Courtney

By Stefan Jurewicz

There’s an old warehouse by the main coastal road, where it straddles the mountain’s edge. I must have passed it a hundred times without knowing it was there. But one day, for a reason I’ll never know, I noticed it. As if it had popped up overnight. A rather unimpressive, distinctly industrial, cream-coloured shoebox plopped on the shoreline like an afterthought.

The longer I looked at it, the less I believed it had existed before that moment. The view of the water from the mountain’s edge was breathtaking—and my favourite part of my rare commutes to and from the office. To have never noticed such a visually incongruous blotch on the landscape felt akin to discovering your nose on your eighteenth birthday.

It took two more trips before my curiosity finally got the better of me. After a string of miscommunications that resulted in me being called in to the office to fix an inventory system issue that never existed, I found myself with a free afternoon. It was on the ride home that the idea struck me to poke around the warehouse. I had no idea what it held, or it was even still operational.

At the bottom of the hill, I swung my bike off the main road and onto the one that led toward the pier. The warehouse was just a little farther down the shoreline and figured it would be a good place to start. I rocketed down the boardwalk all the way to its edge, then dismounted and walked my bike over the rocks that lay just beyond. It wasn’t until the shore veered suddenly to the left that the warehouse peaked out from behind the rocky bluff framing the pier’s northmost point.

A second, dilapidated pier lay in shambles at the waterfront—presumably from when the warehouse had been in use. Behind it, the shoebox I had seen from the main road was a behemoth, and even more unsightly up close. Panels of rusted-out, corrugated metal lay strewn about the perimeter where they had fallen off the side of the building. Discarded tools lay about as if whoever was using them had left quickly, expecting to return. Everything was eerily still; nothing moved except for the odd piece of trash caught in the wind.

Along the front of the building were a series of fourteen-foot-high loading bays. I found that especially odd. From where I was standing, I couldn’t see any roads going in or out from the warehouse—just the pier. Why, then, would there be any, let alone multiple, loading bays for transport trucks?

I left my bike on the rocks and walked up to the nearest one. The garage-style door opened with a chain hoist, but the chain itself was padlocked to another part of the structure. I took a cursory look down the line and noticed another bay—two down from where I stood—with no lock on it. I made quick work of pulling the door open and crawled up the four-foot concrete slab and into the building.

I wasn’t sure what I was expecting to find, or if I expected to find anything. I simply felt drawn to the place, as if it held some sort of special significance. Though what kind of significance, I had no idea.

Inside, the whole place had been gutted. Rows of latticed, floor-to-ceiling steel, once full of pallets containing whatever materials this warehouse had processed, were now completely bare. Everything that wasn’t bolted to the building itself had been removed and brought somewhere else. Everything except for a glossy, black, four-piece drum set in the middle of the warehouse floor. A beam of light coming from a hole in the roof illuminated the kit like it had been sent from heaven. All that was missing was a choir of angels and cherubs playing tiny harps.

My first thought was that I must have stumbled onto someone else’s secret jam space—that I hadn’t been the first to notice the empty shoebox on the beach. It made sense. What kind of cosmic forces would have had to align that one of the loading bay doors just happened to be left unlocked? I considered leaving. I had no good reason to be there and didn’t want to cause any trouble. Yet, I found myself walking closer to the drums. There was a thick coating of dust all over the skins, cymbals, and the top of the bass drum. I breathed a sigh of relief. Whoever had put these here hadn’t been back in a very long time, and it was reasonably safe to assume they weren’t coming back anytime soon either.

With no regard for the integrity of my jacket, I wiped away as much of the dust as I could and sat behind the kit. I put my right foot on the bass drum pedal and gently tapped it. The beater sprung forward, hit the drum, and a low resonant boom echoed through the warehouse. I tapped the pedal again, harder this time. Boom. My heart pounded in my chest.

I had never played the drums before. I understood the basic concept but had never sat behind a kit and done it myself. A pair of dusty drumsticks lay on the floor next to the bass drum, so I picked them up and did what any rational human being would do—I proceeded to hit every drum and cymbal as fast and as hard as I possibly could. My first drum solo.

