By Corey Lof
Wilts saw the ocean for the first time when he was twenty-six. Thank you, he said. We were on the Oregon coast where a waterfall was coming off the cliffs, landing on the beach and running through a spiderweb of trenches to the shoreline. The sun had set and what was left of the light had turned the waterfall, and everything really, the rocks, the sand, us, the ocean, translucent and purple.
Thank you, thank you, he said, breathing like he wasn’t sure he would ever get to do it again. I half expected to turn around and find him facedown making angel shapes in the sand, like he was talking to God, or the earth or something. I hoped he wasn’t talking to me. I wanted to be riding around on Aprhi’s shoulders in the shallow, taking selfies. I didn’t want to be credited with whatever Wilts was experiencing. I ignored him, but he kept saying it. Thank you. Thank you for bringing me here.
It was always like this with Wilts, we’d be doing something normal, like getting gas or watching an ambulance tend to a car wreck, and Wilts would experience some profound depressive episode. It was nothing to be jealous of, but there I was. I wanted to push him over into the sand, fill his mouth with it.
Man, thank yourself, I said. You pitched on gas too.
The second time Wilts saw the ocean he almost drowned. We were burning driftwood on a campsite in northern California, surrounded by long beach grass. The sand was cold and the air was a thick, salty mist. The moon never rose and so turning away from the fire basically left you blind.
You go swimming? Aphri said, looking over my shoulder to where Wilts stood, soaked and shivering, with some girl in his arms. He kept grabbing her like he was checking she was there. They bashed their foreheads together and panted in unison. It was obvious, whether he saved her, or she saved him, or they’d just tripped into a puddle together, Wilts saw it as a cosmic sign. The universe was always telling Wilts that this was it, he’d arrived, and it always ended with his heart looking like sidewalk vomit.
Who the fuck is that? Aprhi asked.
The fire flashed in the girl’s wide eyes. She pet Wilts’ chest, looked up at his chin.
The three of us had been staring into the fire since before dark.
We hadn’t even noticed he left.
He moved into the girl’s van and the next time Aphri and I saw him was in Hollywood. Though he disappeared early that night too. Aphri borrowed then bled on Wilts’ only nice shirt while in a friendly fist fight over a flowery necklace given to us by a homeless man.
It was me who punched him.
I got into it with Aphri twice that night.
Later, while Wilts was asleep, or wandering all woebegone through the Hollywood streets, Aphri warned me against going behind a bar to smoke weed with a black guy who had neck tattoos, so I called him a racist and he smacked me in the face and told me a story about how he was robbed at knifepoint in Guatemala.
I said, I wish I had a knife, I’d take you for everything you got.
What did I tell you about threatening me with violence? he said. I’ll whoop your ass.
I dumped what was left of my beer in his lap and took off while he was still trying to figure out what happened.
But I was so unaccustomed to being alone, I didn’t know what to do. I ended up in some bushes, just off the Boulevard, with my pants down. I thought I might jerk off, but it was hopeless. The mood wasn’t right. I don’t know what I was thinking. Parts of my life were slipping away so fast it was as if I never lived them. Maybe I was hoping to get more time with them. Maybe I thought I’d get that time while in prison as a sex offender. I don’t know. But that was me there, bare ass in the mulch, hand on my soft dick, scrolling through old photos on my phone of all the people I loved and never told.
Wilts told us he was leaving for good one night in a dry lakebed outside Boulder, Nevada—the Boulder no one talks about, that consists of a laundromat and mechanics shop and not much else, the one I’d confused for Boulder City, Colorado and for years wondered what all the hype was about.
We pulled off the road, into a dry lakebed and drove in circles as fast as we could until we lost interest when we realized that was the extent of it, circles. There were no giant cracks or other worlds for us to fall into. No one was chasing us, no one was watching.
We parked, dug a hole to protect our fire from the wind, ate mushrooms and stared blankly into what was a bleak, album cover sort of horizon.
When the sun set, Wilts, Aphri, and I wandered around the dry lakebed in the dark. Wilts had my guitar with him. He plucked the odd low note and let it ring out. Eventually we laid down.
That’s when Wilts told us he was leaving. He laid on his back and looked up at the sky and spoke to us as if he were telling us he was going to die. Again, that’s how he was. His tone always terminal, his sentences always punctuated with deep sighs of resignation. He spoke of love and chapter endings, new beginnings, and a whole bunch of other shit I was embarrassed to even hear.
I gave him a hug and told him we’d miss him but other than that, I stayed quiet. I didn’t want anything I said to betray the fact that I saw this as a non-event. There was no great sense of beginning or end. Wilts was leaving. I always knew he would. It was clear from day one, when Teo left and Wilts replaced him, that he couldn’t hack it. Not on the road, not with Aphri and me. He was too open and too sticky. Everything we passed became a part of him, yet the crucial pieces of himself, the ones that stand you up in the morning or stop you from tripping backwards into your own head, those he’d just let fall out wherever he happened to be or he’d give them away.
