in the end.

“Are you trying to say it’s my fault?” Sam quipped back.

“You know, maybe it is. Maybe if you cared enough to know that he was a touchy person and actually made sure he was okay, he’d be here.”

“Yeah? And where the hell were you? I didn’t see you run to poor Ruben’s side making sure he was alright.”

“I wasn’t the one who dated him for a year and a half,” I paused for a moment, considering whether or not I should continue, “and you know what you’re doing now? You’re distracting yourself. I’ve known you for years, Sam, and I know you wouldn’t forget about him that quickly. Carsen is a high ranking citizen in emotionless, in it for the reputation, douchebag land. You don’t have to worry about hurting him because he’s doing to drop you like a fly without a thought crossing his mind and then you won’t have to take any responsibility for it. Sure, you’ll cry over it for a couple of days, but then it’s over. He’s out with someone else, and so are you.”

We looked at each other. I knew Sam and I were both intelligent people. We both knew this fight was inane and unnecessarily cruel. We were also both overwhelmed.

“Carsen has nothing to do with this,” she muttered, unconvinced of her words.

“Yeah? He just happened to swoop in when our lives started going to shambles?”

“If you’re jealous of him, just say it.” She looked me dead in the eye when saying that.

“What the hell are you talking about?” I said.

“You always act like you were Ruben’s all time best friend when he was alive. Really? I remember you acting like this around him, the same way you’re acting around Carsen. Whining because…” she trailed off, knowing finishing her sentence would result in something she couldn’t take back. 

“Because I couldn’t get my hands on you? Is that what you’re trying to say to me?” I said, head tilted.

“You know that’s what it is.” I had never seen her feel anything so viscerally before.

“You don’t actually think that,” I shifted my standing position, realizing my legs were going numb from how long I’d been stationary.

“It’s obvious—”

“Are you kidding me? We’ve been friends for almost ten years and you’ve gone to this level after one goddamn argument? That I secretly envy everyone around you because I can’t claim you like you’re a cheap, years old sweater at the thrift store?” I walked over to her desk and picked up the little blue camera, holding it up. “And this piece of shit? It doesn’t mean anything to you anymore. You might as well get me and Ruben off of it. Or just get rid of it. Make a new one,” I said.

Wanting to display my anger in some primitive way, I tossed the camera hard against the bed, only for it to hit the bedframe instead and crumble into pieces. I held my breath, finally fixating on the broken blue fragments on the ground.

In what felt like an instant, Carsen came in to check on the commotion. Seeing Sam all riled and my hands in fists as I stood above the broken camera. I expected him to be rough, beat me up, tell me to piss off for ever getting aggressive around Sam. He didn’t. He put his hand on my shoulder and said, “man, I think you should get going.”

I’ll have to thank Ruben for leaving that house with an intact nose that night.

***

Back in high school, I completed the pipeline of physics classes, and my favorite unit of them all was the one about mirrors and lenses. They each have a focal point and a radius, making a bunch of varieties of images based on where in the mirror’s plane the object is placed. The rules were pretty cut and dry (and the reason it was my favorite chapter was probably because it was the easiest), but each of these cases had names that denoted the location of the object. When something is placed far away from a concave mirror, outside the radius of it, it’s named an object at infinity. All the infinite rays coming from the object parallel to the mirror simply reflected back through the focal point.

I guess that’s how it was between Ruben, Sam, and I. His death became a pillar of mystery just out of our reach, and every ray that bounced off of it, or every change that came from Ruben’s death, all reflected off me and burned right into that spot at the focus. 

I wonder if that’s how God feels. If he keeps himself out of reach so there’s no effort required to sort out the prayers and everything just makes it through a filter of hope or fear or whatever that person thinks God is. Maybe Sam saw chance. Ruben saw despair. 

I never prayed again, because I knew that all that would reflect off of me was a sardonic kind of anger.