the big one — Eve Felsenthal

The summer between my sophomore and junior years of college was the hottest in Portland’s history. That summer a long article came out about the Big One, the massive earthquake that would decimate the Pacific Northwest and split Portland in two. All anyone wanted to talk about was the article and the Big One. When it hit– and it was a matter of when, not if– it would be the worst natural disaster in North American history. Bridges would crumble, power would be down, entire cities leveled in a matter of minutes. Hundreds of thousands of us would die.

The worst part was, the Big One wasn’t a secret. There’d been laboratories of scientists saying for decades, look at this, think of what will happen. Nobody listened. Nobody was ready. It could happen any day now.

The article was all anyone could talk about. Students made lists of the most earthquake-proof buildings on campus, bought transistor radios, mapped out escape routes. My college even held a colloquium in the student union for those of us who needed to process their anxiety.

It was also the summer my roommates and I had to move out of Butt House.

Butt House was a crumbling former speakeasy with peeling white paint and a brown front lawn that grew pink flowers. My bedroom was huge, with bay windows that looked onto a church parking lot, and filthy, its beige carpet stained blue with Adderall crumbs. Butt House had been student housing for decades, but the owners had finally taken an offer on the property, so we spent our days breaking down generations of Ikea furniture and driving stuff to the dump.

For our last weekend at Butt House, we draped the living room in garbage bags, screwed green bulbs into all the light sockets, and threw a farewell party. I was drunk in the kitchen when my friend told me to come outside. I opened the front door to see Theo on my porch. His skin was pale and sweating like my beer.

The first time I saw Theo was the previous summer, right before my sophomore year. I had just moved into Butt House, and I biked over to school to train for my new job in the media archives. Classes hadn’t started yet and the campus was empty and very still in the heat, like everybody had been raptured just before I got there.

The archives were on the library’s lower level. They were guarded by a desk at the end of a long, thin hallway. The desk would become my favorite part of the job– I loved how everyone who wanted something had to walk towards me down that hallway while I remained seated, impassive, like a goddess they’d come to pay tribute to.

But that day it I had come to pay tribute.

And there he was: sitting at the desk, swiveling in his office chair, talking to a girl in overalls.

“So I hear Colorado was crazy.”

“Oh yeah,” she drawled. “The Rockies are wild.” They both smiled like something was funny. I hovered a few feet behind them, breathing heavily. I said I was there for training and was the boss there.

“Oh yeah.” Theo’s gaze slipped over me like oil. “You can wait over there.” He pointed to a folding chair next to the desk.

I leaned my bike on the wall, took my seat, and watched them closer. I wanted to absorb them: the sharpness of his canine teeth, the stickers on her Nalgene, their ease in the presence of a stranger. He looked like a villain in a silent movie, with thick mutton chop sideburns and a curling black mustache, a bowling shirt worn open over a ribbed tank top. I hated him. I hated the cool girl.

For my first few months at the archives, he was flamboyant in his indifference to me. If I was with another person, he’d speak only to them; if I was working alone, he’d walk straight past me to the backroom where he digitized film. I trained myself to ignore his presence, to not react to his provocative remarks and dumb jokes. It was hard, but it worked.

As the months got colder he started to hang around during my shifts, taking personality quizzes and reading the results out loud, or asking me questions like, “did you know scientists don’t know why ice is slippery?” I would roll my eyes and try to say something devastating, then bike back home and imagine him fucking me up against the microfiche.

And now here he was, on the Butt House porch. I hadn't thought he'd come; I’d invited everyone I knew in the hopes the party would be a rager. It was not a rager, but he had come. He did not want to socialize, not even to drink a beer. We went straight to my room.

I wondered if he thought the Christmas lights tacked above my bed were cheesy.

I held onto my drink while we were kissing until he took it out of my hand and put it on the floor.

He said, “your body is more… substantial than I expected.”

He was the first person to choke me sexually, which I liked, because it meant he thought of me as someone who liked to be choked during sex, or at least someone who was used to it.

After we had sex I dozed off and woke up hours later, lights still on, to find a wet spot in the middle of the bed. I’d never pissed the bed as an adult before. I tried to explain myself but he stopped me.

“Water world,” he shrugged. “Kevin Costner.” I fell back asleep.

The next morning Sunday service was ending and I could hear kids screaming, and parents talking to each other on the way to their cars. Theo wasn’t next to me. I scanned my room: he was crouched in the corner, watching music videos on my laptop.

“I was feeling manic,” he explained. “So I woke up at seven and got you that.” He gestured to a paper Starbucks bag laying on my windowsill. Inside was a sugar cookie in the shape of a tulip, frosted pink for Mother’s Day.

