“Well, the real trick to being happy is to kill yourself.” He spoke out one side of his mouth to keep the cigarette he’d just bummed in place while he brought up his lighter, cupping his hand against that dry breeze that always comes sweeping through around sunset in the high desert. As he exhaled he leaned back against the louvered shutter on the left side of one window, its wood faded-looking with small bits of peeling paint but probably not actually more than a decade old. The shutter didn’t even work as such, attached by its outer edge to the siding and only there to make the window look more like a stereotypical image of an old-timey saloon. When you spend enough time in these small Nevada towns you get a sense for this stuff: which buildings are really original construction from boom times, which are new builds following the simulacrum of the West all the road-trippers from Maryland are expecting to see, which were stood up back in the day but have been so extensively remodeled nobody would be calling them historic were they not trying to sell an idea; even which features in particular have been preserved through all those years and which, like those louvered-shutters-that-can’t-shut with their curved tops following what’s somehow come to be read as a specifically Old West pattern of ogive, are there to make something authentic into something that looks authentic. The nonchalant way he’d leaned back knowing those shutters would always stay in place suggested he might also be able to see all this. But probably he’d just tried leaning on them on a smoke break before.

“Okay you don’t have to kill yourself, helps a lot though, long as you don’t succeed. Well, if you do succeed that works too, s’probably more effective, I’m just saying all this from a standpoint of, y’know”—he lazily gestured with both arms in a half shrug, pointing his hands inward at his extant body—“still being here. Pros of the other outcome are more self-evident.

“Can’t be a total failure though, gotta get a little close. Like you take a fuckton of benzos and vodka, you just come to a day later, pounding fucking headache, lying in some of your own vomit, turns out you can just roll yourself into recovery position while you’re unconscious sometimes. You just feel fucking terrible and not much else.

“But something like someone finds you in the bath with a knife, warm water, crosshatch, everything you’re supposed to do besides ’member to lock the fucking door, they gotta bandage you up and shit, tell you afterward about just how much blood there was and you kinda wish you could’ve seen it, something like that…” He took an especially long drag and paused for a moment, stared ahead at the vast expanse of desert scrub, then turned back to the right towards me, now leaning against the window’s other fake shutter. “Hey what the fuck do you smoke anyway, dude, why’s it so thin?” 

“Uh, they’re this Korean brand,” I said. “It’s really big over there, I think they like mild cigarettes a lot? I do too, I guess.”

“Thought I was supposed to be the faggot here,” he said. And before I could open my mouth again, he cut me off. “Hey, hey, to be clear here I can say it, you can’t. Unless you wanna reconsider some stuff and go back to my place, I saw you looking at me earlier.”

“Well, I thought you said you were trans. Would it really make me gay if you still have a pussy?”

He chuckled. “Jesus, you weren’t lying about being from around here.”

“Sorry, was that rude?”

“S’good, just gotta lemme bum another one as payment.”

“Already?”

“Yeah dumbass, these are meant for little Korean women and I normally go through a pack a day of Spirits.” While I retrieved another cigarette for him, he threw the slim butt of the one he’d just finished on the ground, barely ahead of where the bar’s little front deck met the unpaved parking lot, and, taking a long stride forward, ground it into the dirt beneath his combat boot. He was dressed fairly punk overall, or maybe goth—I couldn’t really tell you the difference besides maybe that goth is darker and punk is spikier?—but whatever you’d call it, it certainly stood out around here. “What’d I been saying before I got distracted by how you smoke like a girl?”

“Uh, something about being found in the bath,” I said, handing him the cigarette and this time providing the light myself.

“That’s just my example,” he began. I lit one as well. “I’m just saying you get very close to succeeding. I know this one girl in St. George, complete Slavaboo, loves Soviet guns, pretty broke too, of course, but trans girl in Southern Utah, she’s gotta have something, so her daily carry’s this shitty surplus Makarov with shitty surplus ammunition. Literally Cold War shit, decades sitting around some East German police unit or something. Probably see where I’m going here already, she sticks it in her mouth, pulls the trigger, and again shitty surplus ammunition with shitty primers so it hang fires. She just takes it out of her mouth and puts it down, I think that was like a year ago now. She’s been doing alright since. I don’t mean good but I mean better at least, it helped. Know why?”

