Someday Now Forever

By Daniel Foutz

The misguided romantic memoir of a guy who travels the world trying to find something that won't disappear on him. It reads like a novel, but this young adult tale of heartbreak, inebriated Santa Claus riots, and quadrupedal depressive disorders might be one of the more brutally honest things you will have read in some time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Daniel Foutz
• Release date: Sep 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9781370881185

Book preview

Prologue

There once was a blank page.

It isn’t blank anymore because I wrote these words all over it.

So it’s my fault, really.

This page was perfect before I came along. It was infinite possibility. It could have been the world’s next great orchestral masterpiece or a college diploma or a cute doodle of a penguin. Someone could’ve folded it into a paper airplane and written, I love you on it and they might have meant it or not and maybe, might have, and a whole big bundle of perhapses. This page could have been anything, but it’s not because you’re still here ruining this beautiful thing with me. These once blank pages might have been anything but they’re not because they are this. So, in a way, this is already the story of all of our lives.

Clocks

This is a second.

You spent it reading that sentence. Here's a few things you missed in the interim:

A hundred lightning bolts struck the earth as it hurtled eighteen and a half miles through space. Four people were born, one died, 41,000 updated their Facebook statuses, and a guy named Bill Gates made two hundred and fifty dollars. Couples had first kisses and last ones and humans around the world laughed and cried and swore and lied and screamed and punched walls and punched people and at least one somebody somewhere in our corner of the universe had their heart completely broken.

That was a second.

In that one second, the world around you became a different place. More stuff happened in that one second than will happen in this entire book. More stuff happened in that one second than will happen in any of our individual lifetimes. A second is a big deal.

This story ends in the freezing cold under the dancing sky as I hold in one final breath and think about the girl I'd crossed the world for.

580,000,000 seconds earlier...

I must confess, I was born at a very early age. Groucho Marx said that. I didn’t hear it from him though on account of him being super dead by the time I popped out. The guy I did hear it from happens to be the world’s greatest evangelistic top spinner, who, on a quest to snag the record for largest functional spinning toy, was hit in the back of the skull by a chunk of metal that broke off of the top's pulley system during the initial demonstration. Nearly killed him. But it didn’t. After getting out of the hospital, he went back with a hole in his head, finished the top, and got it spinning. Some people might say he loves tops too much. He would probably say he loves Jesus, but never, ever enough. Maybe you can’t have really loved something if it doesn’t end up hurting you.

All that to say: I was born.

The thing that's kind of unfortunate about that whole deal is that the parents responsible for my birth were excellent. This is something most people don’t think to complain about. Take a hundred strokes of lightning, though, to consider how many prolific authors had awesome parents. Done? I got Dr. Seuss but then stopped to wonder if a guy who makes up a last name for himself and then writes about latchkey children shepherded through life by an anthropomorphic fun-time party uncle cat could really be all that satisfied with his family life (and being forced to eat green eggs and ham? Tell me that's not a cause to call child services).

I digress.

The thing is, there’s an alternate timeline where my mum and dad raised me in a cage, broke my kneecaps, and shoved bamboo shoots up my fingernails every night, and in which you are reading a much better book right now (like, one without a convoluted multiverse tangent or child abuse). Shouldn’t blame them though. I mean, I’m sure they had the best of intentions when they decided not to break my legs with a tire iron.

Parenting is tricky like that.

The trouble is that most stories don’t really happen until someone starts suffering and I didn't really start suffering until I was old enough to start talking to pretty girls. Luckily for me, however, my mother was able to fill me in on the details of at least one tragedy that I experienced before then. It was a tragedy of love, which is appropriate because that’s pretty much what this whole mess is:

A love story.

Before I Lose

There once was a baby with red hair and my name and my parents and a pacifier named Binky.

Binky had a football as the bit that you stick in your mouth. So it would be appropriate to say that I sucked at sports from the beginning. Binky wasn’t about sports though, Binky was about security. When I would cry (as I did often, despite not being in a cage with broken legs and bamboo fingers) my mum claims that I would be calmed only if I was brought Binky. I would not stop crying until I had Binky. I would not sleep without Binky.

I.

Loved.

Binky.

