In the dry years, my teeth begin to fall from my mouth. Not in a clatter, but softly. I collect them in the blue enamel pot we used to keep for tea leaves, bury them beneath the kitchen window, scrape furrows in the dirt with my fingernails. When the weather breaks, perhaps they’ll sprout. Perhaps they’ll grow. Mother doubts it. She says it might never rain again. Sometimes she tells me stories of when water fell freely from the sky, when pools and puddles collected in the street for anyone to see, when flowers bloomed in pinks and butter-yellow clouds, when parks were lined with sweeping trees, when lush green grass frilled the roadsides. I try to recall, but the pictures are faded and grey.We bathe in sand, eat beans from tins with rough oatmeal biscuits soaked in the sauce. The Government trucks in water to town for drinking, and milk to the school for the children. It comes in trays once a month. Row after row of small bottles with golden foil lids that glint like jewels in the sun. I love the feel of the glass, heavy and cool against the skin of my palm. I save my share of milk for Mother, who rightly demands it. She gave her teeth to the dry and her bones are brittle, she’s a tumble weed that whispers through the streets in the desert dusk. No matter what I do, the milk always spoils in the heat before I get home. Mother doesn’t mind. She waits for me in her chair on the veranda, blinking. Brown dust cakes her dress and settles deep in the folds of her face. She tilts her head like a hungry baby bird, and I spoon yellow curds into the puckered crevice of her mouth. She clutches my hand, flicks her dry tongue over her lips, seeking every last speck. When we’re done, she closes her eyes and coos.The University sends a doctor to our class to check our bones. A dentist to look at our teeth for his studies. We gather beforehand to watch the clouds of red dirt billow on the horizon as they approach. We grin gap-tooth when they alight in their fresh white coats. I line up with the others, allow the doctor to run probing hands up and down my spine. I reach to touch my toes. I squat. When the dentist asks, I open wide. He doesn’t like what he sees in my smile. The teeth I have left jut crooked, this way and that, wooden fence posts battered in a flinted wind. He says if I hope to save any, I need fillings and braces and both in a hurry. I laugh. It’s as likely I’ll sail a clipper ship down the cracked creek bed.When the last of my teeth come loose, I clamp my jaw together to try to hold them in a little longer, savour the click, click, click as they meet. My gums itch and ache, they feel the loss already. The skin of my lips and my cheeks is soft and sinking. Mother comforts me as I cry, catches my tears with her fingertip, sucks at each one like it’s spun sugar candy. She takes my face in her hands, kisses my mouth and counsels my surrender. She reaches in with her tiny clawing fingers, wobbles each tooth gently, ready to tug them all free. I ask her to wait until they fall on their own, but she refuses. She tells me it won’t hurt. Like pulling little flowers, from a bed of soft, damp soil.
When we caught what I can only refer to as the “thing,” I was fishing the outflow of the Micalgi Dam with my soon-to-be-pregnant wife Tonya who was mainly hauling in fingerling catfish and red-eared sunfish but whose cheeks were blushed from all the Chablis we’d been drinking. We were fishing with cut up hot dogs, a trick I learned from my uncle, an ichthyologist, which is a fancy name for a fish scientist. Man, what I wouldn’t give for him to have been there when I pulled in the “thing.” He was dead by then, having been poisoned by something over the years, perhaps from overexposure to the mercury that pooled in the guts of the fish he worked on, it’s hard to say. So, this creature comes in and it looks like a caterpillar if the caterpillar was nine pounds and pink and gelatinous as a huge earthworm with flute holes along its side in the style of a woodwind instrument or an ocarina. I landed it on the rocks, and it started oozing and undulating, staring up at us in amazement with two oil-black eyes the size of half dollars. Tonya looked at me and I looked at Tonya, and we both looked down to the thing. It had a round suck hole framed with