Nobody Knows I'm Here Right Now
A Short Story
The thought came to Kate abruptly. It interrupted the other panicked voices in her head, the ones shouting, “Keep swimming!” and “Fucking move!” Like a conductor slicing the air with a baton, the thought silenced the orchestra of pandemonium crescendoing in Kate’s head, leaving only its ominous reverberation:
Nobody knows I’m here right now.
It was Sam who had said it, wasn’t it? Yes, Kate was certain it was Sam, remembering the deadpan expression on her friend’s face as she said it. Sam’s words had sent a chill down Kate’s spine, and for a moment, she felt disembodied, floating above the back booth at Casa Bonita and looking down at their empty margarita glasses. This was months and months ago, and Kate hadn’t thought about it since.
But now, far from shore and struggling to tread water in the immensity of the Pacific Ocean, Sam’s words returned to Kate in big block text, neon red and strobing:
Nobody knows I’m here right now. Nobody knows I’m here right now. Nobody knows I’m here right now. Nobody knows I’m here right now. Nobody knows I’m here right now. Nobody knows I’m here right now…
And as Kate looked up at the towering wave suspended in front of her, its powerful momentum sucking up all the coast like a vacuum, her body froze. She tried to tell her limbs to move — fucking move! — but she could only transmit a solitary thought, ripping through her head with the fidelity of a blown-out siren and then a faint whisper —
Nobody knows I’m here right now. Nobody knows I’m here right now…
As Kate swallowed a mouthful of salt water, her eyes darted back toward the beach. Empty. Deserted. Nobody was there. Nobody had been there all afternoon. When her eyes snapped back to the mounting wave, she could no longer see its crest. In an instant, the wave had doubled in size, scraping against the cloudy sky.
It was nice of Sam to take her out that night, all those months ago, drinking overpriced margaritas at Casa Bonita. Sam was aware of how hard of a time Kate had been having after the breakup, and Kate was grateful to have a night out — something to look forward to. But Kate knew her friend’s sympathy only stretched so far; Sam would most likely offer a few platitudes of comfort before spending the rest of the evening talking about herself, which she began to do as soon as their first round arrived.
The way Sam had told it, she was driving back home from work when she remembered she didn’t have anything in her fridge except for a carton of expired milk. “And I’d totally forgotten to eat lunch,” Sam had told Kate, swirling her straw around the edge of her glass. “And you know me — I was fucking star-ving. It was late as shit; nothing was open except that little convenience store down the street from me. You know, the one with the green awning that’s always playing reggaeton? So I’m like, ‘Shit,’ you know? Because all that place is gonna have is like, old-ass cans of tuna. But nothing else was open, so I went in and bought a bag of trail mix.”
Sam had paused here, running her fingers through her hair, tilting her chin up, and looking over Kate’s shoulder. Kate turned around, noticing an oval mirror on the wall behind her, where Sam’s reflection inspected itself.
“So anyway, I walk out into the parking lot,” Sam continued, returning her attention to Kate, “and I realized I hadn’t talked with Jake all day — I hadn’t talked with anyone since I got off work. And I thought, nobody knows I’m here right now. Nobody knows I’m here, standing in this empty parking lot with a bag of trail mix. Weird, right? I mean, I guess it’s not that weird, but whatever — it kinda creeped me out. If something were to happen right there and then, nobody would know where I was.”
The following day, nursing a crippling hungover from the sugary margaritas, the phrase randomly popped back into Kate’s head as she sat in bed, scrolling through her ex-boyfriend’s Instagram account: Nobody knows I’m here right now. It would flash through her mind when she stopped to pump gas at some random station or hike up the trail behind the apartment complex she’d recently moved into — all the little lonely moments in her life when nobody knew her immediate whereabouts. But after a few days, the thought faded from Kate’s mind until it vanished altogether.
Kate went to the beach that day without rhyme or reason. It wasn’t even a particularly nice day; the sky was overcast, and the temperature unseasonably chilly. She had been brushing her teeth in her cramped studio apartment, thinking about the time her ex took her to San Luis Obispo for the weekend, when, all of a sudden, she decided to go to the beach. The last time she went had been with him. That was well over a year ago, when her life held so many more possibilities than it did on this particular day.
Because of the weather conditions, Kate imagined the beach wouldn’t be too crowded, and there’d probably be little traffic — she’d be able to get back home before sunset if she left soon. Before she knew it, she was packing her sunglasses and Amelia Earhart paperback into her canvas bag, and then she was driving down the PCH, and then she was walking down the side of the road, and then she was laying out her towel across the sand, and then she was walking into the ocean.
By the time Kate was waist deep, the surf crashing along the shore died. The water became calm, stagnate and smooth as glass. Behind her, the vacant beach looked flat and lifeless, like a screensaver on her old desktop computer.
A second later, Kate was underwater, the tide dragging her body across the rocky ocean floor. When she came to the surface, gasping for air and flailing her arms, she saw the wave growing before her.
It was at this moment that Kate realized she hadn’t told anyone that she was going to the beach that afternoon. In fact, she hadn’t talked to anyone all day.
Nobody knows I’m here right now.
— someone will find my car parked alongside the road —
Nobody knows I’m here right now.
— and then the towel on the beach —
Nobody knows I’m here right now.
The thought passed through Kate’s head one last time, spoken by a choir of dissonant voices she didn’t recognize. Before she could scream, the wave crashed down on her in a blur of blues and whites and greens, taking her back under.