1.
He is only 22—he still has baby fat around his cheeks—but a slipped disc in his back makes him incapable of moving himself in.
You spend ten minutes hauling his mattress and a couple suitcases up the stairs. We have three other roommates, you tell him. Have them help you with the rest. The rest, he repeats, and you look out at the front porch. Oh, you say. Cool. Then we’re done here.
He sends a message to the house: can somebody take me to Walmart?
Everyone’s busy. You send him the bus route.
◆
Kellogg’s shows up in bunches at your doorstep. He has an Amazon Prime membership. You’ve never seen anyone order the sheer volume of stuff that he orders. Frosted Flakes. Captain Crunch. A package of spoons. A clock radio. Triple-A batteries. A bookshelf. When his back gets really bad, a cane.
◆
On Mondays, the two of you have trash duty. This was once your job alone, but you hated it. You were afraid of it, is the truth, but you won’t tell him this; he has just moved to Baltimore, a 22-year-old straight out of college in placid, corn-quiet Iowa. He doesn’t need to know about the dark spots in the garage, the scuffling of rats you don’t want to see in the dark, the rape that happened last year in the alley. All you say is, It’s a two-person job, and hand him a leaking bag.
◆
Where’s your accent from? you say, the first time you two talk long enough to hear it. Nebraska. Its own shitty country, he says. You say it can’t be that bad. He says east-coast people always say that. You tell him you get Jersey when you’re drunk. He doesn’t know what that means. He fiddles on his phone while you pull moldy apples from the crisper drawer. Down the shore, he says. Shoo-wah, you say. He considers this. Shitty country, he says.
◆
You are sautéing vegetables and scrambling eggs when he comes home with McDonald’s for the seventh time this week. Here, you say, you must be made of ketchup.
He says, Elitist.
You eat in silence. How did you make this? he says.
◆
At your doorstep, in boxes: A pot. A skillet. A spatula.
◆
He is naked in the hallway today, only a towel below his bowing stomach. You catch a glimpse of hair, from sternum to towel, before he closes the bathroom door on himself. He is flustered. He is, he tells you, sorry. He didn’t realize you would see him. You stand outside the door. You assure him it’s fine, this is his home, but he says it’s not fine. You assure him you saw nothing, which is true; already the blur of him is shapeless in your mind.
◆
When he texts, you can’t believe it’s already trash Monday. Didn’t you just suffer the smells and grease and excess of these four people you don’t love?
Food, he’s written.
David, you reply, it’s Thursday. Are you drunk?
He writes, Come.
You go downstairs to the kitchen, where he’s set you a bowl of plain spaghetti and a giant tub of salt.
No cheese, he explains.
You sit. You thank him. You fork a bite into your mouth, and can barely chew the gluey
lump. You both eat in silence.
After a few minutes, he says, It’s bad, right?
Awful.
You go to the pot. Thick yellow strands are floating in a tub of water.
You open your cabinet, take out a strainer. You say, I know you don’t have one, use mine. You open a fresh box of spaghetti from your shelf. You say, Watch.
◆
He says, What’s for dinner? You say, What’s for lunch? Your normal schedule for waking/sleeping puts you later than him for breakfast, by an hour; you start to wake up thirty minutes early, to catch him on the tail end. One day, you find him just starting his cereal when you arrive in the kitchen. What happened to you? you say. He says, I slept late.
◆
I can trace every thought you had, he says, pointing to the string of open drawers and half-filled cups.
My mother says I’d be the world’s worst criminal, you say. I’m transparent.
He says, You give yourself away.
◆
This becomes ironic, later.
◆
He tells you about economics. He tells you, too, about the classics. Books he’s taken from the library, made the better by their width—War and Peace, Anna Karenina, Don Quixote. He has read more than you have. This embarrasses you, because he is an expert in all things, including the ones you’re supposed to be an expert in. But then you’re impressed by him, and wanting to learn, so he gives you the books once he’s finished. You’re a slower reader than he is. But he asks what you think, and you say the writers did x with perspective and y with time and this whole other thing with voice, and he says, wow, he didn’t even notice.
