Being-Towards
by Kent Kosack
We’re temporal creatures, so Sam kept reminding me, but I wanted us not to be temporary. For us to have time together. Enduring, timeless us. Lately she’d been avoiding me, aloof even when we were—together wasn’t the right word. When we existed in the same space. She claimed she was busy on her dissertation on Heidegger. I said she was disserting me. Six months ago, this would have garnered a laugh. But my jokes now fell flat. Was it the gloomy philosopher’s influence on her, all those clunky terms her little Nazi coined were choking her, choking us: Das Man, Dasein, being-towards-death?
I told Sam so as we sat where grass greets sand at Madrona Beach, soaking up the August afternoon Pacific Northwest sun. I wanted to swim out to the floating dock, to dive into Lake Washington. She wanted to read some scholar rehash some critique: arguments, block quotes, footnotes. I couldn’t even read over her shoulder if I wanted to. It was all in German.
“Can’t we be being-towards-the beach?” I said. “Would that be ok with your pal Martin?”
She laughed, finally. But I wasn’t sure if it was at my joke or me. I didn’t like Heidegger or Jonathan, her advisor, another Heidegger expert—these Heideggerians sprout like weeds—and the handsome young chair of her department. He was too young, too thin, sported a too tight-fitting fleece instead of the loose jowls and tweeds I expected.
She patted my head like a person telling their dog they were through petting them. I stared at her, pouting, trying to look pitiful until I realized I was being pitiful and that maybe my being pitiful wasn’t an attractive trait. I wasn’t sure where Heidegger or Sam stood on pity, how it fit into all this being and time business. I walked into the lake. Warm and mucky. I swam to the floating dock, hoisted myself up, and observed Sam reading on her stomach, her legs sticking up, crossed at the ankles. Newly thirty, I felt naked and old. It might have been the high schoolers diving into the lake around me or the kids kicking up sand on the beach or the engagement ring I had hidden in a drawer at home, swaddled in thick ski socks and a lot of uncertainty. The water dripped off me and though it was eighty-two and sunny, I felt cold. Cold and old and temporary.
*
We rode home together on my tandem bicycle. I always sat up front, the captain at the helm, while Sam was the stoker in the rear. I’d spent snatches of free time over the winter building the tandem at the shop I work at. I built it for us. I thought we could ride south to Mexico for our honeymoon. Spend a few months exploring the Cascades, the sand dunes in Oregon, California. Only I needed to propose first. And she needed to say yes.
We climbed up through Washington Park, my clothes sticking to me with a glue of sweat and lake grime. I felt like I was doing all of the pedaling. “Are you still pedaling back there?”
“Yes.”
“Is that the truth? Because it doesn’t feel like you’re pedaling but I know a philosopher wouldn’t lie.”
“Why not?” She stopped pedaling altogether.
I felt the weight immediately, the strain in my hamstrings, an extra tightness in my calves. “Philosophy is all about the search for truth, no?”
“It’s not that simple.”
Now my face was slick with sweat but I could see the downhill stretch towards the Montlake Bridge before us. “True or false. What could be simpler?”
“What’s truth? What’s falseness?”
I knew better than to argue with Sam once we couldn’t agree on meanings. How can you get anywhere if you can’t even agree on your basic terms? She carried on for a bit, parsing, deconstructing, while I focused on getting us across the bridge.
*
One of Jonathan’s parties the following week. He held these often. His house in Greenlake was known as sort of salon for the graduate students at UW to mingle and exchange ideas away from the student vibe on campus. The same talk occurred in the lounge in the philosophy department, I imagined, but in Greenlake there were cheese boards and charcuterie. Same ideas, better grub.
I rode the tandem up from Ballard and met Sam there. I used the iron pineapple knocker and saw Sam through the leaded glass in the door wearing a blue polka dot sundress and her signature Chaco sandals. She opened the door, kissed me quickly on the lips, and let me in like she owned the place. I followed her into the foyer, unrolled my pant leg and smiled but Jonathan appeared behind her.