There was never a choice. Not for him. He was always going to leave.
I’m surprised he lasted this long.
He asked me if he could take my guitar and since I wasn’t playing it, and I said, Sure. If you got fifty bucks.
It was a fluke that he’d ended up in the van to begin with. Years ago, I was sitting in the park in Toronto with this girl I’d started seeing even though I was about to leave town, when Wilts called. I hadn’t spoken to him in months. I remember thinking, is this really something I feel like taking on? The shortest phone calls with Wilts could leave me with an overwhelming sense of guilt and a deep pain in my gut. He had the power to both brighten the world, bring it into clarity and at the same time make it feel hopelessly out of reach.
I sighed a sigh I learned from him, one of his deep, what difference does it make, sort of sighs, and answered the phone. Hello?
He was silent for a while, then all he said was, I see you.
He was right there, right behind me in the same park, somehow wearing on his face every possible implication of the time past between our seeing or speaking to one another.
I told him I was leaving and he said, Can I come?
It’s only ever a matter of gas pitch, I said.
But I still wonder, what if I didn’t answer the phone? What if he’d seen me screen his call? Would he still have approached me, still have had me turn around?
Years later, after Wilts had come and gone, I ended up back in Toronto for a stint, more or less squatting in his apartment, while he tended to another broken heart in the safety and comfort of his childhood home.
I’d been to the apartment once before, when his girlfriend still lived there. I remember being amazed by how full of life it was, how full of stuff, creamers and sauces, photos stuck with magnets to the fridge door. They had cactuses and clay cats and little glass bottles lined up along the top of the door trim. They had little things lined up along any little thing that jutted out from the wall, really, anything that resembled a shelf. Coffee cups with sailboats on them, pictures of people at weddings.
But now that she was gone, the apartment was barren. All the life that I’d seen was hers. He’d just been clinging to it, calling it his own.
The next time I heard from him was a few years after that.
I was back in Toronto, waiting for my car at a mechanic shop. He sent me a message saying he had all his stuff and nowhere to go. Not a clue. He said his most recent breakup happened to coincide with his landing on the wrong side of a line drawn in the sand by his mother after his father’s death. He said, I don’t really want to get into it.
He said, But I hear you’re in Toronto. Me too.
I was living with the woman that would become my wife, that with more time, would have our child, and live quietly with me in a life most would call normal—and I guess what I’m really wondering is if that sort of normalcy can find me in time, then why not Wilts?
I knew he would be a terrible house guest, that he’d permeate our entire four-hundred square foot apartment with his incurable melancholy, but I’d already answered the phone.
Where in Toronto? I said, and immediately spotted him across the street from me, a hopeless lump slumped over a rolling suitcase. He still had my guitar.
He stayed on my couch for two weeks. My wife—my then girlfriend—worked at a bar and so we spent most evenings on our own, Wilts and me, getting stoned and showing each other music on YouTube. Between songs he told me of his plan to fly to California and win back the last girl—in an endless string of girls—who’d broken his heart.
I was working on my own at the time, turning people’s tiny, unfinished basements into illegal apartments, with six-foot ceilings and windows you couldn’t fit a basketball through, if any. So, on the day of his flight, I took the morning off. We had breakfast together at a diner and over cheap coffee and eggs Wilts sighed and went through his plan with me one more time. He would post a photo of himself on the coast in a place of romantic significance for him and his ex, then wait until she saw it and came to find him …
Pulling away from the airport that morning, I cried like I’ve never cried for my own life, like it was my mother’s heart he carried around in his chest.
I mourned Wilts’ death years earlier, while still in his company. He didn’t need to tell me he was suicidal. I mean, he did, on several occasions, but he didn’t need to. It was obvious. And it didn’t take much for me to accept it as an inevitability.
I was in no shape to help him.
We lived in different worlds.
His every breath was the result of a war being waged inside him—you could hear a village burning when he opened his mouth—and there I’d be, standing right beside him, feeling nothing, staring at a shoe.
I was his friend.
I answered the phone when he called.
I say all this, but he might not even be dead. Maybe he hasn’t done it yet. Maybe he won’t.
At this point, I wouldn’t know.
It’s been years.
Corey Lof lives on an island in the North Pacific with his wife, son, and many animals. His writing can be found in Hobart, Vlad Mag, Rejection Letters and several other places online. He would like to acknowledge that the first 300 words or so of Wilts was published as a flash by Back Patio, under the same title, in 2022. (@coreylofsatwit)