◆
His beard is growing toward his eyes. He worries someday he will have to shave his eyelids. Cousin It, you call him, but he doesn’t know the reference. He is sitting in the armchair beside your couch with an open statistics textbook on his lap. The Ivy League kids are so good at this, he says, I’m gonna fail. You tell him he won’t fail, an econ PhD is more than math, it’s telling a story. You say, can they talk the way you can? You tell him he has a special gift: the gift of language. You don’t have to tell him it’s the gift you love best.
◆
For the past half-year you have been sleeping with Tobias, from your writing group. You hate going over there on Mondays. Trash nights are your favorite nights. You wear rubber gloves and step on terrible squelching things and laugh.
Go, he tells you. I can take care of this.
It’s a two-person job, you say. Plus what about your back.
Whenever you go, you wish you hadn’t.
◆
You grocery-shop together. You are intimately familiar with what he looks like in the bread aisle. You decide to share dairy. Eggs, milk, cheese: communal. You will have separate large fruits (apple, grapefruit) and shared small fruits (blueberries, grapes). You will have separate dried goods, cereals and pastas, but in practice you share these, too.
He asks you to drive him everywhere. He doesn’t have a car. You don’t mind. The package deliveries stop. He wants to decorate his room, so you drive to every hotel liquidator in the DC metro area. He buys five paintings of flowers, plus a pot of plastic flowers. You side-eye him. He says, I like plants. You laugh.
You laugh so often, now. You bubble over like a bathtub full of suds. You wake up half an hour earlier than you used to, before the alarm has even gone off.
◆
His best friend from college is coming to visit. This friend’s grandmother was the first female president of a Latin American country; there’s a videogame about her. You are impressed.
You help him host a party at the house, the night the friend comes. You dig into the back of your closet for a pair of heels higher than you could ever wear out. You do your bottom eyeliner. You wear a plunging neckline and pull the straps tight on your bra.
Somebody wants some, he says, seeing you.
He has showered and put on a Hawaiian shirt over shorts. The friend is wearing a button-down and jeans. You don’t invite Tobias.
For the first time, you see him drink. He slings his arms around your shoulders. He pulls you to him around the kitchen island. He keeps you next to him. He keeps a Solo cup of beer next to him, too; you lose count of how many drinks.
So young, you tell him, when he comes back inside from vomiting in your trashcans.
He smiles. He pours another beer. He takes you by the wrist as the party empties, leads you to the front door, stands there waving people off. He can barely speak. You remove the heels, and sink below his shoulder. The friend says, Let’s get you to bed, buddy. The two of them go to his room. Lydia! he yells down the stairs. Yeah, you say. He says: Say shoo-wah.
◆
You clean the kitchen. Before he moved in, you never cleaned, resented cleaning; had to set a schedule, because no one wanted to clean for the benefit of anyone who would make dirty again.
Now, you don’t have to be asked. You collect beer bottles. You stack Solo cups. You rinse counters. In the middle of mopping, he comes downstairs, shirtless, head and chest and beard hair disheveled. You ask him how he’s feeling, champ. Let me help, he says. You hand over the mop. He stands with it in his arms like a fainted girl, hair trailing on the floor. He says, How?
◆
Your other roommates:
- Mice
- Ants
- A grad student in biology
- A nonprofit manager slash waitress
- An evangelical who never leaves her room
- A constant fear of bedbugs
◆
Where do you go out in this city? Brewer’s Art, you say. You go. He drinks so much he wants to walk home. It’s cold, but you follow him north, past the train station, over the bridge.
Pretty, he says, turning your head so you look out over the highway that leads to the low skyline of West Baltimore.
You have never before thought your city was pretty.
He withdraws his hand from his jacket pocket and extends an open palm toward you. Two capsules there. For a crazy moment you think they’re drugs, and you pop one into your mouth.
