Names

He had books. A small bedroom with a closet making it not square, filled with books. The wall which wasn’t a window or a door had a six foot high bookcase—pine wood with Not Ikea Bolts, built sturdy—for books. Piled high and hazardously were small books which made the smell of old socks oddly attractive—printed on cheap paper which wasn’t Bible-tissue-thin but would yellow just as fast. Cheap books, Borders wouldn’t sell them for more than six bucks. Their multicolored Goodwill tags peek at odd places on their spines and backs.

Bigger books clump together on the lower shelves. Textbooks for fun (his sister Nina insists he has a mental disorder when he tells her about buying them), textbooks for class (His father Mark nodded sagely when he got the tour of the place a year ago). Biology, anatomy, chemistry books, books which ought to have been classified as weightlifting classes according to Nina.

Toys—leftover from a childhood not long past—littering the shelves and crouching among books and picture frames and hats. Dinosaurs and a rubik’s cube vie for the umbrella of light under the bedside lamp.

The tiny desk, opposite the bookcase, with no chair because he sits on the bed, proudly displays a collection of action figures and several Japanese comic story arcs—at upwards of eight dollars a pop, manga books are spendy, and arcs can last sometimes twenty chapters. A Japanese to English dictionary, as broken backed as the manga books and riddled with bookmarks, is supported by a pizza box precariously balanced on the edge of the desk. A sheaf of half-completed sketches leans against the desk.

He gets up at o’dark thirty every day to go to work, somewhere repetitive with low expectations—this year it’s Costco early morning stocking crew—and puts in a six hour day as part of his forty hour workweek,  before heading to class across town. He’s fresh and awake for all of his early morning classes, but usually begins to feel the effects of the graveyard shift at around one in the afternoon.  He’s not on an odd sleep schedule, just not a standard one, as he naps for an hour before physics. He longs for his bed in the square except for the closet room. There his books spill even across the bed—he’s alone in that bed, so the books keep him company. These books are read back to front, their covers worn, the backs broken. Their decorated pages flutter at the mocking ceiling. The graphic novels from Marvel and the manga from Japan (because the plots are better, he says). His favorite is classic stuff, but he’ll go for Naruto any day. A poster of Kakashi says so from the wall.

            His alarm on the digital watch short circuits his daydream of home. Class calls. Until he hits the big-time with his graphic novel, he has to have a fallback college degree, as well as a steady job to pay the bills. He’s going to move to Japan the moment he has the money.

The advanced figure drawing class—he debated for a long time before he took the series, the expense of the materials was discouragement enough—is where he sits next to the girl who he may or may not be dating. They don’t give it a name, because she’s had bad luck with “naming” things in her life. He loves her so much it hurts.

Her breath smells faintly of the rancid tang that hot chocolate leaves. He likes it, but never mentions so. Her airy cloud of espresso hair obscures her face from the side, but he knows she smiled at him as he took his seat. His bookbag, filled with more textbooks than for-fun books, makes a hallow thud on the floor of the drawing studio.

The kitchen of his house—for it is a house, he is proud to tell people—is not a dozen feet removed from his bedroom. The sink is always half filled with dirty dishes, the drying rack is half filled with clean ones—a continuous cycle. Books pile up on every other horizontal space here, intermixed with pencils and cords. Ellie, the girl he loves but who might not love him—love is a name, after all—roots around in his cupboard for a coffee cup to fill with tea. He sets the kettle, a gift from his mother when she found he was boiling his water in a soup pot, on the burner.

It’s tradition for this particular day, Thursday, for her to come over to his house for tea because she hates coffee. She’s a cheap date, he’d like to joke but it chokes him whenever he tries to say it. Ellie’s boy, Braeden, gnaws on the plush toy that he keeps around just for the kid. Braeden is the last thing in her life that she named; she’s never needed to tell him that. He wonders if the kid’s old man reads many books like he does or if he’s in jail or if he wants Ellie (and Braeden) back.

Ellie sketches during their chats, elves in business suits and dragons wrapped around skyscrapers—and one of his own characters he described to her on their first Not Date a few months ago. The angular face, high cheekbones and hollow cheeks, will stare up at him as he sips his chai and watches hers grow cold. He admits to himself that he will never draw Ebrion as well as Ellie, and notes that no matter what happens between them he will ask her to draw at least the concept art for his novel as he hits the big time. Whenever that might be.

Once his tea is gone, and hers is the temperature of shaded concrete, they relax on his tiny Goodwill couch with Braeden. She is closest to showing him love when the infant is laid out across both of their laps, and he relishes the weekly possibility. Someday she’ll love him outright, when Braeden can talk and ask “Why,” and “Who,” and “How.” He hopes so, at least as the weeks stretch into more months, and the months pass the year marker and he starts to help Braeden learn to talk.

She doesn’t rate a complete bearing change in his life, but her influences change it slightly nonetheless. He is willing to go along with it for as far as she’d like to change his course. Perhaps she does rate a complete life-change, but he doesn’t think on it overmuch. It’s one of the ways he tries to respect her express wish to not give what they’re doing a name.