rows of small translucent teeth, and it was working it open and closed horribly, joking to itself in a sound I can only describe as a squishy bleat. The fishhook was stuck through the side of the grotesque mouth and red blood leaked out in spurts, like it would on a human, suggesting that, at the very least, inside the thing was a beating heart. When it first appeared out of the water, Tonya was all, “No fucking way Wayne, no fucking way! Cut the line,” but something about it was mesmerizing. I stood dumbfounded and Tonya’s calls trailed off as we both stood before it and watched. “Strange things live behind dams,” prophesized my uncle so long ago. He’d been the clean-up man, the scientist to come in after some idiot dumped a bunch of car batteries into the river or when a fertilizer plant was found to be dumping forever chemicals into a waterway. Fisheries restoration was always a growth market. So, we’re looking at this thing, this mutant, this monster, and Tonya turns her head. “Did you hear that?” she whispered. “It said something.” Tonya and I were drunk but not that drunk. Squish, squish. Bleat, bleat. Then I heard it. The bleating, the thrumming sound, the squishing, the bleating again, and then it spoke as blue-bird clear as the Montana sky. “MA-MA.” Ho-Lee-SHIT! “Kill it!” Tonya yelled, the blinking lights alongside the dam casting her face red. I picked up a boulder and held it over my head. I held it there for a minute. The thing spoke again and bleated and squished, and I got caught in its black-eyed gaze and felt my elbows wobble from the weight of the rock. “Do it!” she yelled. I slammed the rock down across the thing’s make-believe face, and we hauled ass out of there. The next day, after a fitful night’s rest and a lot more wine, I poured through my uncle’s books. I found something in a chapter called, Outflow Oddities, a freshwater lamprey. But it didn’t look the same. The lamprey looked more like a shark, but it had the flute holes on its side and the mouth with ringed teeth, a potential fish cousin. I wrote the whole thing off as a pollution-induced freak show and we went on with our lives.
***
Later, years later, after Tonya and I’d failed to bring six pregnancies to completion, we’d resigned ourselves to fishing together and loving one another. The doctors had a few theories on why we couldn’t have kids, a few newfangled options to try, but at our age we decided to let it be and to focus on ourselves.We fished a lot, and I never forgot the “thing.” Sometimes I hoped we could catch another one to talk to, perhaps to keep and study. Tonya never made mention of it again, but I knew it haunted her in the way she reacted each time she caught a big fish. We didn’t talk about the encounter with the “thing” like we’d probably should, and we grew older, into people who only fished, only drank beer and wine every night, only worried and fought in tiny drunk outbursts about our legacy as a family.
***
One day, when the water was roiling behind the dam, frothy with milky bubbles and mud, and when the red light stopped blinking and stayed lit, Tonya hooked into something. The reel unspooled in a frantic whine, emptying her line nearly to the bare arbor knot. The dam was opening. A siren sounded. She kept fighting the fish. The few others fishing the outflow packed it up.“Ya’ll should leave, now,” hollered a dam worker standing on a catwalk alongside the spillway. One guy waited to see what Tonya pulled in. We all held our breath.Then, in a great magnanimous leap, a rainbow trout broke the water and flashed its scintillating sides like a model before runway flashbulbs. A real hog. A moment later, Tonya had brought the fish to hand, held it close for a minute and cried softly. It was a beautiful thing, too unnecessarily beautiful. “What are we going to do?” I said, referring to keeping it or tossing it back. She released the fish slowly, holding onto its tail for a few seconds as the thing ran water back through its gills, wobbling back and forth, playfully. “Keep fishing,” she said, wiping her tears away. She finally let go, but just before its form totally disappeared, when all its colors smudged into the singular gray of river rock, the waters from the dam released in a thunderous display of the power of nature.