Tums! you say.
He points to his chest. Heartburn.
He swerves into an open doorway. You follow, not knowing where he’s leading you, to haul him out.
He’s the only person on the dance floor. From outside, you hadn’t heard the music blaring.
Where are we? you yell.
The DJ says, The Depot.
He takes your hand. You dance until you’re the dizzy one, and he’s the one saying, Let’s go home.
◆
Sometimes you go dancing at The Depot. Sometimes you watch documentaries on the couch. Sometimes he cuts the movie off halfway, to watch the Barça game. Lio Messi, he tells you. The best soccer player in the world. Which one is he? you ask. Just watch, he says. You watch, and try to pick out Messi, but all you care about is that he loves Messi, and all you can love Messi for is giving him something to love.
The two of you never talk about other girls or guys. You never talk about sex, not even in the distant past. You stop going to Tobias’s.
You talk about a friend of yours, married now, who wrote a novel set in a fantasyland called…you don’t remember the name. Make up a name, you tell him.
Albuquerque.
That’s a real place, you say. He stands by it. So, sure, she wrote this novel set in New Albuquerque. And when she and her husband started dating, she’d come home from the library and he’d say, What’s going on in New Albuquerque?
Where’s your novel set? he says.
Right here, you say. The novel that was the truest thing you knew how to write, the one the world would read, about your two ex-boyfriends.
New Baltimore, he says.
◆
You do wind up able to spot Messi. When he takes off, it’s like he sees something nobody else can see. Some path. Any idiot watching the pitch, an alien dropped into the stadium with no knowledge of soccer or human life, would look at the field full of people and know they should follow that one.
◆
He tries to explain offsides to you, using the salt and pepper shakers, a bottle of paprika, and the crumbs on the counter. The two of you have a third roommate, who is there, watching and listening before her shift at the restaurant. She plays soccer but isn’t able to cut into the flow of talk. Once you understand offsides, he explains about flopping. You nod and laugh and spill the pepper shakers on their sides. You want her to notice that the link between the two of you, him and you, is so strange and strong no one else can penetrate it.
◆
The first time you see a mouse—in the kitchen, when you’re sweeping under the stove—you think you’ve found something vegetable and rotting. An old apple: one of the few small tokens of what you two don’t share. You pull, and a furry mass emerges at your feet.
You scream. A glistening streak of liquid marks the mouse’s path from the stove to your sneakers. You turn away. You are aware that you need to do something. But all you can do is notice the fertilizer smell and leave the kitchen, not quite at a run. You could call for Greg, your biologist roommate, whose job in the lab is killing rats. Instead you go to David’s bedroom door. The two of you hang out in the living room, on the porch, in the kitchen. You knock.
◆
Together, you walk into Waverly Ace Hardware. You ask the skinny boy at the entrance where they keep the mousetraps.
Aisle twelve, he says, and a calico kitten twitches out of his arms. You jump. Every sudden movement has become a mouse to you.
You want to buy five glue traps. David buys thirty. He sets them along the kitchen wall and baits each with a half-teaspoon of peanut butter. He learned to do this online. He learned, also, that peppermint oil repels them; he threw a bottle into your haul at checkout. When did he have the chance to learn these things? You were together the whole time.
◆
He isn’t finished with his room. He needs a chair. Back to the hotel liquidators, who know the two of you. He says, We’re looking for a chair. You could live inside it, that we. You get to say, He has long legs, as though you’re intimately familiar with his legs. You get to say, We’ve got to be able to fit it through our door.
◆
The armchair he decides on weighs a hundred pounds. His back doesn’t stand a chance. He pays a delivery guy to deliver it, but he still needs you to shove it into the right spot next to his bed. You do. The next morning, the side of your arm that pushed the chair breaks out in hives. He calls his father, a minister in Omaha who trained to be a doctor. Food poisoning, he concludes when he hangs up. He runs down the block to get you Benadryl. Food poisoning, he says, handing you the pills, but he still feels guilty.