I was nineteen months old and my family was on a home assignment, which is a tradition where missionaries return to their home countries to beg people for money. We drove from Toronto to Seattle, all the while with me in the back seat sucking on Binky. Upon arrival at our destination, my parents wrenched the mangled, chewed up nub out of my mouth. It looked like a burn victim’s severed toe, discovered in the yard of some serial killer’s home after the dog got tired of gnawing on it.

Probably.

I mean, I'm editorializing a bit here. I don’t actually remember any of this because (forgive me) I was a stupid baby. So was Shakespeare once. Gandhi too. Mother Teresa used to poop herself.

What I did not know back then—in addition to literally everything because I was one—is that my parents regularly replaced Binky with new, identical football-ended pacifiers. It was thusly natural for them, upon seeing the horror sticking out of my mouth, to pry away the old pacifier—the only thing I had ever loved—and to replace it with a new one that looked less like a prop from CSI.

But I knew.

I knew it was not my Binky. I wanted my Binky. I did not care that it was broken, the burn victim toe Binky was the only Binky for me. It was the One True Binky. It would not do, I thought, to have an ever-stretching parade of temporary Binkys. I wanted something to hold on to and depend on. So I did what all reasonable infants do.

I cried in long suspended wails like a cruising fire engine. I cried with great sobs and gasps like a helium voiced man drowning in the ocean. I cried and cried and cried. My parents, unable to console me, put me in a room alone to let me scream myself to sleep. From downstairs they listened to my caterwauling for hours, refusing to give me the satisfaction of acknowledgement. I was persistent, though. Sometime after my initial moans failed to get results they started to hear,

shunk... waah! shunk... waah!

Which was the sound of me slamming my head into the wooden door upstairs over and over again. Pacifiers and love share a common inevitability that I came to understand that day:

They suck.

This is a love story. It’s also a rare instance where history has been recorded by the loser.

Us Against the World

I had a friend once.

His name was Peter. We became friends because we both liked turtles, he laughed at my jokes, and when we ate sandwiches we both threw away the corner bit of bread where we pinched the things between our thumbs and index fingers. Neither of us knew why, we just did.

Peter-and-I (which is what we were, a collective unit of he and I) went to a school called Trust Academy, which is an international institution for missionary kids built up on a hill at the edge of the city of Manila in the Philippines. My parents teach at Trust Academy and soon my sister, who went to college and is living the life of a responsible adult, will teach there as well. My sister was once a stupid baby who put a staple through my right index finger. She wanted to be an octopus when she was little. Really, she would have made for a horrible octopus, but it is kind of sad to see how quickly she abandoned her dreams.

Trust Academy has an amazing playground where Peter-and-I battled in feverish kickball matches and where my friend Dustin used to pogo stick for the entirety of lunch trying to get into the Guinness Book of World Records. It was where Abby Molaney kissed my cheek while we were swinging and I’d pretended like it was horrible even though I’d quite liked it. There was a merry go round that my sister split her head open flying off of and a big metal carriage with a big metal horse and these wooden animal swings where a boy in my class named Joe once whispered in confidence to us that his brother had gotten in big trouble for saying the F word and I had pretended to understand what that meant even though I didn't because I was a stupid baby and was just learning to count and spell and I only knew about eight F words and two of them were frog.

There was this building with a firefighter pole and a rope going down to the playground's lower levels. I once was hanging on that rope while this older kid was swinging it and he shook it so hard that I fell and cleaved open my face and had to be sewn back together. 186,000,000 seconds later that kid was in high school only a week away from graduating and he goes into my dad’s office (because my dad was the high school principal at the time) and he says, Mr. Foutz? with his head hung low and then he explains how way back when he’d swung the rope and that’s why his son had a scar on his face and he’d felt guilty about it ever since even though my dad and I and everyone else more or less forgot that it even happened.

That playground was its own turning world; a prototype for future big persons to learn how to interact with each other. It had its own rules and social system and games. One of those games was called Girls Chase Boys and Try to Catch Them and Kiss Them, which was a love it or hate it deal amongst the boys depending on how firm our faith was in cooties. We all ran of course, but we didn’t all run quite as fast as we could have or hide in places that were particularly hidden. Not Peter-and-I though. We loved the game too much to succumb to the charms of its players. He-and-I found ourselves sitting about fifteen feet up on the scaffolding that held up this massive slide one day as we hid out from the puckered lips of the cootie infected. It was there where we had this talk that stands out in bold color in my faded scrapbook of the way back whens.