A week later, I was on campus to turn in a final. A white van honked and slowed down next to me. The driver rolled down the window. It was Theo. He nodded at me without smiling, then rolled the window up and sped away. That was how I knew I’d see him again.

We settled into a routine where I’d ride my bike from my babysitting gig in Sellwood to Theo’s place. He lived in the basement of a big gray house on Clinton. To get to his room, you had to walk through a storage space full of racks of clothing, sewing machines, ratty wigs, and abandoned synths. His mattress was on the floor and made up with red silk sheets and leopard-print pillowcases. On the unfinished walls he’d tacked up tearsheets from art history books.

It’s hard for me to remember what we did other than drugs. I know we went to Movie Madness. I know we snuck into the Garden Park apartment complex pools, and when security came, he talked to them while I shivered in my soaking nightgown. I know he showed me Neon Genesis: Evangelion and I showed him Friends.

But mostly we did drugs.

Theo loved drugs. The way some people had model trains or baseball cards, he had drugs. If we slept at his place, he’d arrange and survey the inventory he kept in a teal suitcase. If we slept at mine, he’d empty the contents of his pockets and do a show-and-tell: this is Modafonil, this is 2C-B, a street preacher gave me this in Austin. He had a Dark Net connection and a very small-time clientele. He was always on Erowid, reading up on some new research chemical. He put his goods in those mesh sachets that cheap jewelry comes in.

The way I saw it, Theo did drugs because he liked being a person who did drugs, just like I liked being a person who was dating a person who did drugs. As far as I was concerned, those were two very different categories of person.

My favorite of Theo’s drugs was GHB. It came in blue glass bottles that looked like the essential oils they sold at the co-op. He would mix it into our drinks, or use a pipette to drop it straight into our mouths. It was sweet and salty and so thick that it coated my tongue.

Being on G was like being drunk without the sloppiness, or rolling without the jaw clenching. It made everything feel GOOD, and IMPORTANT. It made nights long, and the longer the night would stretch, the heavier my limbs became. By midnight I’d be crawling up and down Theo’s rickety basement stairs on my hands and knees to get to the bathroom.

It was mostly on G that I got to know Theo. He told me about growing up in Texas and his libtard NPR parents. About teen suicide attempts and the time he grabbed a cop’s gun, and the back-to-nature rehab his parents sent him to where they made kids run until they puked.

I was always taking videos of him. I still have some. In my favorite, he’s rubbing my back and I’m looking smugly into my laptop’s camera. He looks up, notices the green light blinking.

“You’re recording this?” he asks, incredulous. “In what context?” He rolls over next to me. “Like, to what end?” I shrug. He stares down the barrel of the camera, and bites my arm, hard. End of video.

I said I love you first. I always do.

Theo wasn't the only boy I saw that summer. While the kids I babysat were at tennis camp, I’d scroll dating apps compulsively. I went out with musicians on tour just looking for a place to crash, DJs, graf bros, grad students— whomever struck my fancy. I took all my dates to the same bar, the Pub at the End of the Universe.

I never knew how Pub at the End of the Universe got its name; it was on a hill overlooking the train tracks, and I guess when you stood there you did feel you were on the precipice of something. But whatever, Pub was perfect: velvet Elvises, slot machines, leopard carpeting, cheap pitchers. The ladies’ room had swinging saloon-style doors and a poem scrawled on the wall that always made me cry. But Theo I didn’t take to Pub. We stayed holed up in his room, talking til sunrise, slapping each other and crying.

When I wasn't with Theo or babysitting or on a date at Pub, I’d go on what I called apocalypse walks. I’d move as slowly as possible in the late afternoon heat, stoned to a crisp, listening to I Love You Always Forever by Donna Lewis on repeat.

I was on one of these walks when I called my friend Claudia to catch up. She was finishing a program in Mexico, learning Spanish and writing poetry. When she asked what I was up to, all I could think to mention was dating: Theo, my ex, a crush who kept blowing me off. Should I double text him or just eat the loss? Or had he maybe heard about Theo, maybe he thought I was–

“-My god, Eve.” Claudia cut me off, disgusted. “Go to a museum or something.”

Theo left to visit his parents for two weeks. We didn’t talk much while he was away. And then when he got back, he didn’t call for a few days. When I finally did see him, his hair, which had been black and shoulder-length, was now close-cropped and yellow-blonde, dyed with industrial-grade bleach: the kind, he told me, they used for cleaning bloodstains.

“My little pop star,” I said, pulling him toward me. “My sex symbol.”

He left a journal at my house. I flipped through the sacred geometry and tattoo sketches, scanning for my name.

I’m ashamed to admit this, but I’m on this Spirit flight pretty geeked right now. Eve and I say we love each other, but who knows.