◆
Your parents come to visit, on a rare day he isn’t home. You hide the glue traps face-up in the pantry. He’ll be back from class any minute—but dinner with the parents is over. You stall, but they want to leave. He comes home ten minutes after they’re gone.
Sorry I missed them, he says. You shrug. You open the pantry to replace the traps, and a baby mouse is squeaking on one, head nuzzling your popcorn kernels.
◆
One night on the couch, he cuts the documentary off halfway. This movie sucks, he says, let’s watch something else. Game of Thrones, he says. Everyone’s talking about it. He’s seen the first episode but will re-watch. You’ll love it, the world is giant.
He invites you to watch in his bed.
You take in nothing but a chaos of snow and blood. You don’t care about big worlds. You’re too busy feeling the distance between your bodies under the blanket. The infrared that heats the space between you is like touch. There’s a pot of fake roses in every corner of the room.
◆
In the fridge, the letters in black Sharpie on the egg carton: L + D.
◆
You go out with his friends, to a dueling-pianos bar downtown. You drink enough to enable something. You end up on the sidewalk, laid out under his bent knees as he sits above you on the curb and calls a cab. When you are face-down over the toilet, your hair a sheath around your eyes into the water, he sets down a pillow and pulls up a chair and calls you Cousin It. So, he says, what’s going on in New Baltimore?
◆
You are happy. This is what will be impossible to explain, later. You loved him. You got to.
2.
He has a small penis. He’s a terrible lover. You think he is, anyway. He might be. The girls he brings home are silent until they sigh of exasperation and leave before breakfast.
You go away to New York. You haven’t peeled yourself away from him in months, since you stopped seeing Tobias, but you go away. It’s the week before Christmas. You have won a writing contest. The prize is a free room on the 34th floor of a hotel in Soho, and a soirée alongside Major Writers who have no interest in talking to you.
As you are checking in, he texts you: Why aren’t you here?
You are giddy. You roll your suitcase into your room. You describe the view to him, the black pillowcases, the purple mood lights, the fake snow in the corners. You mention the bath. You hope he thinks of you, in it.
That night, drunk at the venue, you want to flirt with someone. You feel young. You text him, A married man wants to kiss me! You hope he thinks of wanting to kiss you. He texts back, don’t kiss married men! You hear, don’t kiss someone who isn’t me! You say, I won’t. He says, good. Come home.
On the train the next day, you wonder if you have blown it. You wonder if he won’t like a girl who has to be told not to kiss married men.
He texts you. Home yet? On the train? Come faster, we’ll get drunk.
When you reach home, you hand him an automatic razor that you bought from a stall in the Grand Central Christmas market. For your eyes, you say. He laughs, loudly. He hugs you. He missed you so much, he says. It’s crazy, how much he missed you.
◆
Writing this now, you include that bit, about the penis, because this makes it unlikely he will sue you for libel. Libel in fiction is very hard to prove. To win your case, each additional detail about the character must make the real-life person more recognizable. There’s a trial-attorney joke, which goes, what man comes forward claiming this particular feature of the character as an identifying feature of himself? It’s called the small penis rule. This is true.
There were no girls. You had no idea about his penis. He was spending his days studying next to you, and you were spending your days writing next to him. It hurt you, later, when that book you were writing didn’t go anywhere. It was the truest work of your soul and it was about the only loves of your life and you wrote it while you were living in Baltimore, cooking spaghetti, dressed in New York City best and texting with him on the train back home.
◆
He has a sixteen-pack of Natty Boh waiting for you. His best friend from college is coming to visit again later tonight, but he says the beers are for you. The friend will live with water. You sit together around the dining table, which is only a plank of plywood mounted on a bench and covered with two duct-taped shower curtains. You’re still wearing the all-black sweater/skirt/knee-high/scarf ensemble that you wore in New York last night. He says, suddenly, I don’t usually have crushes.