“Do you know for a fact that the store will take it back? I don't want to walk around the mall with a router.” My sister nods. We sit on the floor of an empty room, my sister across from me with her back to the wall. I watch the dust swirl around the last lamp in the room like cicadas in the summer. We pick from the trash; working out what holds meaning using a perverted equation of sentimentality vs. space in our respective apartments. I lean towards the smaller objects: a passport photo to cleanse the image of her skeletonized body in hospice, restoring color to her face. Tactile things like clothing that I can run my hands across like braille. Nestled on top of my pile sits the router, its multicolored cables spilling out. I take the router and head for the door, scooping the cables in a bunch. I sit the thing on the passenger seat and turn down the road. The AT&T store is not far from the apartment but I dread the walk through the mall among the empty stores and stale air. I park close to the store, working off childhood memory alone, and find a spot in the dark garage. There are way fewer cars than I remember ever being here; like catacombs, the cars are sporadic every five to ten spaces. It makes sense; it’s a Wednesday afternoon. Middle schoolers, who migrate in from across the street, are on spring break. There’s something unnerving about the emptiness and the sounds of tires on the road blocks away. I wrap the router in my hands, feeling finality cloak the situation. It’s weird to me that you never own it; it’s just given to you to borrow. Holding the router, I push open the door to the mall, its cables begging to slip from my hands and fall along my legs. It wants to drag against the floor and walk along the tile next to me. The router and I slowly pass each store. I keep a cool pace that mimics the child in front of me. He’s tugging on his father’s sleeve, mesmerized by all that's surrounding him. He’s walking so slow to download everything he sees, to lock picture into memory. Just a pair of glossy eyes facing skyward. His obtaining and my releasing seem so distant, yet there’s a symbiosis in how we’re both moving and observing. Mutually pulling on something that soothes us. I come around the corner to the store. The router doesn’t beg for me to turn around. It’s almost comfortable being back here. It doesn't throw its cables around anymore; it just sits there next to me on the cold wood chair facing the iPhones, calm, waiting for the man with glasses to help. I watch the overhead light diffuse into the matte black of its sidings and bounce off the shiny front parts. Folding my legs, we wait together. “I need to return this router to you guys. It’s not mine. I—it's for my mom.” The man looks at me then the router, piecing together what's going on. “So we can’t actually take back the router in the store. You’re going to have to go to UPS. Just give them this account number,” he says as he grabs a Post-It note, hastily scribbling numbers. He’s almost sympathetic as he looks at me with gentle eyes. It’s uncomfortable, even agitating. The surrealness of the man pinning me down begins to deconstruct walls of denial I've so carefully built through paperwork, cleaning, and phone calls. I leave the store in a rushed attempt to contain any security I’ve formed for myself.All the empty walkways and escalators stare back with the icy cold of metal. I’m confused and faint from the lack of food and sleep I’ve missed in the past weeks. My jaw is slammed into its other half, crunching with anxiety. All I want is to finish; I want to return the router and be alone again. There's a fog around the whole place. What permeates the skylights is a translation of the gray marine layer outside. I brush the router's thin brown hair out of its eyes as we walk. I cradle her in the Panda Express line and apologize. Last time we were together when she was still cognizant I was high on pills from the night before. We had breakfast that day and all I can remember was being so comfortable, my new humor making the smile lines that ridge her cheeks grow. She even texted me that morning saying how good it was to see me, punctuating her thankfulness with emojis. I can't stop apologizing to her for this as I sit across from her at the food court table. I can’t escape her last memory of me being a direct consequence of drug use. A moment blanched of real love, the last visual she’ll be buried with. The curtains closing on a sad act of my derangement—all the worse, one she believed in, one she responded to with outstretched arms. At Panda Express, I think maybe if I plug her in somewhere around here then her lights will blink in sequence, shaping constellations in an otherwise blank sky. Instead, I gather the cables in my arms and head outside.It’s in the front seat on the way to the UPS store. I buckle her in so she doesn’t fly through the windshield and break into a million tiny pieces if I crash. The speakers play something I won’t remember later. Memory screens back images without sound sometimes; as if you’ve lost the right to deserve your complete past. I will only deserve a small allocation of these moments, portioned out thin enough to still want. More than this would be gluttonous, less would be hollow. The UPS man is similar to the AT&T man except I love this one like family. I can’t figure out why, but his voice is soft and the afternoon sun drapes across him through the window like a thin sheet. I gently place the router in his arms. A little too gently. He holds her as she leaves my fingers, hands me a receipt, and explains it will all be taken care of. I step outside into the rest.