When I paused to catch my breath, my ears were ringing, and my heart was beating so heavily in my chest I could practically feel the force of the blood being pumped through my body. Sweat beaded on my brow. Something had happened in that brief interval between the silence and the devastating noise that had followed it. I just couldn’t get a handle on what that something was. It felt as if a switch in my brain had been turned off—or on, I suppose. I wasn’t quite sure.

I packed up and went home, careful to leave everything as close to how I found it as possible. That night, back in my apartment, I dreamed of playing the drums. I woke up seeing patterns and caught myself tapping them out on the counter as I made my morning coffee. As I cracked open my laptop to check my emails my feet bounced back and forth under the desk. I typed to a consistent tempo, adding flourishes of more complex rhythms over clusters of nearby letters. Everything I did was in service to some internal metronome, some ticking mechanism inside of me.

The second I closed my laptop for the day—4:30P.M. on the dot—I stuffed my face with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and was halfway to the warehouse before I was fully aware of what I was doing. I biked to the base of the mountain road, down the side road to the pier, all the way to the end of the boardwalk, climbed over the rocks and around the bluff, and crawled up into the warehouse as if I’d expected there to be a line and wanted to get a good spot.

I spent the rest of the evening and well into the night repeating the basic patterns I had been tapping out around the house on different parts of the drum kit. By the time the sun had set I could loop a basic beat, and the moment it became comfortable I felt myself slip into a kind of trance, losing myself for hours on end.

I repeated this ritual every day for the next month—I would work until 4:30P.M., eat a quick dinner, then bike down to the warehouse and play drums until my arms gave out. Drumming became meditative. I never again attempted to play all the drums I could as fast as I could, but instead I would start playing a beat and let it move where it wanted until I found a pattern and tempo that felt right. Then I would repeat that pattern on an endless loop, losing myself to the thunderous reverberation, lost in thought while simultaneously thinking of nothing at all.

I never told a soul about the warehouse or the drum kit. I had no one to tell. I worked from home and lived alone. There was no one in my life to ask where I was going, or why I always came home so late. No one but Courtney.

***

The chime of an electronic marimba shook me from a strange dream—I had been riding a bull like a horse down the aisles of a grocery store. I turned off the alarm, rubbed the image of wall-to-wall canned goods and steaming cowpies from my mind’s eye, and swung myself out of bed to start the day. I showered, dressed, ate breakfast, made myself a cup of coffee, then cracked open my work laptop, expecting to pick up where I had left off the day before. Immediately, an email notification lit up the top corner of my screen, the subject line reading “TODAY: SYSTEM MAINTENANCE TRAINING.”

I cursed. I wasn’t participating in the training; I was leading it. While most days I worked from the comfort of my apartment, occasionally my job required I commute to the office. Since I was the only IT guy in the entire company, system maintenance training was my responsibility. It was a relatively new policy the higher ups were convinced would make my life easier, specifically by not having to bike down to the office every time someone lost a couch. I was to teach a new group of employees how to navigate the company’s inventory system, as well as basic troubleshooting skills. However, in practice, I found myself doing more “maintenance training” than I ever did in-calls in the first place.

“Where you off to, babe?” came a voice from the direction of the bedroom.

She came out in a white slip with lace detailing around the bust—a rare departure from her usual black jeans and white tank top. Her bright red curls sat in a loose bun on top of her head.

“What’re you wearing?” I asked, ignoring her question.

“Oh, this?” she twirled in the doorway, giving me the full three-sixty, “I don’t know. Thought I’d change it up. Do you like it?”

I nodded. “It’s nice. Suits you.”

She blushed, then, nodding in the direction of the shoes I was pulling on my feet, asked again where I was off to.

“System maintenance training,” we said in unison.

“I hate when you do that,” I said.

She grinned innocently as I shook my head, annoyed.

“Anyway, hang out if you want. I shouldn’t be gone long.”