You know how most people end up having girlfriends and getting married? I asked Peter. Our legs dangled from the scaffolding beneath the slide that dominated our tri-level playground dominion. All around we heard the faint screams of our male compatriots and the giggles of the girls who viciously hunted them. Peter-and-I never got caught. We were fast, cunning, and… well to be honest it could’ve been that we weren’t the objects of the young ladies’ fancies. I don’t know what draws the romantic interests of seven year old girls. Not gingers or kids from Austria apparently.

Yeah?

So, do you think that means that you and I will get girlfriends someday? You know, in a long time when we’re super old, like fifteen or something?

Peter shrugged. I guess so. Most people do so I guess we will too.

I paused. But we’ll still be friends.

Yeah, he said. Of course.

My whole life I’d lived in the same house and gone to the same school and had the same sandwich wasting friend. I suppose I just assumed that it would always be that way; Peter-and-I against the world. That moment under the slide was the first time that I realized that things might not always be so. If we could change so much that we would want girlfriends, how could we stop ourselves from changing into people who didn’t like each other?

Soon the girls were gone and we were bored of not being chased so I just said, Getting grown up is weird, and we hopped back down to earth as it continued turning, bringing us in loop back to that same place, though not as the people we once were.

—

There's only so far you can get with turtles and bad jokes before you need someone else in there to break a few awkward silences. Over the years Peter-and-I went through a lot of Third Guys. We would have stuck with one but they always wound up leaving. That happens a lot when you’re a missionary kid. People leaving. I guess that happens a lot to everybody but I think it happened faster to us. Our first Third Guy was a dude named Taylor. He packed up and left for Singapore in grade four.

Which sucked.

Next it was Josh, who was in our lives for just one year before returning to the distant and mysterious land known as, The States.

That sucked too.

After Josh came Sean, who was the best Third Guy a couple of middle school dudes could ask for. He was the best friend Peter-and-I had ever had. He was the kind of guy who made you feel special to know; the kind of guy who, also, made you feel like the kind of guy that a person would feel special to know when he laughed at your joke or offered you a sip of his Coke. We loved him.

So he left.

(Obviously.)

Soon after Sean told us he was leaving, Peter announced that he would be gone for a year as well. They said those things and I said, Okay, and then I went for a walk in the rain.

For years I'd had these ratty shoes that were always falling apart. Every time they did I would get more tape and patch them back together. That day, however, walking in the rain, I felt my sock sink into the thin layer of water flowing over the broken street. I looked down and saw the torn away sole of my right sneaker lying in a puddle a few feet back. When I went to pick it up, the ring of tape slid off my other shoe and it went to pieces as well. So I took off the shoes, and my socks, and I threw them all in a rusted barrel on the side of the road and returned barefoot to apartment 503 in the Valley Condominium.

After that I just wore sandals.

—

Sean and Peter were great friends to me, but we were all three pretty lousy to a lot of the people around us so I didn’t get much sympathy when they left. My classmates weren’t jerks about it and I didn’t get bullied and nobody hated me or anything as far as I know, but there was no Third Guy. There was no Second Guy. There was just a guy.

So I wrote a book.

Because that’s what lonely people do I guess.

I wrote a book and I made a vow that no temporary people were going to walk away with pieces of me again. My book was called, The Rift and even in the reality where I get raised in a cage and have bamboo shoots jammed up my fingernails that book is awful, but I discovered through it that writing was like having friends inside my head who didn’t go away unless I composed noble and bloody deaths for them. Writing might not have been better than real friends but it was certainly less of a gamble.

—

Peter came back the year we both started high school. I met him on campus a few days before classes began and he got out of the car, about four inches taller than I remembered, and walked over to me with a big grin on his face. He opened his arms for a hug and I put my hand out to pull him in for a chest bump and we kind of just squeezed into each other with my arm sandwiched between us.

How was Austria? I asked up to him.

Good. How was here? His voice was way deeper than it had been before.

Your voice is way deeper than it was before.

Yours too, he said.

Yeah. I tried to put my hands in my pockets but missed and so ended up just patting my thighs and blowing air out of my mouth. Good, I said. Here was good. I adjusted my glasses.