“Yeah, I think it makes sense. You’re saying that when you get that close to dying and then you’re still there the next moment, it makes you feel like there’s some sort of force telling you not to do it. Whether that’s God, or the universe, or fate, or whatever you want to believe in. Plus, like any animal, humans all have a natural self-preservation instinct encoded deep in our DNA. When you get so close to death that it truly kicks in, you’re forced to realize that, on some fundamental level, you do want to live,” I said, turning away from him to face forward and beginning to take in the landscape myself. “You find out that some part of you still thinks your life is precious.”

I always loved how the desert looked at this hour. Despite having spent most of my life in a Nevada town like this, it had seemed so distant for the past year. After moving to D.C. I was constantly assailed by noise and light and smells, surrounded by petty political concerns, feeling in the smog and pollution of every rush-hour traffic jam the aspirations of each person in each car, from the overworked single mothers and striving interns to the cosmopolitan wives of diplomats and rapacious legislators, as they gradually externalized themselves, coagulated, blanketed the city in a haze which grew more and more asphyxiating by the day. Now, I felt free of all of that, able to breathe for the first time since I’d left. In front of me, those last scraps of light as the sun fell below the horizon limned squat sagebrush and saltbush with a golden warmth made all the more beautiful by the knowledge of how brief it would be before the descending dark reduced everything to vespertine outlines, and I was glad to have, at least for the moment, traded the oppressive, swampy atmosphere of the Potomac for that dry, thin air I’d always loved. It’s air where the baking heat gives way to crisp breezes as soon as the sun goes down. It’s air where nothing lingers.

When I looked back to the left he was facing me, staring in mock bewilderment. I briefly met his eyes and he scoffed, rolled them with a derisive smile, did it all with that sort of wry exaggeration that generally belies real contempt. “I wasn’t going for anything so fucking… cloying, no.”

He shifted in place to angle his body forward again and lean further back on the wall behind him. After another drag he looked back at me. “No, it’s the trick to being happy,” he began, “’cause once you get that close you know you can do it. That’s what it’s about, is knowing you can. S’why you don’t strictly have to, but I think most people, they do have to, I did. Usually a person just thinks they know they can. You know doctors talk about ideation versus intent, ideation is just the normal everyday stuff of wanting to do it, thinking about it, you know how it is.”

“I can’t say I do know.”

His upper lip twitched, that same furtive contempt playing across his face again. “Right, yeah, guess we talked about it a bit earlier,” he said, casting his gaze down for a moment, then back up, and straight ahead. “Too busy with making the rest of us wanna kill ourselves, no time to really consider for yourself.

“Anyway, ideation is wanting to, intent is meaning to, it’s a big difference. You’re kinda right about the self-preservation instinct in the brain, it takes effort to jump that gap ’cause of it. That part of you fights against active planning, things’ve gotta be bad enough to push through it. I think there’s a bigger gap between planning and being ready, brain fights even harder against that one, it’s real hard to be over that gap unless you’ve actually done it before, done it and it almost worked.

“That’s the thing that’s the trick, is being over the gap, so you don’t really have to have done it, but it’s hard to really be ready otherwise. We think action follows thought, if we do something it’s ’cause we wanted to, lot of times it’s the opposite though, thought follows action. Some people have the force of will that they can make action follow thought, some people can just be ready, that’s not most of us. Most of us, easiest way to be ready to do it is to have done it, as long as you really almost did it, like I was saying. Gotta be one of those things where just one detail went awry, shitty East German ammo hang firing, roommate coming home early and needing to shit, then you know next time you just do the one thing different and it’ll happen.

