Per was off work for a week with a concussion. He spent most of that time on a pull-out in the darkened living room while the couple he lived with went about muted versions of their life. They asked him quietly how he was feeling, what he needed. They got him glasses of cold water and changed his bedding the first night when he got so warm that he sweated down through the sheets. They helped him to bathe when he smelled raw and sour but felt too tired to move. They made him borscht, lentils, and polenta. When his strength started to return, they made him lion head soup with ground lamb and leftover bok choy and scallions. The ginger broth left Per’s lips buzzing.
“My mother used to make this for me when I was a boy,” the older of them said. “But only when I was almost better.”
The man’s mellow affect seemed to come either from the amount of marijuana he smoked or from something in his natural orientation toward life. Per did not know where he had grown up because his accent was almost ruthlessly neutral, like a television broadcaster. His partner on the other hand was stubby and freckled and had dyed rust hair and spoke with the clipped directness of a forties film star. They were an odd pair whose temperaments moved at strikingly different speeds.
The night of the lion head soup, the younger of the men asked Per how he felt about going back to work in the morning, and Per said that he was ready and in truth that he missed it.
The two men were sitting at the window while Per sat in his bed with his blankets around his legs. They were smoking a joint and watching Per. The older one stroking his partner’s leg. The younger, holding the joint with an elegant little gesture of his hand. When Per said that he missed the store, the younger man smiled meanly.
“I suppose you would.”
“Don’t be a bitch,” the older one said.
The younger took a hit off the joint and leaned out the window to exhale, and then laughed.
The wind was cold and clear, laced with weed smoke. Per drank the broth and set the bowl on a coaster nearby. The older one nodded in approval at this, which made Per feel a little better about being looked after. He did not understand what had passed between himself and the younger man or between the couple, but he knew something had been articulated at him and that it was not strictly speaking a nice thing. But he had spoken honestly about it—he did miss the store and would be happy to return to it in the morning.
The couple stayed up until the joint was done, and then the older of the men washed Per’s bowl and put away the soup. The younger one climbed into bed and peeled off his boxers. He let them drop pointedly out to the side of the bed within Per’s line of sight. When the kitchen was cleaned, the older one stuck his head back into the living room and told Per where to find the soup in the morning and said that he should take some for lunch, that he was welcome to it, and then turned out the lights.
Per listened a moment and sure enough—the mattress shifting, the wood joints of the bed squeaking loudly, and the murmur of voices, sighing, the quiet click of a cap pressing open, then the hiss of skin passing against skin, and the settling thump of bodies aligning and deep, quiet breathing. Per rolled onto his side and put his pillow on his head and tried to be very still and very quiet as if he could make himself be far, far away from that place.
◆
On the train, Per fixed his eyes on an advertisement for the discreet delivery of medications for erectile dysfunction and hair loss. The ad had a minimalist aesthetic with a taupe color story that Per resented because it made him want to look up the service. He did not need medication for hair loss or erectile dysfunction, to be clear, but he was swayed by the elegant typeface and the soothing color. The way the white hovered over the taupe, implying something crisp and official, but also relaxed. It was medical but not sterile—meaning of course that total nonsense category of wellness.
Having recently been through the harrowing brightness of Urgent Care and the exceedingly unglamorous, hostile purgatory of the American healthcare system, Per was perhaps a little permeable to something calm and beautiful.
At 7th Ave, a group of small, old women got on. They were in the dark channel between 7th and 50th-Rockefeller Center when a cold wave rose up Per’s back and settled at the base of his neck. The rocking train made him want to lie down and close his eyes, pull his knees up to his chest and shrink very small. His knees felt rubbery, like there was suddenly too much give in his joints and he’d spring up from his own body weight. He looked around in the dim train car for a place to sit, but there was only the morning scrum: kids in their uniforms and tights with their knobby knees pointing at odd inhuman angles, men in tight stretchable pants that Per had seen advertised on Instagram, women in long dark skirts and thick sweaters wrapped in wool coats or people in cheap denim and puffer coats and scarves with holes in them, smelling like shampoo and bathroom cleaner and cologne. Their eyes were blank or distant or else staring back at him with perhaps too much interest, and he felt as he often did when he looked around on the train that he was being peered at from beyond a dark window.
He felt a heavy, slow dizziness as they reached 42nd, and he considered getting off and sitting in Bryant Park until the moment passed, but he did not think that he could make it up the stairs to the mezzanine. A burning grit at the back of his throat and the rims of his eyes throbbing and hot made him want to throw up. He held fast to the rail as the doors shut, and they went further on, reaching 34th where a lot of people got off. Per sat, finally, and the dizziness subsided. He leaned back and blotted sweat from his forehead. The nausea abated.