He said, “Well, if it isn’t the best bike mechanic this side of the cut.” He was wearing tight-fitting technical outerwear as usual: a navy merino wool polo shirt and army green synthetic shorts. Always looked like he was on the verge of setting off for a hike or kayaking trip, teasing the promise of an epic adventure just around the corner. With a certain vain satisfaction, I noticed his calves, unlike mine, were thin and puny. After a stalled conversation, they retreated to the kitchen to finish preparing samosas. I spent most of the night mooning by samosas as Sam and Jonathan talked philosophical shop until I left the party as the sun was setting. I wanted Sam to leave with me but she said she had more to discuss and I gathered not with me. Though I wanted to discuss something with Sam, too. A lot of somethings. To talk to Sam, with Sam, to understand her and be understood, to clarify our terms and finally settle on some shared meanings, but it was August in Seattle and the sun was setting and she wanted to stay and I wanted to go so I rode far and fast and in silence. I added some miles and flew past Fremont, over the cut and hooked south around Lake Union, the lights of the city coming to life reflected on the water’s surface. I sweated out the wine, burned off the samosas and cheese and some of my anger and turned north again towards home though I felt like I could have kept going. I just didn’t know where.
*
I spent the next day assembling bikes in the back of the shop and mulling over the future. How Sam might fit in it. While I was struggling with some finicky touring handlebars, Sam showed up with lunch and two tomes on Heidegger, saying she had the afternoon free.
“Free for me or Heidegger?”
“I think there’s time enough for both of you.”
I wanted to dispute this but held my tongue. I locked in the handlebars and took a bite of the PB&J Sam offered. I turned my attention to the wheels, checking to see if they were true. The rear was fine. Sam sat cross-legged in the corner, laboring over and with her Heidegger. I examined the smear of bike grease my hands had stained the bread of my sandwich with and couldn’t imagine what Sam saw in me, a mere mechanic. And of bikes no less.
Sam looked up, took a quick glance at the bike. “The front looks wobbly.”
“You a bike expert too, now? Learn that from your Martin?”
She stood, walked over, took a bite of my greasy sandwich, and kissed me hard on the mouth before she finished chewing. “I learned it being with you.”
I spun the front wheel. Sure enough, it was wobbly and would take some time to true.
*
Sam and I were supposed to ride the tandem together to her friend Marc’s wedding. The plan was she’d spend the night at my place in Ballard then we’d pedal together to the Vashon Ferry in the morning the day of the wedding. She’d only known Marc for two years but they’d gotten close so she was in the wedding party. And now, evidently, she needed to be there the day before.
“Wedding stuff,” she said over the phone. She could be that way, frustratingly imprecise with her language when it came to making solid plans yet could write treatises on the many meanings of the verb to be.
“I have needs too.”
“There will be plenty of time after the wedding.”
I wondered if she had some unique sense of the word, of time, that I wasn’t aware of or attuned to since lately we seemed to spend so little of it together. She caught a lift with someone to Vashon and left me to ride to the ferry alone, disserted. But once on the road I didn’t really mind. The ride was beautiful. The day. From the Fauntleroy Ferry I saw Mt. Rainier looming to the south, the evergreens of Vashon Island to the west, and the quiet churning Puget Sound. The weight of the ring box in my fanny pack, the weight of my resolve, of my future, nestled between a granola bar, a multi-tool, my wallet, and three pre-rolled joints.
