The Why

It’s been five days since Nest drove a car into a tree at sixty miles an hour. She’s sleeping. Unconscious, at any rate. If and when she wakes, she will face questions. What else?
 
I was there in the car, next to her, a helpless passenger. What do I remember about the collision? Not much. My own memory of it can’t be trusted. I remember—.
 
I remember the Chimaera behind the wheel.
 
The Chimaera roaring in the middle of a great fire. The lion roaring fire. The goat bleating. The poised snake. No one can get near, it’s all so hot.
 
I’ve been questioned by doctors and the police. I don’t mention the Chimaera. Otherwise, I’m honest.
 
“Nest asked me if I wanted to go for a drive, and I said yes.”
 
“I remember my life up until I shut the passenger door.”
 
“I don’t know why Nest drove the car into a tree. I don’t think she intended to.”
 
“Yes, I know she’s totaled two cars in two years. But—. You don’t know about her headaches. The first time, a headache shut her eyes. She should have pulled over sooner, but. The same thing happened to her father.”
 
“I’ve known Nest almost half my life. Her boyfriend, yes, off and on. Off, lately.”
 
“Suicide? I can’t answer that. I don’t think that’s in her. She gets—. Her mind. She’s bipolar, sometimes psychotic. Yes. No. She seemed happy and calm enough when we started, then BOOM.”
 
“I’d say black ice. Maybe, snow. It’s December, right?”
 
“No drugs, no alcohol. You must know that already.”
 
“Boom. Just boom.”
 
“I’m alive.”
 
“My name is Isaac Kew.”
 
*
 
Nest calls me Q. I am, right now, an empty Q. Q without Nest.
 
I fell in love with Nest in eighth grade, when we were thirteen, at exactly the same moment when I hated her. She cast me as a fire hydrant in a class play she’d written. She has, since we met, teased me for being stupid, but that’s only because she told me first thing she had a silent P in front of her name, and I believed her. I was gullible. But I was gullible because I had no reason to doubt the first girl I’d decided was beautiful.
 
“P-N-E-S-T,” I said, spelling it out. “But silent. Like the P in pneumatic. Or pneumonia.”
 
“That’s right,” Nest said. “Just like that.”
 
“Cool,” I said.
 
Then she said: “I think you’d make a great fire hydrant.”
 
Every so often, Nest relents. When we were driving, for example, five days ago, the night of the collision. I remember this. “I’ve never thought for a moment you’re actually dumb,” she said. “But you’ve always had a giant love for me. It’s not stupid to love unquestioningly. It’s beautiful. What’s stupid is that my brain makes other people’s love seem ridiculous. I am the Chimaera. Beast and girl, and deadly. I am unlovable.”
 
That last sentence: “I am unlovable.” That would have been enough for the police to think Nest really had wanted to die outright, commit suicide, and was willing to take me with her.
 
I’m not convinced.
 
I believe, no matter how Nest’s illness rips her up, Nest knows I love her. Nest knows her mother and father love her. It’s difficult to end your life when you know you’re loved. Not impossible. But difficult.
 
Nest was right, though. I don’t have her intelligence—or trouble. I’ll never be forced to take a drug to calm down. I’ll never see the inside of a mental ward, except to visit. And I’ll never have a mythical beast living inside of me.
 
*
 
I’ve been writing almost five days straight to no one in particular. To the you we all have inside of us, not ourselves but no one else either. Not quite a god or a devil; not quite a friend, not quite a hero. No one in particular, but someone just the same.
 
There are two styles of handwriting here. Myself in one. Most of it, though, in a handwriting to show when Nest’s speaking aloud to me. Speaking and speaking for miles.
 
Three years ago, when we were seventeen, Nest asked me to go on a walk with her. I’m writing out half of it, ten miles. This is in case she dies. I don’t want the world to think she died without ever having been loved.
 
*
 
Nest had never asked me on one of her walks before. Manic walks, when she thought and felt in a rush and talked to herself and somehow made it home alive. She always went alone, once a week, sometimes more, for months, depending on how she slept. She’s someone for whom sleep was a disaster. It was her father who started taking her on walks, day or night, when she was young. I knew that, but not—.
 
I don’t want to say too much too soon. I want you to hear what happened over the course of a long walk, or half a long walk. The second half doesn’t matter. I don’t know if the second half even exists. I don’t remember ever making it home.