The books in his room start to become organized, and the toys which aren’t toddler friendly take up the very highest shelf on his bookcase. The other ones need to be regularly washed as toddler snot gums up their workings. Bellbottoms and bras make their way into his laundry as some of his most favorite manga episodes get sorted out of his underwear drawer.

Ellie jokes about his virginal bachelor qualities—the sporadic schedule of laundry day, the uncertainty in holding her close at night when it’s just them and their PJs—qualities which she so obviously lacks or has moved past as she totes around a baby and a weekly calendar. She appreciates finding clean socks being used as tenuous bookmarks, she tells him, after finding several such examples.

Ebrion takes a new life under her guidance—the man he wishes could have been there for her with Braeden, the man he wishes he could be. Ellie calls that man a stick in the mud, adding a pinched feel to Ebrion’s face in her sketches.

After another few months, with Braeden’s constant visitation meriting a full baby-proofing of the house he’s renting, his rent drops by half as Ellie finally gives a name to what they have: roommates. In a one bedroom house where the living room is the domain of a rapidly growing toddler, however, it is obvious what his and Ellie’s situation is. Helen, his mom, starts hinting that maybe he should start asking around with Ellie’s friends about her favorite time of year. Much more subtle than his father who bluntly stated that if he didn’t grow a pair and marry that girl, Braeden was going to grow up a sissy. His father had read a book somewhere that said that, and it was a sign of good parenting to pass on good information.

He didn’t ask any of those questions or do any of those things. He knows Ellie, and he knows that she will be the one who figures out if she wants to be married or not—if she wants him to be her boyfriend and have Jim or Ron or whoever he was to be Braeden’s dad rather than him. He knows and doesn’t press or ask for more than she can give.

Nina calls him an introvert who is going to end up the loser. He doesn’t know how that would happen, but buys a self-help relationship book nonetheless. Ellie giggles at him when she finds him reading it.

The day Braeden calls him “Daaa! DaaaaaaAaaaaa!” in a mutinous scream from the far side of the living room, he panics. Braeden doesn’t know about the house rule of not naming things—he was a toddler for Christ’s sake—and his broken toy has but one possible way of being fixed: his Da. Ellie arrives a moment into his panic, her eyes wide and bright. That brightness translates into anger, Directed at me, he believes. Braeden continues to wail, his face red as pus colored snot runs out his nose, tears streaming down the very center of his chubby baby cheeks.

In slow motion he steps forward to the boy, arms reaching out as his knees bend to scoop him up. The offending word, the one obviously making Ellie so angry, continues to spout out of Braeden’s mouth.

“It’s okay Brae-Brae, it’s okay. I…I will fix that. But I’m not—”

“Yes you are. Shut up and stop it, just accept it—you’re his dad,” Ellie’s shrill voice cuts through the toddler’s sobbing hiccups. “You have been since you saw him, since you made him laugh. Just shut up and be that for him!” he takes a leaf out of Kakashi’s book, out of the rule book for ninjas, and he looks for the hidden meaning of her words.

You’re his dad, which means you belong to me—to us. You’ve been mine since I let you see him, since I let you into his life. Shut up and be his dad, for me. He was definitely going to have to do some research about how messed up that was—but not now. Ellie wanted him, the nerd, the scientist, the last person probably capable of interpersonal relationships.

“Marry me,” he blurts out, holding her son up against himself with the little boy’s head tucked into his neck. He knows, from his book, that she can’t possibly accept him now. She’s going to throw it back in his face—which she does by not answering or acknowledging his words—but he doesn’t care.

Braeden began to develop a speech impediment, unable to properly put “Ds” and “Ts” on the ends of his words. His cry for his father in all senses of the word but the biological one never completes itself—Da instead of Dad or Daddy. He tries to teach the kid “papa” so to avoid the confused looks on day adventures to the park, but to no avail. It’s with practiced panic that he goes to buy children’s books with the right sort of stories to help the kid, but he rarely succeeds.

When Ellie’s ex shows up to the park where the three of them are passing an afternoon, it’s the day he’s been dreading since he met Braeden. The other man—David Ellie hisses—is where Braeden got his black hair from, but not where he got his blue eyes from. Ellie leaves Braeden with him as she moves away to talk with David out of earshot. She’s definitely a gesture-talker, something her mother Tammy once told him was her Yiddish streak. He shrugged that comment off as family legend because he knew a lot of people who talked with their hands, and their religious heritage didn’t seem to be a factor.

When she returns he bundles her up in a hug before driving them all back home. Ellie laughs the entire way home—a harsh, manic sort of laugh to be sure. Braeden gazes at her confusedly from his carseat. It was the particular kind of laughing that sounds like sobbing. Awkward to hear as stilted sobs seep into raucous guffaws. If it were any other situation—if he hadn’t known the cause of her laughter—he would have laughed as well to cover up his panicked fear. Instead he thinks about buying another self-help book since therapy is too expensive.