The cruise ships circle the island like sharks. Full of wealthy refugees. We watch from the rooftop of the five-star resort where we’ve chosen to spend the end of our money and the end of the world. Loquats from the branch that overhangs our balcony and the limited room service menu provide sustenance but little pleasure. I choke down the yuca, the bitter greens, the thin soups that taste of dirt or chemicals. The kitchen staff pretend not to speak English when I ask about ingredients. I dream of meat—sweet breads, foie gras, suckling pig, rack of lamb, steaks so rare they’re blue. My husband says it’s because I’m iron deficient. “I’m a carnivore,” I say, baring my teeth.He snorts. “You couldn’t say boo to a goose.”My husband doesn’t like me to walk in the garden—says it’s not safe for a woman alone—but I’ve begun to sneak out when he’s asleep. The guard, Enrique, patrols the perimeter with a machine gun. Children beg for food by the fence. I often catch him dropping loquats from the pocket of his fatigues into the small hands that protrude. Sometimes we share a black-market Marlboro under the star-studded sky. The cruise ships drift past. Floating palaces. “Let them eat Twinkies,” I say to Enrique, who gives me a quizzical smile. There used to be monkeys, he tells me. Small, brown monkeys who lived in the loquat trees. But they started falling. He mimes something plummeting from a great height.It upset the guests, he says, so they had to move the rest. “Move where?” I say. “Move,” he says, slicing his hand across his jugular. He was able to save one. He will show me if I come back the next night with more money. I agree, and he disappears into the blue-black shadows as a cruise ship blocks out the moon.The next night my husband stays up reading The Wealth of Nations, and apparently it’s a knee-slapper. He keeps chuckling every few pages, which grates on my nerves. I sulk on the balcony and scan for the glow of Enrique’s cigarette. Finally, a soft thunk as the book slides to the carpet and my husband’s purring snore. I find Enrique playing patience at one of the garden tables meant for moonlit drinks. He makes me wait while he finishes his hand. He’s become somewhat fickle since we’ve grown closer. Finally, he looks up. Into his open palm I drop three Franklin Mint silver dollars from my husband’s Discovery of America set. I know I’ll be in trouble when he finds them gone, but I find I no longer care. Enrique bites down on a coin and grins.I clutch his waist as we jounce through the night on his gleaming Schwinn. After a lifetime, a cluster of shacks. Enrique stops without warning, and I spill onto the gravel. “Shh!” he says. But helps me up. My blood shines like black beads in the moonlight. We slink around corners and past candle-lit windows. No dogs to give us away. A child shrieks like it’s being skinned alive.He guides me to his hovel and pushes me inside. I’m afraid I’ve made a terrible mistake. But he only lights a candle and points to a dark corner, fenced off to form a cage. He rubs his fingers together. Mine for the right price.At first I don’t see anything, but then in the depths something stirs. I creep closer. “There, There,” I say, holding out my hand. The monkey moves into the light. Its face open like a pansy. “There, there,” I say, as I reach in to wring its neck.
Kimberly keeps her cowboy hat in the trunk of her car for emergencies. Emergencies like a last-minute invite to a rodeo, or line dancing at Ranchman’s.Other items in her car include: stickers from the local radio station, an old Cosmo magazine, bear spray, and a dinner knife. She doesn’t know about the dinner knife though. It slipped under the seat after she helped set up her nephew’s birthday picnic in the park two years ago. Like most things in Kimberly’s car though, the knife doesn’t have anything to do with this story.Her car is also home to dozens of lighters that she’s stolen from various people over the years. But Kimberly’s vice isn’t smoking; she’s barely a social smoker. To tell you the truth, she goes out less than she lets on. No, Kimberly’s vice is biting her fingernails. She bites them down to the nub and chews the flesh around her cuticles. Her fingertips bleed and ache. They’re sensitive to the touch. Cosmo tells her that it’s important to identify her nail-biting triggers. Her underlying issues. But when Kimberly sits idle in her car and thinks about it, really thinks about it, her mind goes blank and her fingers find their way to her mouth. Is life an issue, she asks. The very act of being? And you’d think we’d give her some sort of answer, but we don’t.A few weeks ago, Kimberly went to a hypnotist. She heard him advertising on that same local radio station where she got all her stickers, and he boasted about the ability to cure anything with just one session. She made an appointment right then and there at the 14th Street traffic light that always takes forever to turn. Later, she’ll realize it was like her nubby fingers dialed the number on their own, seemingly taking matters into their own hands. Like swarm intelligence or those clouds of birds she sees on Instagram, their tiny bodies morphing into dramatic drops of ink in the sky.The hypnotist was strange, as hypnotists are, but he didn’t wear a cape or anything and he didn’t make her squawk like a chicken. He had her lie back on a lounge chair and count down from ten. Then she sort of… drifted. She woke up seventeen minutes later. “Do you want to