Then classes started again. The walk to campus was thirty minutes walking, ten by bike, yet I found the prospect of going to class insurmountable. I was getting concerned emails from my professors weekly. I saw Theo less and less; mostly, we'd hang when he stopped by to sell my roommates drugs. We’d fuck compulsorily and he’d leave. To my surprise, he started charging me for the G. It was only fair, since I was taking it nearly every day. I’d wake up, miss class, take G, scroll Tinder, fall asleep, wake up … I was watching a lot of Grey’s Anatomy. I liked the surgery scenes best. I was jealous of the patients: I wanted to be anesthetized on the slab, being attended to by frantic professionals. I wanted to be praised for being unconscious, an absent vessel for some brain-dead miracle.

10.

One night in October, I was painting my toenails, getting ready to see a graffiti writer I’d been texting, when my phone rang. It was Theo. When I picked up, I could barely hear him over the sound of loud, insistent music.

“What’s up?”

“I just decided not to be hospitalized and I’m blasting jazz. Not boring jazz”-- he dropped his phone-- “Sorry. Not boring jazz, I will say, but important jazz.”

“Oh man.” I smudged my big toe, getting neon green all over my hand. “That’s a crazy sentence.”

“Don’t do this to me. I’m literally going insane.”

“Theo-” I put the nail polish down.

“That’s a crazy sentence.” His imitation of me was shrill and vocal fried. “That’s a crazy sentence. That’s a crazy sentence.”

“Do you need to go to the hospital?”

“That’s a crazy sentence. That’s a crazy sentence.”

“Do you want me to come over?”

“Are you kidding?” His voice was back to normal. “Fuck you. No.”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously.”

“Oka-aay.” I checked the time; I had to leave soon if I was going to catch the bus to meet my date. “I’m gonna leave you alone then.”

“Good,” he said. “I don’t think you understand.” And then he hung up.

I pulled the tights over my wet toes and left.

11.

I woke up at 5 am in North with the graffiti writer snoring next to me. I checked my phone to find two missed phone calls and a voicemail from Theo.

“So. I blacked out and started a fire— a small fire, but–fuck. Sorry, I feel bad telling anyone this. My shit is so fucked up. You don’t have to do anything, I just… I thought I’d let you know… that everything is fucked up right now, I guess.”

12.

After he got out of jail, Theo moved out of the basement on Clinton and into a basement on Belmont, where he slept on an air mattress next to the washer-dryer for a few months, til December, when he moved into the attic of a house on Schilling with a coffin in the living room. I liked this room the least, because I was always bonking my head on the exposed beams stuffed with insulation that looked like cotton candy.

Winter in the Pacific Northwest is muddy. I had a terrible self-administered pixie cut and a re-awakened habit of cutting myself and passing out in our communal living room. Every so often I would squelch over to Theo’s attic, where we'd do drugs and half-watch some movie, barely even touching– he was feeling asexual, he explained. He had to go to community service five days a week because of the arrest and was camming to make ends meet, since he’d been banned from campus for selling drugs, and besides, he’d graduated already.

13.

In April the air reeked of rotted ginkgo berries. I passed my qualifying exams by the skin of my teeth.

“Your peers inform me you haven’t been to a single group study session,” the department chair told me in a private meeting. “That you don’t respond to their texts or phone calls. I’ll pass you, but you’re going to have to participate.” I nodded vigorously. I was officially an incoming senior. I left her office at sunset. The cherry trees were blooming and the puffy blossoms drifted through the air like snowflakes.

14.

A year later, a month before graduation, my friends and I visited where Butt House used to be.

We were scattering our separate ways, to hometowns and teach for America and dubious internships. Butt House was just a pile of rubble, but the pink flowers were still growing in the lawn. That same week, I was taking a walk (of the non-apocalypse variety) and I passed Pub and noticed a sign taped to the door that said CLOSED FOR FAMILY EMERGENCY.

As far as I know it's stayed that way– but I can’t confirm because I haven’t been back.

Every summer since that summer has been the hottest in Portland’s history. There have been wildfires and floods and riots, but the Big One hasn’t happened yet. When it does, it will come without warning. Just the barking of thousands of dogs, sensing what their owners cannot: the shifting of the ground they walk on, miles below the surface of the earth.

The internet tells me Theo got married and divorced and is now living in New York City. I read his Twitter sometimes; he’s still funny. Maybe I didn’t tell you that, how funny he was. What else didn’t I tell you? How smart he was. How he could play any instrument you put in front of him, how he held my pet hamster with such tenderness, how he rubbed my back the mornings I woke up sobbing, made me toast, complimented my awful haircuts.

This is the poem from the end of the universe that always made me cry:

I didn’t believe in anything

Til I met you

Now I know

all that love shit is true!