I was five minutes down the road when the weather suddenly shifted. The wind picked up, carrying with it clouds so dark it looked as if portions of the night sky were floating on the daytime, and in the distance a great sheet of rain rushed towards me like a stampeding animal, head down, horns leveled. I took the hit head-on, slowing down slightly so as not to lose balance on the slick asphalt, and accepted my waterlogged fate.

By the time I arrived at the office the sky was clear and bright, and I was the only person on the street, it seemed, that hadn’t been able to find cover from the rain. Drenched from head to toe and actively dripping all over the floor—leaving a puddle anywhere I stood still for too long—I pushed open the front door to the furniture company I worked for.

Liz, the secretary of almost three years, waved at me enthusiastically from her seat behind the front desk. In seconds flat she leapt up from her chair, rounded the corner, and came back with a fresh towel, which she extended towards me with a dimpled, toothy grin on her face.

“Thanks,” I said, “is Jensen here yet?”

“Yup. Got here maybe fifteen minutes ago. I’ll let him know you made it.”

She hung up the phone just as a hand clamped down hard on my right shoulder.

“Hey McCurdy! You wet yourself?”

The grating laughter that followed betrayed Colin Ek’s identity before I turned to see his nauseatingly handsome face inches from mine, grinning like an idiot. For as long as I’d had the misfortune of knowing him, Colin had always spoken to me loudly and with other people nearby, so everyone could bear witness to how much funnier and smarter and better looking he was than me.

I was under no delusion that either of us were any better than the other. We were both career employees for a furniture company that had barely turned a profit last quarter. Neither of us owned a home, had a wife or kids, or had an interesting side hustle. I didn’t care that he had a car while I biked to work, or that his phone was newer than mine. I didn’t envy him whenever he bragged about sleeping with one of the other women in the office. I gave him very little to work with in the way of reaction, which is why Colin had made it his personal mission to break me—he had said so, in as many words, the very first week we’d met.

“What’s the matter, McCurdy? Got a bit too much water sloshing around up there?”

He jabbed at my forehead with a meaty finger. I grabbed it and pulled it off me, taking a step backwards.

“Don’t touch me,” I said flatly.

“Ooh, he means business!” Colin mocked, putting his hands up as if surrendering.

He looked over at Liz to make sure she was watching. She shot him a dirty look and went back to reading something on her computer screen. Disappointment flashed on his face for a moment before returning his focus to me.

Unfortunately for him, the opportunity to save face ended with the arrival of Harold Jensen, CEO of Jensen furniture, who quickly shooed Colin away and ushered me into a board room full of trainees.

***

I was unusually tense on the ride home, so I swung by the warehouse to play drums for a bit.

I had gotten into the habit of hiding my bike behind the dumpster next to the warehouse, on the off chance that it was visible from the road. Somewhere along the way my initial fear of having stumbled onto someone else’s secret jam space had been reversed—now I feared someone might stumble onto my secret jam space.

The drum kit glowed in the fading daylight as I pulled open the bay door. Without a word I crossed the warehouse floor and sat behind it. I took a deep breath and counted off—one, two, three, four—and started playing. I could feel the tension in my body, hear it in my playing. I felt stiff, robotic. I inhaled two, three, four, exhaled two, three, four, inhaled two, three, four, exhaled, two, three, four, and felt the tension melt away with every bar. Finally—crash!—an explosive release of energy. The last of my frustrations with Colin, with system maintenance training, all detonated in a furious wash of white noise. I fell into a deep state of relaxation, while simultaneously sweat began pouring down my face. I shut my eyes.

I saw my college girlfriend, Amy Winters, in her dorm room. She had a look on her face I remembered quite well—a mixture of amusement, sadness, disgust, and anger all rolled into one. She was yelling, and her body language made it clear she was mocking someone, but I heard nothing except the echo of drums in an empty warehouse. But I didn’t need to hear her to know what she was saying because this wasn’t a dream—it was a memory.