You drink. You hide your face behind the can. Neither of you has ever mentioned crushes. Exes, sex, dating, none of it.
You say, I don’t believe that.
He says, once I did. She was my friend first, and the crush part didn’t last long.
The front door opens and closes. You push the thermostat from eighty to eight-five, and the house stays sixty. You get up, find your jacket, zip it. He’s wearing shorts. You bring him a blanket from the couch. Someone squeals. Mouse, someone else yells down the stairs.
How long?
Two months, he says. Then I knocked on her dorm-room door one night and my heart was racing and I had to kiss her. I counted down. Five four three two do it.
The back door opens and closes. Yellow flips to red on the streetlight you can see through the blinds. A siren wails, a car drives through the light, the siren goes silent. He’s looking at you.
Five four three two, you say.
Skittering in the walls. You both drink.
That night, he comes to your room.
◆
You experiment at this point in the drafting with different points of view. I experiment. I took the train back from New York in the all-black outfit I’d worn the night before. I didn’t mean a word of what I said to the married guy. My life was taking shape around that plywood table. I was about to ruin everything.
But it’s wrong for the project. You is how you speak to yourself about him. The imperative. Calm down. Forget. Keep moving. Leave.
◆
That night, he comes to your room. You will always return to this moment.
Between the two of you, you’ve finished the sixteen-pack. The friend from college has arrived and said hello and unpacked and drunk water and gone to sleep. You have all gone to sleep. You are already sleeping, the second night running in the all-black clothing of your future, when he knocks at your door.
As soon as he steps inside, you know he’s smashed. If it were you, you’d be over the toilet. He’s wobbly, his eyes don’t focus, his hair is a mess. He says, My friend’s in my bed. He sits on the end of yours. You guys shared a bed last time, you say. He says, I don’t have anywhere to sleep. You say, Sleep in Greg’s room, he’s at Carly’s. He says I can’t, it’s rude. You say, Sleep on the couch. He says I can’t, you took the blanket off the couch. I put it on you! you say. He shakes his head. He says, So you’re telling me I should sleep anywhere but here.
Of course you’re not. Of course you’re not, but he’s unlikely to remember any of this in the morning. Or, he could plausibly opt not to remember any of this in the morning. He’s swaying. He’s sweating. He’s doing that thing he does when he’s really drunk, smiling then frowning then smiling again. This isn’t how it happens. He doesn’t wake up beside you in the morning wondering how he got there. He doesn’t get to claim that you came on to him. He doesn’t get to decide whether or not he feels like remembering.
And this must be how it happens. He drinks enough to have the courage to knock at your door.
Five four three two.
You say he can sleep here but he should know he’s drunk. You tell him he’s drunk. You ask him, does he know he’s drunk?
He says thank you. He says but you’re in your bed, like the friend is in his. You say no, it’s okay, you can sleep here. You should sleep here. Isn’t that why you came? He says yeah, maybe. You say okay so do it. He says he can’t, he doesn’t feel right. You get up, stand over him, try to lift him by the shoulders to walk him to the bathroom. He lies backward instead, and spreads his arms, taking up the whole mattress. Now I’m in your bed, he says, you have nowhere to sleep. Next to you? you say. He says there isn’t room. You say, move over. He doesn’t. His breathing lengthens. He seems to have passed out.
So you go out into the hallway, confused. The friend is there. He says, What are you doing here? You say you think you got kicked out of your own room? The friend says, I wasn’t even in his bed, I set up pillows in the armchair. He wanted you. You say, He wanted my bed. Weird, says the friend. Who’s that?
There’s a light on in one of the rooms. A pair of socked feet under the door.
Our other roommate, you say. We never see her. We think she gets takeout through the window.
Where will you sleep? he says.
I don’t know.
Are you tired?
Not anymore.
My grandma was in a video game, he says. I’ll show you.
◆
In the morning, David says, You told me to go sleep in Greg’s room instead of yours.