The character of the train was different below 34th. The business men in their stretchable Instagram pants were replaced with a different variety of business person—these older, with carefully styled gray hair and loose suits and business casual made of natural fibers rather than space age materials. Carefully styled jackets and suits and shirts and skirts and blouses and slacks, every pleat and every cuff breaking in just the right way. They stood not with the casual bad posture of the desperate and the wealth-proximal but with the calm confidence of the owner class. They checked their emails, but mostly stood in groups of two or three, talking quietly, smirking about something about to befall someone they knew.
There were also people still damp from the gym in their athleisure, people with rackets and golf clubs. Backwards caps and fleece jackets, these rangy, recovering lacrosse bros and women in pastel spandex. There was a crackling, vicious energy in the air of the car. It struck Per that he had known people like this in college, and that they belonged to a different class of human being than he did. They seemed to know how to move and fit and be calm in public. They were not coming unglued and almost fainting on a train.
In the long downward passage to 4th-Washington Square, Per watched a young black woman read a novel that had come out the year before. It was by a young gay black writer and the novel was about his childhood growing up abused and poor in the rural South. Per did not want to read the novel because it was too much like the kind of thing he knew too much about. There were two kinds of young black reader, Per thought, those who read everything about people like themselves and those who ran far, far from it because any depiction of a life they knew would feel cheap and tawdry. Neither seemed, strictly speaking, a healthy way to live one’s life. They both spoke to a tendency to overidentify with the things you read, which was essentially a form of magical thinking.
Per didn’t not hold it against readers themselves, but he resented that recently this magical thinking had spilled over into the punditry class and become an enshrined ethic. Reading for mirrors or else refusing to read books by people like yourself for fear of finding shallow representations of a life you knew. It was all rather egotistical.
Anyway, Per read mostly 19th century literature.
The young woman had long braids with reddish tips pulled into an elegant ponytail that ran down to the left. Next to her was a young man about her age reading a book that Per couldn’t make out at first. Then, the train bobbing, he lifted the book just slightly, permitting Per to see that it was an edition of Madame Bovary, but the translation that Per didn’t like. It was a translation that was quite well-known and preferred by people who had been to graduate school and wrote for literary periodicals. It was the translation that everyone cooed and awed over, and it was the only translation stocked in most of the stores.
Except at Per’s store, because he preferred another translation by a British novelist, which felt closer in sentiment if not in syntax to the original than the arid American translation that was the dominant one of the moment. Per knew immediately that the young man had not gotten this edition at his store, and he felt a little meanness in himself at that idea. Like stumbling upon someone betraying him.
The young man looked up and saw Per staring at the book, and he pressed it flat against his thighs and gave a little smirk, and Per wanted to ask what he was smirking about. At 4th-Washington Square, the two young people got off the train together, and before the door closed, Per heard a burst of laughter that echoed up and down the platform. He looked back through the window as the train pulled on and saw the two of them talking animatedly. His face felt hot. They were talking about him, he knew. He couldn’t hear them. He had no way of knowing. But as the train slipped into the tunnel carrying him along with it, away from those two people, he felt that he was being taken far away from something that concerned him. Something that he had no way of claiming a part in. Just those two strangers on the platform, laughing.
◆
Per got off at Broadway-Lafayette. The day was cold and gray—there had been rain and sleet a few days before, and now everything had crusted over. There was sufficient latent light to hurt his eyes, so he put on the medicated sunglasses even though they made him feel a little ridiculous.
There was something extra to the world. Everything flickered brighter and seemed a fraction louder. He wore earplugs because the cars striking potholes and manhole covers in the street sounded like gunfire and mortars exploding. He couldn’t listen to music without feeling his teeth vibrate and his bones hurt. Even passing glances at his phone made his eyes hum brutally.
Per took the walk to the store slowly. Passing the high brownstones and other old buildings that had been refitted into streetwear retailers and luxury brands. The edge of the church came into view, and he knew that he’d pass Chester’s bar. They had not spoken since Chester had put him in a car the morning after the concussion and sent him home. They did not exchange numbers, and it was true that Per could have asked Anil for his contact info or he might have looked him up on social media. But the phone still gave him a headache and his vision was still blurry. Those were excuses, of course.
The truth was that he was ashamed. Embarrassed. He’d thrown up in Chester’s apartment and he’d had to be taken to the hospital. What could you say to someone who had seen you that way? Who had looked after you even though you were a perfect stranger? What could possibly take place between the two of them now that they had already spent a strange and ugly night together? Sometimes—and this was a tragic element to contemporary life—you experienced something deeply intimate with a person, and it was this very experience of intimacy which foreclosed all possible intimacy in the future. That was, you used it all up in one go right up front, and there was nothing left. He felt a little sad about that.
Chester had seemed so nice and like someone Per would have enjoyed knowing. But now they would only ever be strangers.
Per paused outside of the empty tapas bar and gazed into the dark interior. Near the back, a pale blue light at the end of the long hall. He stepped away before someone could see him and crossed the street to the store.