I don’t remember what I had said to set her off. All I remember was that whatever it was had been the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. Amy, just like every other girlfriend I’d had, claimed I was ‘too sensitive.’ Said I was always so focused on ‘stupid little details.’ But it was those little details that mattered most to me. Whether they were the way the corners of her eyes wrinkled up when she smiled or the way she tilted her phone away from me whenever she got a text after nine p.m., they all meant something. But no matter how hard I had tried to shut it off, it was never enough. It always leaked through.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized how much my past relationships had in common with a drumbeat—doomed to follow the same patterns, though not without the odd variation, punctuated by moments of intense excitement. Not to mention the harder and faster the beat, the harder it was to keep up.

I opened my eyes. Almost all the daylight had disappeared, only a narrow band of light able to penetrate the expansive warehouse. I transitioned my right hand from the hi-hat to the ride cymbal and that band caught the edge of the cymbal as it swung, casting a beam of light across one side of the building. During its arc downward I spotted her leaning back against the far wall, legs crossed, thumbs in her pockets. White tank top, black jeans, brown leather boots, and that unmistakable bright red hair. I stopped playing.

“Thought I might find you here,” she said, when the final crash finished ringing out.

She stepped forward out of the shadows, her boots clacking against the concrete floor.

“You said you’d be right back,” she said.

“Shit. I know. I just… got distracted,” I mumbled.

“You know they only treat you like that because they resent your self-control.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“It makes them jealous.”

I nodded as she came up right next to me and wrapped my head in a big hug, pulling me tight against her chest. She smelled like cinnamon.

“Ready to go home now?” she cooed.

“Yeah.”

***

As I walked my bike up the stairs to my apartment, Courtney fell in behind me.

“It’s your birthday tomorrow,” she said between the second and third floor.

“I know,” I said.

“So? What do you want to do?”

“It’s a Wednesday. I’m not going to do anything,” I replied.

I didn’t need to be looking at her to see the cartoonish pout on her face.

“Aw c’mon, Charlie! Have some fun!” she whined.

I waved off her moaning like a bad smell and pulled my bike through the door to the fourth floor. My apartment was the first to the right. Inside, I rolled my bike into the living room and immediately crossed to the liquor cabinet. I grabbed a bottle of pinot noir and a glass, uncorked it, poured myself a drink, and slugged it back like I was thirsty.

I poured myself a second, then carried it to the coffee table in front of the couch, upon which lay a leatherbound notebook and matching black pen. I set down the wine, unbuckled the clasp securing the notebook cover, and opened it to the page marked with a thin piece of black fabric. This was my ‘drum diary,’ if you will—a written account of all the thoughts and ideas and epiphanies I’d had while behind the kit. I used it in the same way one might keep a dream diary. I had no idea if I would ever reread any of it, or if there was anything to be learned from it, but it felt like documenting the process was the least I could do.

I flipped back through the pages. There were twenty-three of them, full of barely legible scrawls. I flipped to a fresh page and began writing about Amy Winters.

***

The next morning, mug in hand, I opened my work laptop. An email notification appeared in the top corner. My heart dropped, fearing another system maintenance seminar. The subject line read “HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!!!” followed by a series of emojis—a smiley face with a party hat, a cake, a balloon, and a couch (I guess just in case I forgot what company I worked for).

I clicked on the notification and a cheesy e-card filled the screen, complete with Harry Jensen’s signature in the bottom right corner. I kept my volume on mute by default, but out of curiosity bumped it up a couple notches to confirm a suspicion I had. Sure enough, the Beatles ‘Birthday’ played in the background. I shook my head, a smirk on my face, then deleted the email.

I wasn’t one of those ‘I hate my birthday’ types. I’ve just always been indifferent towards my own, even as a child. We never had much money to go around (despite my mom working two jobs), so the link between my birthday and gifts and parties and cake and special treatment was never really established. To me, my birthday had always looked the same as any other day. However, the older I got, the funnier it became to watch people fawn over their own existence for a day—and to watch everyone else play along. I grew to love birthdays, just in my own way, and strictly as a third party.