He insists that he doesn’t remember a single other thing.
◆
You start to notice that he cycles. Work on, party off. Fourteen-hour days at the library. Saturdays too. No drinking, not even a beer at Friday-afternoon happy hour. No documentaries. Quick lunches with you at the house, and quick dinners, hey how’s it going thanks for the omelet here’s your ziti gotta run, then back to the library.
◆
The thing about friendship, he says, is that you each have this unbelievable power over the other.
It’s a Sunday. Two weeks after the night you still don’t understand and haven’t mentioned. His first day off in two weeks. You’re painting your nails at the table; he’s smoking; you’re both breathing fumes.
He pauses for so long that he will likely say nothing unless you say, What? This is a new tendency he has picked up. The flow of talk between you can die, now.
You say, What?
Friends know the darkest secret truth about each other, he says. The one essential terrible thing that’s just, true, and the other person doesn’t know it. And what’s crazy is, you’re willing to say it to absolutely anyone except them.
The secret truth, you say.
Like, for Carly: Greg doesn’t love her as much as she loves him, and never will, and it’s because she loves him too much.
Right.
The secret truth, he says. The thing they are that’s revolting, that they can’t change.
And if you do say it? you say.
Then you’re one truthful total fucking asshole, he says. He takes a long drag. He looks at you. And the person who says it will never love the person who hears it again.
◆
On his birthday, you bake him a cake. Lemon curd. You remember his mother used to make it. You knock on his door at midnight, after he’s come home late from the library and your other roommates are already sleeping. He says, What?, without letting you in. Open the door, you say.
It takes him a long time. Oh! he says. You sing. He blows out the candle. You take out two forks from behind your back.
I’ll try it tomorrow, he says.
One taste? you say. You’ve worked on it all day, hiding it behind the eggs.
I already brushed my teeth.
You set the cake on the floor. You hear shuffling behind you as you leave. You turn back around, and he’s rubbing the side of his fist up and down on the doorframe. Hey, he says. Thank you.
◆
Sometimes, he doesn’t do precisely the things you most want him to do. You start to wonder if he doesn’t do them precisely because you want him to. Try the cake. Split a beer. Come to my reading. Meet my mom.
◆
His parents are flying in from Nebraska. You drive him to Waverly Ace Hardware for glue traps. You tell the guy with the calico cat that we’re trying to catch everything before this one’s parents arrive. The guy asks where you live. A rowhouse on 29th, attached to the diner down the block. The guy says forget it, go for the steel wool. So you both pull on gloves and get on your knees and stuff steel wool into the holes in the kitchen molding. He’s sneezing the whole time. Must be the cat, he says. If I die, he says, go into my room and toss my bong. Tell my mom I never drank, and that I always talked about seeing her again in the kingdom of heaven.
If I die, you say, and it takes a while to come up with a request. Give my agent my book.
Don’t die, he says.
You give him the Benadryl he once gave you. You help him clear away the evidence of alcohol under the sink. He makes sure you’re home at the right time, so you can meet his parents.
His dad points to your arm. Doing better? he asks.
You say yes, all better, thanks for helping me. The dad says, Thanks to Christ. He looks at you like you should say something too. You look at David, who is looking at you with big intentional eyes. He draws a little cross on his chest. He mouths, sorry.
It occurs to you that David has told his parents that you are the evangelical roommate, not the Jew from New Jersey.
Is David being good? says his mom.
You say, He takes the trash out every week.
◆
You go out to The Depot on a Sunday night. He loves The Depot. He’s the only one dancing. You head to the back of the dance floor, and bob beside him to something ’80s. He imitates your moves. He’s laughing. He tries to give you a Tums, and this makes you laugh, too, and you extend your hand to his. He doesn’t take it.
You lose it. You leave the bar. You are trying to catch a cab when his hand lands on your shoulder. What happened to you? he says.
I forgot my credit card.
Why are you crying?
You shake your head. A cab swings toward you.