◆
“I just think,” Anil was saying, “that Britney’s ‘Hit Me Baby One More Time’ perfectly scans as being about Martin Luther’s crisis of faith resulting in the Protestant Reformation. It is very much about his attempt to reconcile with God.”
“I’m pretty sure it’s about wanting your toxic ex to text you back,” Clem said.
Anil pointed excitedly, “Exactly! That’s what I said.” The booksellers laughed as Anil gestured to them, seeking support for his argument. “People underestimate Max Martin as the great theologian of our time.”
“Didn’t he write that ridiculous line in ‘Break Free’?”
“A perfect example of liberation theology. You guys need to get on his level.”
Per stood off to the side watching them. They had waved when he came in wearing the glasses. Anil did not look at him, but his ears were red. Then he’d launched into that long speech about pop songs and theology. It had the rhythmic snap of a practiced routine, but Per did not recognize it as one of Anil’s usual bits to which he reverted when his natural personality did not permit him to be easy.
Imogen joined them a few moments later and called their meeting to order.
“First of all, welcome back, Per. We missed you.”
There was a quiet applause and much smiling at him. Clem squeezed his shoulder. The other two booksellers on their shift were Siva and Brynn, who Per did not know well. Emmaline was off to visit her parents because her father was dying. Brynn was tall and had an eerily direct gaze that made her seem confident until you realized that she was actually not very smart and was in fact fairly awkward.
Anil clapped sheepishly.
“You came back just in time. We’re going to need all the help we can get. Winter stock is upon us. It’s our big push, so let’s make sure we’re either on the floor or we’re in the back. I don’t want a fucking cardboard avalanche either, okay? Don’t wait to be asked. See something, do something. Whether it’s opening, organizing, stickers, whatever. It’s all hands. Truly.”
Per had fallen and gotten hurt at the worst possible time: the short, cruel weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas. It was an unusual time of year because people started shopping much later—on their way home from work or on their way to dinner. It was a time of gift giving and small thoughtful gestures, or gestures that appeared to be small or thoughtful. People wanted the stationery and the pens, the little notes written swiftly at the checkout counter next to the keypad while the clerk wrapped the book efficiently, snipping the ribbon on a bias to imply a kind of human touch though they were more machine than person this time of the year.
People wanted to know what sort of book to buy a certain kind of person that also said that the person giving the book was a different certain kind of person—customers outsourced the act of knowing and discerning to perfect strangers. It was funny in its way. Sad in another way. That sometimes people had no clue about the people they loved, what sort of person they were or what they liked or what they desired or were afraid of or needed. Most people, Per thought, went around not knowing the first thing about the people who shared their lives. And yet those people, despite not knowing anything, looked down on Per for not always understanding what to say or what to do. They treated him like he was aberrant when they knew as little about the most important people in their lives as he did.
“And of course, as if that were not enough,” Imogen said. “The winter party is next week. We’ll have some light catering. But beforehand, we’ll need to get some of the portable shelves moved elsewhere to create more space, and we’ll need to think about the displays. I still haven’t given it…any thought. So if you’ve got some ideas, please. No, truly please.”
Imogen looked tired and anxious. Her eyes were dark and her cheeks had blueish shadows.
Anil raised his hand. “I think we could do like, the descent into Inferno on the stairs and—”
“No,” Imogen said. “Absolutely not.”
They laughed. Anil shrugged.
“I think it could be fun to have a wrapping demo,” Clem said. “Like, people seem to enjoy watching, it’s the sort of thing that could be a lot of fun, I don’t know.”
“In Paris,” Brynn said, “they do these roasted chestnuts. They get one of those like charcoal holders and put a metal pan on it and roast the chestnuts? That could be cool. Outside, obviously.”
“Festive,” Siva said. “I like it though.”
“And we could do some themed displays, different books on, like winter and the holidays around the world.”
“Definitely going to need a self-help station,” Anil said. There was snickering. “No, seriously. It’s one of our best categories during the holidays. We get a table or a shelf and we just shove a bunch of like, Suze Orman and Brené Brown and The Body Keeps the Score and a lot of mental health shit. People would eat it up. Holidays are brutal.”
Per was a little surprised at the clarity and correctness of the idea.
“I think that sounds…really good,” Per said. They looked at him, and his throat got dry. “If it were me…I don’t know. I’d like something like that.”
Anil did not return his gaze, and instead was staring at the ground.
“Okay,” Imogen said. “That’s a good idea. Let’s keep touching base about it. Until then, let’s get ready to open.”
Siva and Clem followed Imogen to the register. Brynn and Per went downstairs. Anil stood there staring down at his shoes. Per stood on the lower landing watching him, but then, Anil shrugged his shoulders and went into the stationery section where Per could hear him straightening the notebooks in their crackling plastic sleeves.
