Ryan Endless

by NAN DENETTE

There are 916 names in my spreadsheet at work, but one of them, the best one, is Ryan  Endless. I describe him to my friends at the bar that night. Ryan Endless is a character in an 80s novel who wants to eat so many hamburgers that he stretches out infinitely in all directions. Ryan Endless is a  long-winded man who talks for years and years until he becomes inaudible to everyone else, like the  ancient sound of the earth creaking and groaning through space. Ryan Endless is a supergroup of musicians spanning billions of genres and instruments and galaxies. Each letter in Ryan Endless is the initial of one of the musicians, and the letters in their names are the initials of someone else, and so on, and the Rs stand for Ryan Endless each time, spiraling out like a fractal. I imagine writing under the pseudonym Ryan Endless: poems, texts, standup comedy, morning show bits for satellite radio. I imagine being beloved by many but known by few. I imagine being unbothered by the endless horrors of the  world because I, Ryan Endless, am even more endless and can swallow them whole.  

That night I dream my friends and I live underground, and I have to take care of their two pet lizards while they are away. Each day at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, I take the lizards to a man who hands out  crickets. He has dirty blonde hair and a thick mustache. We are still underground. Each lizard eats a cricket and I eat one too. Every night I wonder about skipping dinner, because I am tired of eating  crickets. I do not remember where my friends have gone.  

The next day I take the train home from the Peruvian restaurant where my friends and I ate human dinner in real life, which is where we went after the bar, which was where I went after work, which was where I  made a joke that morning about chewing off my own hand. I am thinking about chewing off my own hand because I am waiting for a call that probably isn’t coming. Ryan Endless would never get sad about  this kind of thing. Ryan Endless would remember that time stretches out in all directions like a man full of hamburgers, that eventually someone will love him in a way that isn’t temporary or strange, and that the best possible thing to do on a Thursday night, instead of chewing off his own hand, is go to a different bar, by his house this time and not by work, where different friends and two hundred twenty-seven strangers are watching basketball. After drinking two or five beers at this bar, he crawls into bed and waits for the call that will never come, and he dreams about crickets and lizards, and how it might not be so bad to live underground if somebody else is down there with him.