Aw c’mon, Charlie! Have some fun! Courtney’s voice rattled through my head. My vision blurred as my focus shifted inwards. It was a fact that I had never celebrated my birthday, but that didn’t necessarily mean I never could.

Immediately I got the giggles, imagining myself in a party hat, walking into the board room at the office, and proclaiming “hey everyone! It’s my birthday!” I imagined the way they would all cheer and clap and burst into boisterous song, all in my honour.

As I wiped the tears from my eyes, a somewhat sobering thought struck me. I had something my mom didn’t when she was my age, trying to raise me on her own—expendable income. And the longer I considered it, the more I realized that the only thing keeping me from doing anything to celebrate the day I breathed air for the first time was me. I was the only thing left propping up this idea that birthdays belonged to everyone else.

Screw it, I thought. Tonight, I would do something needlessly frivolous, for no other reason than to celebrate my thirty-two seasons as a cast member on planet earth.

***

The dingy, nautically themed pub at the end of my street had a fair selection of scotches behind the bar. Not being much of an expert in the world of spirits, I embarrassingly asked the bartender for a glass of his finest scotch on the rocks, which outed me much faster than I could have ever anticipated.

“Must be a big deal, whatever yer celebratin’,” he laughed.

I turned red and he kindly backed off, gently explaining the apparent faux pas of ordering a good scotch on ice, and slid me a beautifully ornate glass with a small amount of translucent brown liquid inside it.

“Sip it slow,” he warned.

I nodded, blushing but thankful for the insight, and started a tab. As the bartender floated away to serve someone else, I swivelled on my barstool to people watch. Occasionally my eyes would meet someone else’s, though never for long before they returned to their own business, as if totally unimpacted by my presence.

I sipped my scotch as prescribed, and the complexity of flavour made me gasp like a lunatic. I turned bright red again and swivelled back towards the bar. I had never consumed anything quite like it. It felt as if someone had taken the concept of the three-course meal chewing gum that had turned Violet Beauregarde into a giant blueberry and dragged it across the forest floor. Layers of earthy, green, multifaceted flavours cascaded over my tongue in waves, each one as novel as the last, equal parts delightful and vile.

As I set down my empty glass, another appeared next to it.

“Pretty busy for a Wednesday,” said Courtney.

“Yup.”

“Good night for people watching.”

I nodded and took a sip of my new drink.

“Do you want to play a game?” she asked.

“Sure, why not?”

She swung around in her seat and pointed at a couple playing pool at the only table in the bar.

“He’s a schoolteacher. Math. She’s a mechanic.”

“She’s the mechanic?”

Courtney nodded emphatically.

“Yup. Does that intimidate Mr. Teacher?”

As soon as she finished speaking, the couple burst into laughter, loud enough to turn a few heads. The schoolteacher—or whoever he was in real life—slid his arm around his date’s waist, playfully pulling her against him as she surveyed the table for what move she wanted to make next. The tiniest smile still played at the corner of her lips—the last remaining artifact of the joyous noise they had just made together.

“Doesn’t look like it,” I said.

“If anything, it looks like they’re ready to go home and make some little shop teachers.”

She swirled her scotch around in her glass, then took a sip. Her eyes fluttered closed.

“Violet Beauregarde,” I said.

One eye opened and she pursed her lips slightly.

“Clever.”

“Alright, how about them?” I said, pointing to a group of women at a booth on the opposite end of the bar from the pool table, each one holding a glass of red wine.

“Don’t point, it’s rude. But mom’s night out, for sure.”

“You wouldn’t believe how many babysitters I had to call tonight!” I said in a high-pitched, Brooklyn accent.

“But it’s all worth it to spend time with my gworls,” she played along.

I squinted my eyes to try and make out more details in the dimly lit pub—something to keep the bit going—and realized the ‘moms’ in question didn’t look any older than I was. One in particular, a brunette with shoulder-length hair and a strappy green dress, was quite attractive.

“What about her? Is she a mom too?” Courtney asked, as if reading my mind.