◆
The backroom was a mess. There was no other way to describe it. Boxes of stock covered almost every surface and inch of the floor. A narrow channel ran down the center of the room and through the back door. In the back hall, more boxes of stock stacked along the walls. The door that led up to the street was blocked by still more boxes. Per stood in the drafty hall, squinting at the stacks. The boxes weren’t organized by publisher or date shipped or anything like that. Some of the stock had been ripped open and the packing slips removed. The others must have come down to take the books one at a time from the boxes rather than organizing anything into any sort of system.
As for their desk and the small tables where they kept supplies, the filing system that Per had organized meticulously—total chaos. Nothing was where it should have been. It had the scattered, improvised nature of a nervous mind at work. Someone had left a paper cup of coffee resting on a box of paperbacks and the coffee had bled down into the cardboard. There were crumbs and something sticky on the surface of some of the books in an open box, a shiny bright hardcover of a debut novel.
“This is beyond,” Per said.
Brynn was nudging some books aside with her foot, trying to get to the rack so she could hang her jacket.
“Yeah, it’s been like this since the shipment. We don’t really have it…figured out.”
“We should call FEMA at this rate. Who was in charge of this?”
“Anil,” she said. “You know how he is. Just put it anywhere, who cares.”
Per could feel his pulse deep in his brain, a watery little kick. When he closed his eyes, he saw a strobe flickering every couple seconds.
“This is going to take days. Just to sort,” he said. “I don’t even. Where. Even. To start.”
Brynn stood there with her hands on her hips, looking around without any great sense of urgency. “Well, I’m here as your hands for the day.” She reached down and lifted a box and looked it over. The box had an orange sticker indicating an on-sale date the coming Tuesday. That would need to be sorted sooner rather than later. What concerned him was the winter stock they had ordered, long-delayed because of shipping and pipeline issues, all now showing up at the worst possible moment.
That’s how it was. You order something in plenty of time and hope that the vast network of American transport and distribution, rickety and arthritic since Reconstruction, wouldn’t fail you though of course you knew it would. How strange this modern paradox of life, that the mega-retailers had juiced the American distribution networks to their limit and when that was not sufficient to meet the ravenous demand of two-day and same-day shipping, those same retailers after driving the postal and shipping services to the brink of bankruptcy had simply started their own delivery services, which merely exacerbated the issue.
There were too many shipments. There was too much acquisitiveness. Too much demand for speed, speed, speed, for objects that would be merely discarded the moment they arrived—people considered immediacy not a convenience but a human right, above all other human rights, a right to right now, right this second, give me the thing that I need.
And the result, Per thought, looking out over all the boxes, was that they all lived in a society of warehouses. But then, every society had the church and cathedrals it deserved.
Brynn set her box down and took Per’s shoulders in her hands. “It’s going to be fine. We just have to pick a place and start.”
This was reasonable advice. Brynn was nodding slowly and Per realized that she wanted him to nod too because accepting that this was the case was the first step to getting on with the work. So he nodded, slowly, feeling like there was fluid moving in his skull, tipping forward and back, bathing his brain in a tingling heat. A sharp, piercing brightness located somewhere at the top of his neck.
“Good,” she said. “Let’s just start.”
◆
They worked diligently and calmly, first sorting out the boxes on the floor in the office. It was like cutting through ice with a blunt ax. There were many false-starts. Boxes set down just for a moment getting reabsorbed into the mass of boxes awaiting to be sorted. But then they got into a rhythm. Brynn cordoned off a part of the downstairs sales floor and set some of their overflow out there. Some of the early customers stood and watched her as she carried five, six, seven boxes at a time in her strong arms. Per could see their eyes widen slightly as Brynn in her boots and her flannel shirt and high-waisted jeans made lightwork of it.
A wider path opened from their work, and they had an easier time of it. Moving boxes in and out from the sales floor to the back hall to the office and such. They grouped them by on-sale and then by genre. Per printed a list of titles sorted by on-sale date and went through checking off those that had arrived.
It was true that most of the shipments had come in, but there were still some stragglers out there floating loose and free, who knew where, as easily in New Jersey as in Pennsylvania or even Indiana. Per checked the store email and saw that there was a notice from the distributor sent en masse to several stores in the city saying that a small issue with their internal server meant that some shipments had been sent to Delaware where they still were sitting in a distribution center, awaiting correction.
None of their big titles for the winter were on the list of lost shipments. Just some children’s books and board books and adult coloring books. It was more that Per felt sorry for the publishers of those books. The endless logistical headaches of trying to put something into a world of rapid, ugly commercial currents. If you missed your chance, it was gone forever.
Around lunch time, Clem and Anil came down for their break. Clem was trying to save money by not going to the restaurant next door the way they normally did. Per had some of the lion head soup from the night before. Clem was eating reheated lentils and braised short ribs. Brynn went to work on the upper floor. Anil stood at the back door pouting because Clem wasn’t going out for lunch. Eventually, he went and bought a sandwich to eat in the back room with them.