bite your nails?” the hypnotist asked.And to Kimberly’s surprise, she didn’t. Not even when she stared at herself in the elevator mirror, sat in traffic, or waited at the drive-through.And you’d think we’d be proud of Kimberly, and we are in a way, because we love Kimberly. But unfortunately, something else will now have room to grow, and that’s not quite the ending we wanted for her.Kimberly keeps her cowboy hat in the trunk of her car for emergencies, and yesterday, she put it on. But there are no last-minute invites to bars with mechanical bulls looming. No. Our dear Kimberly is on the run. And if she’s going to be on the run, she’s bringing her cowboy hat with her.Kimberly’s nails are long now. They’re red and pointed and they have a mind of their own. They tap against countertops and demand respect. They flash stolen credit cards and hypnotize—yes, hypnotize—with their otherworldly glow. She can’t stop them. Her nails are opposing magnets to her mouth. But when she thinks about it, really thinks about it, she realizes she doesn’t even want to trim them, let alone bite them, these precious nails. They’re sharp enough to be weapons.Kimberly races down the highway. Confident she’s not being followed, she pulls over on the side of the road. She flicks the metal wheel of one of her backseat lighters, chucks it into the car, and walks away. Her nails sparkle and glitter with the obliteration of her previous life. When the bear spray explodes she doesn’t think of the knife from her nephew’s birthday party, because, if you remember, she doesn’t even know it’s there.Kimberly hitches a ride one town over. She ponders the majesty of her nails as she slices the neck of her unsuspecting driver, as she digs his grave by the light of the moon. They’re just so powerful, she gushes as she drives away in his car, turns on the radio, and searches for a new station. And because we love Kimberly, even after all this, we find her something good.
Gone FishingBefore they bury your father, you eat plastic bags of goldfish, stack tuna fish sandwiches into stomach skyscrapers, slurp salmon off wood boards, down sardines from sharp containers, sing duets with big mouth bass, lick rainbow book fish, and laugh as clown fish swim in your belly.When there’s no room for bait or folding fortune-telling fish, you see fish floating in your blood, ichthyology meshed with humanology, swimming upstream, upcolon, eyeballs bulging behind yours. You sleep, flopping restlessly on your deck, fish guts and blood as a mattress. You beg fishmongers to swing your legs and arms across 5:00 AM catch-of-the-day piles. You pretend your eczema is scales and scratch until there are patches all over.You buy a mermaid tail for your niece, but wear it first in your clawfoot tub with its Poseidon feet and trident legs. You plan a trip to a mountain stream to battle bears for salmon.The funeral parlor owner holds his nose when you arrive in a Mrs. Frizzle fish-patterned dress and fish hook earrings. You bring tuna fish sandwiches for the after-service potluck. A long-haired man hands out fish and bread. You consider asking if he knows Jesus’ other miracles, especially the one with Lazarus.The fishing schedule is printed on your dad's program next to scriptures about the Leviathan. He missed opening day by a week, we always went together, you tell your cousins and aunts. There are fish swimming in his clear coffin like a toilet seat cover full of plastic fish. He’s wearing his Hawaiian fish shirt, the one your mom picked for the last family vacation luau.You can’t find farewell words because you're too full of fish. A rainbow trout falls out of your mouth and catches all the light in the room.Bereavement Fare Your shoes are white when you board. You have no luggage. No one fights to get on the plane first. Two people are dragged on. The stewardesses wear dark wigs with bangs that make them look like spies. Fishnet hose and black airplane-issued shoes. Some in slacks, others dark crinolines. All in jaunty death scarves imprinted with skulls.Their faces are as pale as yours, with Raggedy Ann blush blots. “Welcome aboard,” they say.One hands you a warm cloth. It unfolds into a damp American flag. Small children carry Colorform books with coffin and skeleton stickers. You step through coffee grounds smushed into your shoes. At seat 6, the grounds are replaced with the odors of potting soil and black mulch mixed with manure. Your nose burns. When you sit, a sea of darkness rises to your neck.You pull the airsick bag out. Your mother’s high school graduation picture is on the back next to her obituary. She’s smiling. Your seat mates stare at their grandmother and uncle. Died doing what she loved. Wife. Mother. Friend. Teacher.The plane takes off. Stewardesses stumble with tuna casseroles in aluminum pans and pound cakes in frozen foil. Black coffee in floral teacups. Your seatmates sleep because they’ve ordered sedatives. You didn’t.A Star is Born plays on everyone’s screen. Then, Steel Magnolias. The stewardesses have shovels with airplane logos. They slide coffins into the empty dinner compartments and toss in dirt. The plane is landing soon. They announce. But no one’s listening. They’re eating lukewarm casserole and crying over Shelby. The plane lands. You pull a carved wood box from the overhead compartment. The second passenger in your row is refusing to get off the plane.Everyone else exits, leaving behind only black footprints on the gate’s carpet.