Once off the ferry, I found a quiet corner to smoke a joint and call Sam. She didn’t pick up but I had the address so I began my ascent, leaving the terminal, feeling loose in the sun, warmed up by my ride to the ferry and wondering about Heidegger and what this young Jewish woman in Seattle in the 21st century saw in a dead Nazi, an oddball mystic proto-existentialist. I climbed, out of the saddle, hauling the extra weight of the tandem, excited, ecstatic even. I remembered a bit I’d read in Heidegger about ecstatic temporality, another gnomic passage I didn’t understand no matter how much Sam tried to explain it. But I felt it. For a moment. My version of these ecstasies, of existing in time, looking back at the baggage of time, at my history, thinking of my mother up in Bellingham, ecstatic I was getting married or that I was proposing at least, like it signified a maturation or seriousness that, working in a bike shop, she thought I lacked. And of my father who died of a sudden heart attack when I was five while out for his Sunday ride along Lake Whatcom and how they said he fell over his handlebars but his helmet protected him so he was unscathed except he was more than scathed, he was dead. I projected myself into the future, over the hill, the road lined thickly with madronas and bigleaf maples, a future with Sam and maybe she’d get a tenured-gig somewhere and I could open my own shop and sure I lacked some of Sam’s high-falutin credentials, the publications and awards, but I could be my own man, a business owner, a craftsman doing what he loved and she’d respect that and once the lecture hall emptied and I’d closed up shop we could take evening rides together on the tandem. Is this what Heidegger was all about? Was there something to this Martin fellow after all?
*
Marc’s wedding was held at his partner’s parents’ house. His fiancé Hamilton’s folks were old hippies who’d run a micro farm on Vashon for years but had sold off most of their land and retired. They still had a nice acre though, with a fancy six-bedroom craftsman home and views of the Puget Sound from the third-floor windows.
I rolled in and waved to Marc and Hamilton chatting with some people I didn’t know. I took my panniers off the rear rack and Marc told me to hurry upstairs to shower and change. I didn’t think I was late but somehow on the ecstatic ride or the ferry or smoking the joint I lost track of time so I thanked him and hurried inside, brushed past some other guests, bodies, faces, and climbed the stairs to find Sam kissing Jonathan or Jonathan kissing Sam or the two of them kissing each other. The motives and order of operations weren’t clear. Their lips were. The closeness of their bodies. It wasn’t a chaste greeting. Nor, it seemed, was it unreciprocated. I stood still on the stairs, my panniers heavy at my sides, my heart heavier still.
Jonathan spotted me first. Over Sam’s shoulder, he looked at me, then her, removed his hand from her hip and said, “Samantha.”
She turned, saw me on the stairs, and started to cry. I wasn’t sure what for. At being caught in the act? At hurting my feelings? Or were they tears of joy? Perhaps this was what Heidegger meant by ecstasy? Was this the authentic Sam? Was I the anxiety she must resolutely confront?
Despite it all, I wanted to go to her. Comfort her. Be with her. I felt each step, each stair, was conscious of the ones behind me, of every step that led me here, to a wedding on Vashon Island in the summer of my thirtieth year and of the future, of all sorts of possible futures, and yet I couldn’t imagine a single step without Sam.
But I walked past them in silence to the bedroom and closed and locked the door behind me. Out the window, a shard of the Sound shone through the trees. The handle turned behind me as someone tried to enter but, finding it locked, they left. I listened to the stairs creak with their descent. I stripped and stood in the shower thinking about attunement and anxiety and when I first met Sam on a group ride with my bicycle club and her cut-off jeans and powerful legs and the way we fell in together, attuned, wordlessly matching pace. Like we’d done it a thousand times before and would a thousand times more. A familiarity so easy and immediate that when the group ride ended, we continued on together to a brewery, to a relationship, to a future together. Or so I’d thought. So I thought we’d thought.
*
I sulked in the room awhile but decided I wouldn’t mar Marc’s wedding with my personal miseries. I showered and put on my nicest jeans and the khaki sport coat Sam had snagged for me in a thrift store. I exchanged my bike shoes for a pair of penny loafers I bought at the Goodwill and looked at myself in the mirror. It was all wrong. I was all wrong. I had anxiety to spare, Martin. I acknowledged that. But where was the subsequent authenticity? In fact, I felt like a fraud. Sam was a fraud. Marriage was a fraud. Academia and philosophy too. Love, also, a fraud. And Martin’s willfully obtuse ideas? Frauds upon frauds upon frauds.