He would not make eye contact with Per. During the week, he had not texted or emailed or called to say that he was sorry about what happened at dinner—almost spilling hot oil on Per and causing him to fall back out of a chair and concuss himself. No, Anil had not apologized. Not that Per particularly thought he was owed an apology. After all, Anil hadn’t tried to hurt him. It was fine by him, but Anil seemed more annoyed than anything else.
Clem asked to try Per’s sunglasses and Per obliged because the room was dim enough that he could go without them. Clem put the glasses on and did a bad impression of The Blues Brothers.
“Do you even need those?” Anil asked. “Like, were you really hurt that bad?”
Clem took the glasses off and frowned at Anil.
“He went to the doctor, man. He had a concussion.”
“Yeah, but, like, how bad was it really? You know?”
They were talking about him like he wasn’t in the room, and it had the feeling of a conversation that had been had many times before. Per thought of the two people on the station platform, laughing about him as though he couldn’t see them.
“I do need them,” he said. “For the sun and sometimes screens. It still hurts.”
Anil flinched and Per said, “Sometimes. Not always.”
“When you came in this morning wearing them. I thought you were fucking with me,” Anil said.
Clem laughed, loudly. “Jesus, you’re so self-centered.”
“I really did think that. I thought, he’s trying to make me feel bad or something—I didn’t know it was really that bad.”
The lion head soup had gotten a little cold. Oil had collected on the surface in gold little drops that skimmed over the cloudy broth. Fat from the lamb. The bok choy was limp and bitter.
“I don’t really know how to do that,” Per said.
“Do what?” Anil asked. Clem was still laughing, but he quieted.
“Fuck with people. I don’t really know how to do that. I wish I did. But I don’t.”
“Oh,” Anil said.
“I wasn’t trying to make you feel bad,” Per said.
“Don’t apologize to him. His feelings about your feelings are actually not your concern,” Clem said.
“Maybe not,” Per replied. “But I think when you’re friends with people. Sometimes it’s okay to want them to feel better about how you feel.”
Clem blinked. Anil turned dark red and stood up.
“Break’s over,” he said. But then, looking around, he seemed to notice for the first time that the back room had been cleared quite a lot. It jolted him. His hand shook and Per watched him turn slowly, taking in the room. He didn’t say anything else. He just threw his sandwich into the trash with a loud thump and went out into the sales floor. Through the open door, they could see him going up the stairs, two at a time.
Clem and Per sat quietly a moment after that. Then Clem said, “He really did think you were just fucking with him. That’s why he let the backroom get like this. Or like it was. He was like, determined, to not feel bad for you. Because he thought it wasn’t real.”
“He saw me fall,” Per said.
“Yeah.” Clem squeezed Per’s shoulder. “Anil is used to being the wronged party in almost every exchange in his life. He isn’t very good at taking his licks.”
Per nodded. He thought of what Chester had told him about Anil, leaving him alone on spring break, the bad shape of their relationship and the messy climax of it all. It was true that things had happened to Anil as things had happened to everyone, and that things happening to you could make you coarse and hard. You could get so used to the fact of your position as a person to whom things happened that you forgot your own role in causing things to happen to others. But there was no such thing as those who were harmed and did not harm—only Christ had been that way.
At the thought of Christ, Per felt cold and his throat closed. He had not thought of Christ in a long time. That part of his life was over now. Yet, it all came surging back in a gray wave, and Per gripped his bowl very tightly.
“I don’t think he’s very nice,” Per said. “He isn’t very nice or very good.”
Clem laughed. “No. But, who is?”
◆
After Clem had gone, Per took their trash out and up to the dumpster so that there wouldn’t be rats. He stood in the cold without his jacket, turning over in his mind what Clem had said. Who was a good person? Who was a nice person? Did the absence of good and nice people mean that they were allowed to be cruel and bad to each other? Did it excuse hardness, callousness, selfishness?
When Per was very young, his grandmother used to call him selfish. She told him that he lacked a Christian heart and therefore would never enter into the Kingdom of Heaven unless he changed. Her method of spiritual instruction was to have him read the bible at her table during the summer. The whole time he read, she sat next to him and at her right she kept a small golden spoon and a cigarette lighter. She smoked menthols and watched him with sharp eyes. And when his attention drifted, she heated the little spoon with the lighter and then pressed it to the back of his hand.
It was in this way that he learned the miracles of Christ.
At night, in the country, he slept sweating above the sheets. Sometimes, he’d awaken and see a gray face standing over him, watching. It was not his grandmother’s face, but there was something deeply familiar about it. After a few moments, the face would always leave and Per would go back to sleep. Other times, he felt hands passing down his face and stomach, holding him down. When he opened his eyes, it was not the gray face he saw, but a black face. An old woman in a dark veil with a hunched back and hard fingers digging at his arms. She opened her mouth and there were three sets of teeth and five tongues twisting.
One time, in the woods, Per found a dead dog. It had been shot through the back and its stomach was blown open. He pushed it over with a stick and saw that a black outline was left in the grass. And wriggling within the black outline on the grass, thousands of tan maggots. So many that their collective heat made steam in the cold.