You want him to say, Why are you crying?, one more time. If he asks just once more, you’ll tell him. You’ll say you’re losing track of the story here. It all seemed to be going one way, all the evidence pointed to one conclusion, but now all the evidence points to all conclusions. What happened that night? you’ll say. Were you drunk and stupid, or drunk on purpose? Do you think I said no? Did you say no? Did you want to say yes? Do you?
He doesn’t ask. You insist on taking the taxi by yourself. You hide out in your room when you hear the front door open and close. When you leave again, much later that night, you’re prepared with a lie that explains your behavior: your dad needs surgery. (This is true, though only retinal.)
He’s waiting up for you in the kitchen. He doesn’t ask for an explanation or an apology. He pushes a bowl of cereal to you, already poured, and slides the milk back into the fridge.
Rough night, you say.
He mimes you retching over the toilet with your hair in your face. He says, You’ve done worse.
◆
Hey, the friend texts you. So I don’t think David knew about that night. Sorry. I figured you’d already told him.
◆
He doesn’t want you; therefore, you slept with his friend.
You slept with his friend; therefore, he doesn’t want you.
You will never, ever know which was the cause and which the effect.
3.
You will never, ever know which was the cause and which the effect. But you will know this: the next day, he will stop talking to you. The next week, you will come downstairs to find him already finishing dinner. There will be a carton of eggs in the fridge that says D, and you will take the trash out alone. The next year, he will move away. The year after, you will. Your novel will go nowhere. You will move to Boston. You will always feel cold. You will get a job at an adult community writing center, where you will teach adults how to be exactly good enough at writing to teach at an adult community writing center. You will go out dancing once or twice, then feel too old. You will be asked out, then years will pass, then you will not be asked out anymore. From time to time, you will get drinks with a former roommate who’s passing through town. You will live in an apartment with horizontal windows at the top of the walls. You will never hear from him again.
◆
Except once.
It will be twenty years since you lived with him in Baltimore. Two years since you last went on a date. Your hair is more gray than brown. Your boldest students at the adult community writing center—women your own age who think, if you pulled yourself together, you could still find a divorcé—tell you to color the roots. This morning, they asked you: What have you been writing all these years? Now it’s 9pm and you are walking home from the adult community writing center, feeling a burning in your chest. You had coffee without food again. The acid is climbing up your throat. On the way to the T, you find a crushed rat on the sidewalk. A surge of wildness jolts through you when you step over the carcass. You love that it is dead.
Hey, says a man, That rat belongs to the kingdom of heaven too.
You know the voice without looking up.
God, it’s been a long time. You don’t know why he’s here. Probably a business trip for his investment or consulting firm. He’s probably wearing a suit and tie. He must have lost the baby fat around his cheeks. Maybe he’s close-shaved. Maybe he’s balding. You find you can’t look up and find out. You are staring at the rat. Its body is flat as a carpet, its tail still bony and erect.
How’s New Boston? he says.
You look up. He’s smiling, he has a goatee and a belly and a receding hairline. You wait to feel that flutter in your chest, that shame, that question you’ve never been able to answer. What happened? But you look at him and all you feel is: the secret truth.
He’s only a man. Twenty years have turned him into just some guy.
And then, suddenly, you’re overwhelmed with another feeling. Over these past decades, scribbling late at night in your basement apartment, trying to write the answer to what happened and when and whether it was your fault—somewhere along the way, somewhere you didn’t even notice—you must have learned how to fix it. Your heart. Fix it, that is, like an animal gets fixed: cut out the passion-parts. The rest of the thing works fine. It sleeps. It plays. It wags.
He’s standing straight, and doesn’t have a cane anymore.
You, you say.
You! he says.
Then neither of you seems to know what to say. His suit is too big. Your chest is on fire.
You stick out your hand. Tums? you say, and you start to laugh, but he shakes his head. He doesn’t have any. His heartburn is fixed, he says.
Like his back.
Like you.