The brunette smiled a big, toothy smile, likely laughing at something said by one of her friends, and I felt my cheeks get hot. I turned towards Courtney.

“No,” she continued, “she’s not a mom. Can’t be. Just look at her.”

“Who is she?” I said, doing my best not to let my tone give too much away.

Courtney, still playing the game, paused for a moment, a genuine look of confusion on her face.

“Huh. I can’t think of anything.”

She shrugged and turned back towards the bar. Game over. I took another look at the brunette before doing the same. I wasn’t sure what I was hoping to find, but I had never seen Courtney stumped before. Anyone could be anyone from a distance, so it struck me as odd that not only had she been unable to assign some arbitrary character to the woman, but she had also explicitly expressed there was no way she could be a mom.

Without thinking about it, I began tapping a rhythm out on the tabletop, my feet bouncing in time on the crossbar of my stool. Buoyed by the two scotches sloshing around in my stomach, my thoughts began to drift away from the present, and a fully-formed thought whizzed into my brain—express delivery.

I’d likened my past relationships to a drumbeat—repetitive, cyclical. A loop doomed to reiterate itself. But in a flash of insight, I suddenly realized I had only been playing them that way. Much like my first weeks behind the kit, I had been trying so hard to perfect the one or two ‘beats’ I knew that it hadn’t occurred to me that perhaps they weren’t the right tempo or groove for the song I was trying to play—that there were infinite variations to learn. A drumbeat doesn’t start over, it marches forward. It pushes. It changes. It breathes. Maybe I wasn’t doomed to repeat the same mistakes for the rest of my life. Maybe I just needed to change the pattern.

I snapped back to the bar. The bartender was talking to me.

“Hm?”

“How you’ doin’ over here?” he gestured towards my empty glass.

I quickly glanced back over my shoulder at the booth where the brunette had been sitting. At some point while I’d been absorbed in my thoughts, the group of women had cleared out. I turned back to the bartender.

“I’ll take the bill please.”

As he left to close my tab, I turned towards the bar’s front window and caught the tail of a green dress getting into a cab on the street.

***

Exhausted and damp, I unlocked the front door of my apartment. There, sitting on my couch, wearing the same thing she always wore, was Courtney.

“There you are. I was just about to give up and go to bed.”

“Sorry,” I said noncommittally. I was standing in front of the fridge, rolling up and stuffing cold cuts into my mouth.

“It’s okay. Rough day?”

I pause for a moment, ham dangling from my lips. It had been an office day. Not system maintenance training, just a regular in-call.

“Actually, no. It was pretty good.”

My mind’s eye flashed back to sitting in the lobby, chatting with Liz, the receptionist. After I’d fixed the office photocopier, I was on my way out the door when she asked if I could spare a minute. Without going into much detail, she explained that she had been going through a rough patch with her roommate and her anxiety was getting in the way of articulating her side in arguments.

Liz’s cheery, upbeat attitude had always made coming into the office slightly less agonizing for me, but we didn’t know each other well. We weren’t close. I didn’t understand why she had chosen me to confide in. I told her as much.

She had turned beet red, and guilt welled up in my chest for putting her on the spot. She pushed her blonde hair back behind her ear and stared at a spot on the desk as she spoke.

“I don’t know. You’re always just so… chill all the time. Nothing gets to you. So, I thought, I don’t know… maybe you could teach me?”

“Teach you?” I parroted.

She met my gaze and smiled.

“Yeah. Maybe Friday?”

Courtney appeared at my side and snatched the last cold cut from my fingers.

“So, what were you doing at the warehouse so late, then?”

“I just wanted to play,” I shrugged.

“For fun?” she mocked, “I didn’t think you knew how to do that.”

“Hey, people change,” I laughed.

She swivelled around in my desk chair, her face half-illuminated by the lamp in the corner of the room. Her expression was different now, more sombre. She took me in for a moment before speaking.

“So, this is it, huh?”

“For now, I think, yeah.”

A small smile played at the corner of her lips, though not strong enough to hide her obvious disappointment.

“I’m happy for you.”

“I know.”