That night, Per dreamed of the old woman. He saw her dragging the dog a long way to their front yard and leaving it there. When he woke the next morning, he checked the yard, but it was empty. When he put on his shoes to get firewood, he found, writhing below his laces, a mound of maggots.
He did not tell his grandmother, but he sensed that the maggots and the old woman were connected to what she’d said about his lack of a Christian heart.
It was only later when his college roommate complained about his snoring that Per went to a doctor and was diagnosed with sleep apnea. One of the side effects was sleep paralysis.
“It’s very common,” the doctor said. “Especially among African-Americans.”
Per looked up sleep paralysis and saw that it was very common indeed. And that the old woman from his dreams was likely some manifestation of the crone.
Until that time though, Per had tried to be a good person, to have a Christian heart. One capable of goodness and love and kindness and forgiveness. He had tried to be as Christ had been. And in college, he found only diagnoses and prescriptions. There were explanations for what he had experienced and what had happened to him. There was a whole, bright, caustic world filled with explanations. And yet some part of him, some dark and primal part, still belonged to that other world, that world of shadows and myths and crones. A world that believed that there was such a thing as good people and bad people.
And if Per could try, why couldn’t others?
In the dumpster, he saw two rats. They looked at him as though asking if he had some business with them.
After he’d let the dumpster lid slam shut, he went on standing there just to feel the cold on his face. The shades had cut a lot of the light, but it still stung his eyelids and made his eyes throb in a pleasant way.
“You’re back,” someone said. Per turned and saw through the slats in the fence that it was Chester.
“I am,” Per said.
“And no coat, aren’t you cold?”
“No, yes, but, I like it.”
Chester stepped close to the fence.
“I haven’t heard from you. Are you alright? Better?”
“Yes,” Per said. “I’m sorry I didn’t. I didn’t get to thank you.”
“No problem,” Chester said.
“Thank you.”
Chester laughed. “You’re welcome.”
Per’s wrists had started to burn from the cold. The wind was picking up.
“Do you want to come across? For a coffee maybe?”
“My break is over,” he said. “I can’t. Now.”
Chester nodded. “Maybe after?”
“I don’t want to get in the way. You have a business to run.”
“You won’t be in the way. I’m off.”
“I don’t think that’s true,” Per said. “I think you are trying to make me feel better about inconveniencing you.”
“Blunt.” Chester laughed again. “No, okay, yes, I have to work. But we should talk.”
“You want to talk to me?”
“Yes,” Chester said.
“About what?”
“About…” Chester looked away. “Hey, can you open this?”
Per pulled the latch up and Chester stepped into the alley with him. He was wearing a long gray coat and leather gloves. His eyes were bright and clear, and his cheeks were flushed from the cold.
“Come down,” Per said. “It’s better in the hall.”
“Lead the way.”
They went down the small steps and in through the back door into the hall. Per had shut the office door on his way out, so they were in the dark.
“One moment,” Per said. He fumbled for the switch and when he got it on, they were in a pale, lusterless glow. White. The bulb needed to warm up.
They were close in the hall. Their shoes were dripping snow and ice. Per worried briefly about the boxes getting wet. But then, Chester kissed him.
“Oh,” Per said after.
“You didn’t like it?”
“I did. No, yeah, I did. It’s just. Surprising.”
Chester laughed. But then he took his gloves off with a practiced, careless motion, pulling with his teeth. Then Chester ran his hands up the back of Per’s neck to his head, where he still felt so tender and soft. But the touch of Chester’s hand, human warm, slightly damp from the gloves, made Per feel a little better.
“How are you?” he asked again, quieter. Per saw his long, pale lashes, the smooth, bright color of his eyes. “Really.”
“I’m better,” he said.
Chester sighed. “I’m really fucking glad to hear that. I was worried.”
“You were? Why?”
“Because you got hurt,” Chester said.
“Yeah, but we don’t really know each other.”
“You’re an odd duck, Per.”
Chester put his gloves back on. The light bulb was warm. The light was steadier, not too bright. Just fuller.
“Anil thought I was faking.”
Chester barked.
“Man, yeah, he would.”
“I wasn’t faking though.”
“I know.”
“I wasn’t faking but he thought I was, and that made me really sad.”
“Of course, Per.”
“It made me so sad he thought that.”
Chester watched him a moment, and Per watched himself be watched. But then, Chester hugged him and rubbed his back, and Per put his cheek on Chester’s shoulder and closed his eyes.
“You’re a real boy, Per.”
That made Per laugh. He pulled back. Then Chester took the glasses off him. At first, it stung, the sudden brightness. But then, his eyes adjusted, and Chester was in focus and clear and solid and standing before him. And Per reached for him. They kissed again, and Chester backed him a little against the boxes and Per touched the back of Chester’s head, pulling him closer.