Oh yeah. Good. Good.

Do you hear from Sean?

He shrugged. I did a couple of times. You?

Couple times, I said, thinking as I said it that it must be true even though I couldn’t recall having made an attempt to contact him. I crossed my arms in front of me. I moved one hand to my hip. I adjusted my glasses. Wanna go praise Jesus? I laughed weakly.

Yeah, let’s go.

Our school had chapel sessions because, y’know, missionaries. There were students at Trust Academy who weren’t Christians but that was something you tended to keep quiet. Personally, I liked Jesus. Jesus never had to move back to the States. Well I mean, Mormon Jesus did, but Mormon Jesus wasn’t the Jesus I was into. Peter and I stood next to each other and clapped and sang too quietly for each other to hear. When the music was done we sat as we knew to do and a smiling face we recognized walked up and started speaking. He talked about a boy and a girl in love in an apple orchard who ate the wrong fruit and wound up crying for answers in the desert.

A lot of people miss, said the speaker, the fact that the Bible mentions another special tree in the garden of Eden. In addition to the tree of knowledge of good and evil, there was the tree of life, which… I tuned out, losing myself in a story in my head with lazer swords and dangerous journeys and a protagonist who always got what he wanted in the end.

When chapel finished, Peter and I walked outside and I said, Hey it’s great to have you back, man.

Yeah, it’s really good to see you, man, said Peter. We hugged, my face sort of up against a pectoral muscle that certainly wasn’t there before. I’ll see you at school, man.

You too, man. We were very manly.

I walked home in my sandals.

Talk

We were in Jesus class.

The room was on three tiers because it had been a choir room at some point. It had become the whatever room, which is why many of our freshman classes took place there, freshman typically being viewed as the, whatever age group. The smell from the blue carpet was mold, probably older than me, as was the map on the wall which still contained the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. Walking into that place made your body and eyelids feel heavy, the air inside a cloud of damp wood shavings thick like some 60s cheap motel room. I sat, rocking myself steadily with sandal jammed into that little cubby built into desks to allow students to text discreetly during class. I stared off into space and walked around in some poorly adjectivised writing world my brain. Rooms of voices like that class at that moment are just talk noise; so many words and inflections jumbling up like Play-Doh until the only discernible audio from it all are those Peanuts cartoon parent brown garble tones.

"Wuh wa waa, wuh wa wuh wawa waa. Wuhwa novel I’m writing..."

Her voice came through the wood chips, past the mold, clearer than the bold typeface of more than one antiquated communist nation. It was the unfamiliar voice of a girl somewhere off to the left of me. I couldn’t see her and I didn’t try to because I was way too cool for that. I just continued to rock back and forwards in my chair listening to that impossibly discernible voice talking about the book she was going to write for National Novel Writing Month.

"It’s about this girl who’s a musician and can make people fall in love with her by playing this one song. But she falls in love with this guy who lives in space and can only visit her once a year so she records these love songs for him to listen to while they’re separated. But then there’s this other guy—"

Hello, I said, standing a tier below her desk so that my head arrived just behind her purple pencil case. She swiveled her attention from the girl sitting next to her to angle down in my direction. Her name was Adilyn Chan. I knew this because we had the kind of school where you knew the names of everyone even if you didn’t talk to any of them (which I pretty much didn’t). That was the first of four things I knew about Adilyn Chan. The rest were these:

2. She was a Filipino girl with a Chinese last name, which meant she was probably rich.

3. She liked to write books, and (I could assume), read them.

4. She was beautiful.

Adilyn Chan had big hair like a black Shakira and eyes that were brown enormous behind glasses on a face too small for her features. I was caught in those eyes at that moment like headlamps on a deer. Or whatever.

Did I hear you mention NaNoWriMo? That’s what the cool kids called National Novel Writing Month. I mean, they would if there were any cool kids who knew about National Novel Writing Month.

She pulled a stray hair back behind her ear as she nodded and made a positive mouth closed sound that meant, Yup!

I don’t know if I’ll finish it, but I thought it would be fun, she said. I have this story in my head but it's hard to write it out without it turning into gross word mush.

It can be tough, I said as I climbed up and over the desk next to hers to get closer to her. This was about as unnatural as it sounds. "You just have to sit down and make yourself do it.