I heard someone blow a trumpet or a bugle and figured the ceremony had either begun or ended or some sympathetic musician was blowing a dirge for the death of my future with Sam so I braced myself with two slaps to the face and went downstairs and joined the forty or so people in the folding chairs before the podium on the lawn. Sam stood up front behind Marc’s sister who was behind Marc. I felt her eyes on me as I took a seat in the backrow. I stared at the back of Jonathan’s head two rows in front of me. I thought about getting up and yanking him by his luscious ponytail, or somehow hitching him to my tandem and dragging him behind it. Then I looked at Hamilton. At Marc. At their happiness glowing up there and emanating outwards and how authentic it all seemed but hadn’t Sam and I had that? Something bright and real? Not dependent on our anxieties or the prospect of death as gloomy old Martin insisted, but maybe in spite of it. Just this little bit of goodness between two souls trying to get by.
I didn’t hear much of the mystical lovey-dovey stuff that was said by Hamilton’s mother, a thin white woman with thick dreadlocks who’d gotten ordained online just to officiate this wedding. But I saw Marc and Hamilton kiss and I remembered the first time Sam and I had kissed. Our third date. A twenty-five-mile bike up to Mukilteo. The lighthouse there. The approaching ferry. Sam and I together on the rocks eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and our knees touching and I felt strange for a second. I couldn’t place the feeling. Then I realized I didn’t want to be elsewhere. Didn’t feel my usual impatience to be on my bike, exploring, moving. She took my hand and we kissed for a while then we finished our sandwiches and watched the ferry unload as if a silent yet binding deal had been struck there on the rocks beside the water.
Only I was wrong. We were wrong. No deal.
The ceremony ended. People began migrating to the tables of food beneath a nearby marquee. I didn’t feel like celebrating. I went inside, changed, stuffed the sport coat back into the pannier and walked back to my bike to start the twenty-mile ride home.
Sam was waiting for me beside the bike.
“I don’t want to ruin Marc’s big day here by getting into an argument or causing a scene. I just want to leave,” I said.
“We need to talk.”
“I’m tired of talking.”
“To really talk,” she said.
Jonathan approached, undeterred by my glare. I put my panniers on the rack, stepped over the bike, and tried to ride away but Sam rested a hand on my shoulder and I remembered that hand in Mukilteo and felt calm, again, for a moment.
“You misunderstand,” Jonathan said.
“Do I? Maybe I’m a bit slow. I didn’t go to college after all. I’m just a simple bike mechanic. But to me, to my unlearned eyes, it looked like you were making out with my girlfriend. True or false?”
He smiled and said, “What’s truth? What’s falseness?”
Hearing her words in his mouth burned away all the calm Sam’s touch had imparted. I snapped. I stood on the pedals and, there’s no better, less incriminating way to say this: I charged. At first, Jonathan kept smiling. Because I’m sure I looked ridiculous. But once I closed the distance between us, my gravel tires ripping through the front lawn, he ran. I gave chase even as Sam yelled for me to stop. Jonathan yelled “whoa” and “calm down” as if I were a skittish horse. I chased him through the maze of folding chairs, around the podium and nearly caught him by the marquee though he dodged at the last minute, the spry monkey, and my front tire slammed into the dessert table. A few éclairs fell onto the lawn but the rest survived. I think some of the guests thought we were a comedy team and laughed it off. Maybe we were. Though if I caught him, I wasn’t sure what I’d do, how far I’d go.