“I wish you would come after your shift,” Chester said.
“I’d just get in the way.”
“I want you to get in the way.”
“You just say that.”
“Will you come tomorrow then? I’m really off. For real.”
“I don’t know,” Per said.
“Then come tonight. Don’t think about it. Just come.”
Per nodded. There were voices on the other side of the door. Chester put his finger to his lips and smiled. He slid the glasses back onto Per’s nose and then stood with the door propped open to the outside.
“Come,” he said. “I’ll wait for you.”
“Okay,” Per said. “I’ll come.”
From the other side of the office door, muted laughter.
◆
After work, Anil pulled at Per’s elbow.
“I’m just. I’m just really sorry, man. About how everything went down.”
The church was at their right, looming over them. It was evening. They were tired. Per was sore and sweaty. Brynn stood with Clem and Siva on the other side of the street watching them.
“It’s okay,” Per said. “Accidents happen.”
“I’m just. I really did think you were fine. I didn’t know. I guess I didn’t want to know.”
“That makes sense,” Per said. “There are things I don’t want to know too.”
Anil nodded, but he didn’t look like he felt better. Per tried to suppress the part of him that wanted to make people feel better.
“It’ll be okay,” he said.
“Yeah,” Anil said.
They crossed the street to be with the others, and found the tapas bar rather full actually. Loud, too. And Per’s head immediately hurt. It was a mistake to come. But then Chester waved them over to the bar.
“You came,” he said to Per, but then to them all.
“Give me free drinks,” Anil said. “I have been doing moral relativism all day.”
Chester laughed.
“He thinks Max Martin is a theologian,” Clem said.
Chester looked confused, which only made Clem and Siva laugh loudly.
“Exactly,” Siva said. “Precisely.”
They were given beers. The rude bartender from last time was there again, though he seemed moderately nicer tonight. Per sat at the far end of their group, a little away from Chester and the bartender. He drank seltzer because his mouth was so dry.
Chester, without looking at him, slid a small bowl of nuts his way. When Per looked up, he glimpsed Anil staring at him. Then he saw Anil’s gaze move slowly from himself and the nuts to Chester, who was talking happily to Brynn and Siva about someone they knew in common.
“I hadn’t seen her in years,” Siva said. “But there she was at the Alex Katz show. Just, as if out of the air.”
“Wow, that’s so wild. I can’t believe she’s back.”
“Who?” Clem asked.
“This girl we all knew from like, 2012 or something. She used to go to parties and deal a lot of coke. She was rather infamously profiled in New York Magazine for being…kind of…around? I guess? It was a different time. New York was feral,” Chester said. “But she like got clean and converted to some kind of Baptist and then she vanished.”
“Some kind of Baptist,” Anil said. “Per is some kind of Baptist, aren’t you, Per? You’re from Alabama.”
“You’re from Alabama,” Clem said.
“Yes, but not really…from there, natively. But Per is. Didn’t you grow up speaking in tongues?”
They all looked at him, and Per swallowed hard.
“I didn’t speak in tongues,” Per said. “Some people in my church did sometimes. But I didn’t.”
“What is speaking in tongues? Is it like a language or?”
“It’s theater,” Anil said. “Everybody down there has three teeth and a Jesus bumper sticker.”
“You grew up in Daphne,” Per said. “Everybody’s rich in Daphne.”
Anil bristled and licked his lips. “You don’t know shit about it, country boy.”
“Whoa, let’s simmer down,” Chester said. “Let’s have peace in the realm.”
Clem, Siva, and Brynn all looked at each other in bafflement. Per felt flushed with shame. But also shared their confusion, because hadn’t they just made up? Hadn’t they just been over this?
Anil, looking at each of them, smiled. Laughed. “I’m just joking. Come on, let’s hug it out.”
He came down the bar and put his arms around Per’s shoulders. Per patted his lower back, but Anil went on squeezing him hard, and he leaned in and licked Per’s ear then bit his neck hard, and Per jerked back.
“What is going on with you?” he asked.
“Nothing, I’m just. Joking. That’s how I joke. I’m being funny.”
Anil looked at them again, like they were the ones in the wrong. Per wiped away the wet from Anil’s mouth. There were spikes jabbing his temples and his head. The air felt close.
Chester came around the bar and took Anil’s hand and pulled him into the hall that Per knew led to his apartment upstairs.
Clem and the others inspected the bruise already forming on Per’s neck.
“What is going on with him? Is he like, properly deranged right now or what?” Clem asked.
“I don’t get it.”
“Going after the lamb is so…lame.”
They all blinked at Brynn.
“The lamb?”
“Is that me?” Per asked.
“Yeah, like. You’re the lamb. You’re like. Soft. And vulnerable. And exposed.”
Siva nodded. “Yeah, that’s accurate.”
“Totally, he’s the lamb.”
Per laughed, but then regretted because his head hurt.
“Where did they go?”