My daughter-in-law Susie bought me a voucher for an adult educational course at the local evening school. Susie had studied herbalism there last year. She suggested I try it too. Susie had been married to my son for six years, but I struggled to connect with her. She wore pigtails in her hair and never smiled with teeth. She discussed her reproductive system with a near-pornographic reverence. I did not want to study herbalism. I didn’t want to learn to make wildflower seed-balls or my own callus balm with essential oils. What I wanted from Susie was a lesson on the subject of my own son, Jon, who was impenetrable to me. Silent, large, permanently bored, Jon had arrived on the earth like that: a baby IT manager.I selected the course in Greek Mythology on Wednesday nights from 6-8pm. The teacher had dyed black hair and a chain that linked his belt to his wallet. Athena was the best starting point when looking at Greek Mythology, he told us. Zeus had swallowed Athena’s mother whole because he didn’t want kids. But then Athena popped right out of Zeus’s forehead, wearing a helmet and holding a sword. When I told the group that I related to this experience of parenting, they laughed more than I had expected them to.That weekend, I saw Susie on the street, carrying a bundle of wild-weeds in her arms. She seemed baffled as to why I hadn’t selected the herbalism course. I grinned, perhaps baring my teeth a little too much. “What are the nettles for?” I asked.She looked at them and sighed. “They promote healthy ovulation.”Her pigtails had little wooden cubes on each hairband. Were these ornaments a representation of my son’s taste? Every time I saw Susie, it was all I could do: scrutinise her for signs that pointed to my son’s character.“Some people say that ovulation is a lot like religion,” I offered. “Best not overthought.”Susie didn’t have anything to say to that.Driving home from work, I thought about Athena’s mother. She had crafted Athena’s helmet and armour right inside Zeus’s stomach; the hammering sound gave him a headache. It must have felt gratifying, I thought, passing down something to one’s child. I’d never experienced anything like that. I remembered picking up Jon once from a week-long school trip to Wales. All the other kids were homesick and crying, desperate to come home. But Jon stood there among the weeping children, gormless, unaffected by their tears. His teacher told me that he’d gone around double-lacing every single child’s pair of shoes on the bus ride home. Some students had tried to kick him off, others had patted his back like a little donkey. I was stunned. I couldn’t even remember if I’d taught him to knot his own laces yet.In another evening session, we were asked to go into breakout groups of two to discuss Circe. Circe was an enchantress known for her knowledge of potions and herbs. She could transform her enemies into animals—mostly squealing pigs.The teacher asked us to choose partners for breakout sessions. Looking around, I realised I didn’t know anyone’s name. As I watched my classmates buddy up with each other, it dawned on me that many of them were not here to learn about myths.After a while, I noticed a man sitting alone in the corner. He was fidgety and had blackheads on his nose. Thinking he was shy, I approached and asked if he wanted to link up with me. It was maybe a poor choice of words. As soon as I said this, the man leered, raising his eyebrow.“You know,” he said, smirking, “according to the Greeks, the world started when the earth fucked the sky.” Then he winked. I wasn’t sure if he was trying to hit on me.I bumped into Susie in the same place I had the time before. Our routines were clearly in sync. This time, she was heaving a grocery bag on her hip. “What’s in there?” I asked her, trying to sound kind and approachable. I hoped maybe she’d invite me to dinner at her and Jon’s house.“Night ointment,” she said. “Homemade. For Jon. Lavender oil base and roughage from pink corn skin. I’ve been working on it for several weeks.”I thought of her in bed with Jon, rubbing the ointment all over his enormous back. His face against the pillow, expressionless, still.“And it helps him sleep?” I asked.Susie shrugged. “That’s the hope.”I hesitated. “Well, can I try some?”Susie smiled cautiously. “Really?” She seemed reluctantly pleased.