“That point, you’ve got thought and action synced on that issue. It’s in you, it’s internalized, the will is there. And then you know, at any point in time, you wanna kill yourself you can kill yourself, no struggle, no thinking about who’s gonna miss me, you dealt with it already, now the option’s just open. Most people think the option’s open but it’s not, they’ve got that shit stopping them. You know what a freeing feeling that is, to always have that option right there? Sometimes if you’re scared of flying, a therapist’ll tell you to sit in the emergency exit row, lets you know you always have control over the evacuation if something goes wrong. It helps with the fear.

“Other thing is it means if you’re still here you must kinda wanna be, now you know there’s barely a barrier between being here and not. You know it can’t be all that bad if you’re still doing it. Me, for instance, obviously you can tell I’m outta place here, I don’t go with the rest of the decor in fucking Tonopah. You told me inside what you’re doing here, you wanna know what I’m doing here?”

I nodded. He placed the filter to his lips and inhaled, kept inhaling, filled his lungs deeply and deliberately, a long, long drag, whether to make up for the lack of one while he’d been speaking or simply to give himself a few more moments before he had to continue, I couldn’t say. Eventually, he had to exhale.

“I’m supposed to be in San Bernardino, s’where I actually live, had been living, with my partner, ex-partner I guess. Give you the short version but we’d been together like six months, and he’s always been pretty shitty and toxic, s’hard to tell that when you’re in love though, especially the first few months, when you’re really in love, but a couple weeks ago he comes into a bit of money, suggests we go to Vegas. Obviously, not a great idea, but I’m an idiot and in love, so even though things’ve been getting bad I tell myself a change of scenery’ll get us back on track. So we drive to Vegas, get a room at fuckin’ Circus Circus for a few nights, goes okay for a day or two, then he convinces himself he knows how to count cards, then he starts playing blackjack, then he starts losing money, then he’s lost all the money. It’s around here I find out he’s been doing amphetamines again the past couple weeks or so, he’d been clean for about a year ’cause he’s got a family history of schizophrenia and he tends to get some stimulant psychosis when he uses ’em. Sure explains a lot of his behavior that couple weeks when I find that out though.

“So anyway, we end up driving out of Vegas at noon when checkout comes around, he hasn’t slept in the past day but he’s driving ’cause I never got my license ’cause it always makes me have a panic attack to try and drive, kinda having a panic attack anyway since he’s driving like a goddamn maniac which of course he is. And he decides we’re going to Reno ’cause he’ll have better luck there, not sure with what fucking money he thinks that’ll happen at this point but what am I gonna say? And then he starts thinking that he actually should’ve been winning at blackjack that whole time ’cause he’s great at counting cards, he thinks, and obviously if he’s not winning he must’ve been sabotaged, and obviously who else could be the one sabotaging him. Spare you the details of the fighting, I end up on the side of the road two miles outside of Tonopah, no phone no bags no shit ’cause as quote unquote ‘recompense’ for my quote unquote ‘perfidy’ he just kept everything of mine in the car there with him and kicked me out.

“So, sit there and cry for a little bit but what the fuck else am I gonna do but walk into town and look for anyone to help me. That’s about two weeks ago now. Owner of this place has been surprisingly great, gave me some work and an air mattress in the back, customers not exactly. Much as it’s sucked, I kinda don’t even care all that much. Because, see, ten months ago, moment I came back to consciousness on cold linoleum, my roommate sobbing over me surrounded by more of my blood than I could’ve imagined I even had inside me, I synced my thoughts to my actions. So I decide to quit this shit, at any point, I’ll just fuckin’ quit, and if I haven’t quit yet I guess I can’t complain.”

He looked straight at me as he flicked this second cigarette butt onto the ground but still managed to make it land not even an inch away from the first one. “Think that’s the end of my break,” he said, grinding it into the dirt with exactly the same motion as before. As he turned and headed back inside, he stopped for a moment.

“Oh, drinks are fine but don’t get any actual food here, health inspector would shut this shit down in seconds if one ever came. A&W’s down towards the gas station, I guess?” He pointed vaguely, then pushed through those kitschy swinging saloon doors. Conversations in a place like this, in a town doing an impression of itself, spread out along the highway, adrift in the ever-shifting measureless Mountain West, all end the same way: with the knowledge that each of you will now cease to exist.