“Upstairs,” Per said. “Probably upstairs.”
It was twenty minutes before Anil and Chester came back. Their faces were both red and they were not looking at each other. Anil took up his coat and left quickly.
“What was that about?” the bartender asked Chester, who had come behind the bar and taken up a rag.
“Don’t worry about it.”
Clem and Brynn finished their drinks and left together. Siva said she was taking the train to Washington Square, and said she could walk with Per since they’d be on the same train for a little while.
“I’m okay,” Per said.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. I’m okay.”
Chester eyed him sheepishly and Per asked for another seltzer. Chester filled the glass himself and slid it across the bar.
“I’m sorry about him,” Chester said. “He gets. Jealous sometimes, if he isn’t the center of attention.”
“Yeah,” Per said. “What did you talk about upstairs?”
“Nothing. Ancient history,” he said.
“Did you guys…” Per made a motion with his hand that he himself did not understand.
Chester laughed, then, growing more seriously.
“We talked. And we kissed. But that’s it.”
“That’s it,” Per said, nodding. “I don’t know why I asked. It’s none of my business.”
“No, it’s not. But I kind of like that you asked.”
“I shouldn’t be asking about your life. I’m sorry.”
“I like it,” Chester said. He touched Per’s hand—he was so warm.
“Do you,” Per started. “Ah. There is a party next week. At the store. Do you. Would you. I mean. I’m going,” he said.
“You’re going,” Chester nodded.
“Yeah, I’m going.”
“Are you excited to be going?”
“No,” Per said. Then, wetting his lips. “Yes. Parties. No, I’m bad at parties.”
“Me too,” Chester said. He was leaning on the bar now, and the muscles of his forearms were discernible. Per remembered the firmness of his chest from when they’d pressed together in the hallway earlier. The collar of his t-shirt was a little low like it had been recently stretched. His neck was red.
“Are you? Bad at parties?”
“Not always. But now I am.”
“Oh,” Per said. “I was going to ask if you wanted to go with me.”
Chester raised his eyebrows and hummed.
“Are you asking me out?”
“Well, I was going to. But I don’t want you to be uncomfortable.”
“I’ll go,” Chester said. “Anil will be there, how do you feel about that?”
“Oh yeah,” Per said. The lemon floated on the surface of the seltzer. The many dozens of bubbles rose and popped, rose and popped, in a great chain of replacement. “I think I just want to see you again. Is that weird?”
“I want to see you again too.”
“You do?”
Chester laughed.
“Yes, I want to see you again. Do you want me to come to the party? With you? I’ll just stand there and soak up all the bad conversation for you.”
“That would honestly be so helpful,” Per said.
Chester smiled. “Okay. I’ll go.”
“You will.”
“Yes,” Chester said. He took Per’s hand again and squeezed it. “Promise.”
Per nodded.
“But also,” Per said. “Can I see you another time before that, too?”
“Well, well, we’re in danger of making this a regular thing.”
Per laughed.
“There’s a Hopper show going. I’d like to see it. And. I don’t know, I heard about you being at Alex Katz, so I thought you might like art.”
“I do,” Chester said.
“Oh, me too,” Per said.
“Should we…go to see the Hopper show?”
“I’d like that.”
“Then, we’ve got to do something first.”
“What?”
Chester held out his hand and Per stared at his open palm.
“Give me your phone.”
Per put his phone in Chester’s hand and Chester entered his details then texted himself from Per’s phone so that he would have Per’s number.
“This way, we don’t have to wait by the dumpster.”
“That’s really smart,” Per said.
“Don’t go spreading my wisdom all over town.”
◆
Chester walked Per to the train at Broadway-Lafayette. Per didn’t need an escort, but Chester said that he wanted to. They passed couples and families and people alone. There were little huts with heating lamps and waiters zipping out of restaurants over the sidewalks crusted with ice.
The sewer grates steamed and Per could see through the shed windows people laughing and talking, eating their meals, communing with each other. Chester had his hand at Per’s lower back. He was telling Per a joke.
At the corner near the REI, Chester kissed him again and said good night.
“Thanks for walking me,” Per said.
“Of course.”
Per crossed the street. When he looked back, Chester was still there, watching him. He waved. Chester waved back and nodded a little impatiently at the subway steps. He wanted Per to go down. He wanted to know that Per was safe and on his way. Per could understand as easily as if Chester had whispered it in his ear. Go on. Be easy. Per went down, but before he lost sight of the street, he raised his hand high above his head and waved and then he was down in the station.
Above, just the sound of cars in the street.
Below, the roar of the train.
The couple were eating dinner when Per arrived. The younger one leaned back in a chair to look at him.
“You look better,” he said.
“I feel better,” Per said.
“Have some dinner,” the older one said.
Per put his jacket on the hook and sat. They poured him butternut squash soup and gave him seared bass. Out the living room window, the moon high and bright.
“You really do look better,” the younger one said. “You hardly look ill at all.”