I watched him scurry towards Sam and her look of disgust—directed at who? Me? Him?—further enraged me. I grabbed one of the metal poles propping up the marquee, yanked it out of the earth, and screamed “the ready-to-hand!” I tucked it under my arm like a lance and charged once more, the lawn tearing up beneath me, Hamilton’s mother yelling something about the cost of sod, the marquee slowly collapsing behind me, my future with Sam dissolving with each frenzied rotation of the pedals. I wanted to kill. Or at least maim. I tightened my grip on my make-shift lance, screamed “I’ll show you being-towards-death!” and pedaled harder than I ever have in my life. Just as I was about to make contact, a mere yard from shish kebabbing the most pompous Heideggerian in the Evergreen State, Jonathan grabbed Sam and held her in front of him like a shield. She didn’t look scared so much as disappointed. I dropped my lance, squeezed the brake levers tight and flew over the handlebars. As I tumbled through the air for three interminable seconds, I wondered about how we’re thrown into the world, sure, but so is everyone, and maybe some of us can land in the same place, can follow the same trajectory, that maybe authenticity doesn’t need to be derived exclusively from being-towards-death, but that you can exist by being-towards-someone, by being for and with and toward another, not an amorphous they but a specific someone, that you can be authentic in contrast to another, against the backdrop, the horizon, of a beloved other.
Then I thought: who cares?
Sam didn’t want me and I’d probably be dead in a moment, not being-towards it but actually breaking my neck in the Vashon Island mud until I realized with a mixture of relief and regret that, like my prudent father, I’d remembered to put on my helmet. I landed with a thud at Sam’s feet, deeply hurt and yet somehow unscathed, my heart not attacked, exactly, but definitely broken.
*
Dunce-like, I sat in detention in Hamilton’s mother’s garden on the opposite side of the house, catching my breath, trying to recover what was left of my dignity. Here came Sam. I tried to be angry but there was nothing there. Nothing but a sort of quiet loss like on the anniversary of someone’s death and you feel a little numb to it but it doesn’t take much to remember underneath the numbness is suppressed but ever-present pain. My hands trembled. Sam smiled, then wiped off some mud that I hadn’t noticed sticking to my face.
“You were wrong, you know.”
“About Heidegger?”
“Him too. And about Jonathan. About us. What you think you saw.”
“What did I see?”
“You saw a confused and lonely man mistake someone’s admiration for their work for deeper affection or attraction.”
“I did?”
“And it will never happen again.”
I thought about Jonathan, lonely Dr. Jonathan with his credentials and his puny calves. Jonathan facing his own being-towards death and finding not authenticity but fear, wishing he could once again orient himself towards life or to the most vivacious thing in his vicinity: Sam. And who better to glom on to, with her kindness, her warmth and sincerity? No one. As I well knew.
“I care about Jonathan but I don’t want to be with Jonathan. I want to be with you. That’s the truth.”
“What is being? What is truth?” I said, my voice dry and brittle.
As if to answer or refute my questions, she kneeled in front of me and rummaged in her pocket. “I was looking for a joint. I thought we could use one. And I found this.” She took my ring box out of her front pocket and held it solemnly in her right palm, the left supporting it as if it were five tons instead of five grams. “The answer is yes. That is, if you still want to ask the question.”
I looked from her to the box and back to her. I nodded.
“Yeah?”
I nodded again and started crying. She started crying. After ten minutes, we went to look for that joint.
*
We rode home together the next morning with Sam in front as the captain for a change. We overslept so I doubted we could catch our preferred ferry yet I wasn’t in a hurry to reach the terminal. The first few miles were slow going because I had to get used to being the stoker in the rear and letting Sam steer. Once we found our rhythm—pedaling in unison, leaning into each curve in the road, the terminal appearing on the horizon—I doubt either of us spared a thought for our destination. We were too busy having a great time.
Kent Kosack is a writer with recent work in minor literature[s], the Heavy Feather Review, 3:AM Magazine, Some Words, and Burning House Press. His novella, Adar's Freedom, is available now through Subtle Body Press. You can read more at kentkosack.net.