“Oh, please! I’m a terrible sleeper,” I lied, laughing too loudly. “Like mother, like son.”We learnt about Icarus in class that week. It was one of the few stories I’d remembered. The father who creates a pair of wax wings for his son who then flies too high in the sky and comes crashing down. A story about ego. The teacher described Icarus flying with a lot of gusto, emphasizing the joy of escape and the temptation of the sun. I shut my eyes and tried to picture Jon flying high like that. I tried to picture him in a state of bliss.In the car after class, I sat in the driver’s seat for several minutes. I looked down and noticed the large bottle of Susie’s potion on the passenger’s seat. I’d tossed it there after seeing her. Brushing the hair from my face, I pulled off the lid and smeared it all over my forearms. It smelt like a first aid kit. The liquid stung my skin, which I assumed was purposeful. The pain felt vaguely correct somehow.Trying to breathe evenly, my arms lathered up, I took out my phone to text Jon. Tell Susie thank you so much for the lovely ointment. She’s a witch! In a good way :)I waited for a few minutes. He didn’t text back.The sores didn’t appear immediately, but when they started to come through, they were red, pea-sized lumps, almost geometrically abundant, like a raging breed of honeycomb. I couldn’t figure out whether bandaging them up would make them worse, so I wrapped up one and left the other bare.By the time the next class came around, Jon still hadn’t responded to my text about Susie’s lotion. I assumed he was ignoring me, as he usually did. I thought about texting him with a picture, typing, Look what your wife did to me, but decided against it.In class, I felt tearful, aggrieved. I kept catching other members of the group staring at my blistered arms, the looks of concern and disgust on their faces. The wounds seemed like burns. I thought about what had happened with Susie. I had not flown too close to the sun, I don’t think. I had barely gotten a peek through the clouds. Whilst the teacher was introducing us to Theseus and the Minotaur, my phone buzzed in my pocket. Jon had texted me back. The message was a picture. I leaned over and opened it. He’d sent me a photograph of his arms, irritated and bumpy, just like mine. They looked as if they had been dipped into a bucket of mild acid. He texted, Do you think this is normal? Susie made it. I can’t stop scratching.I put my phone back into my pocket. The teacher was telling us how the story ended with King Aegeus throwing himself into the sea when he wrongly presumed that his son Theseus was dead. I pictured the Aegean Ocean, riotous turquoise, limestone soft enough to sleep on. I imagined floating in the warm sea, the water buttery on my skin. I pulled out my phone again to look at the picture from Jon. I hoped that nobody would notice how much I was smiling.
I want to tell you about a day in late August of 2009. It is just past noon, and this is a clear day, a gorgeous day with almost zero headwind. I am sitting on the street-level deck of an Upper East Side coffee shop named M. Rohrs’. M. Rohrs’ is located just off of 86th and 2nd. The traffic is moving briskly throughout this part of town, and that is because the city has settled into a malaise, an annual two-week period that bridges the divide between true summer and the academic fall. This is a quiet time in New York City. This is a bittersweet time that is meant to usher in new things. When I think of this time, I tend to think of the outer boroughs, and I tend to think of the vacant parking spaces along open streets. I tend to think of the downtown and of the West Village. I tend to think of the Meatpacking District, and of the West Side Highway. I tend to think of the docks, and of the rhythmic plunging of waves against cement. I tend to think of the Rockaways and of City Island, where the steel and the asphalt give way to front lawns, to grass and rock and, eventually, to sea. For whatever reason, I tend to think of all these places as existing short of sundown, within some cosmic frequency that is perennially wave-jumping between the outgoing sax of HAIM’s “Summer Girl” and the opening strains of “White Dress” by Lana Del Rey.The outside deck at M. Rohrs’ runs empty. I am joined now by a girl named Zuzana. Zuzana is from Prague, but she has traveled to the US on a working visa for the summer. Zuzana is cute and unpretentious and she is engaging in a way that exudes charm. Every now and again, Zuzana will attempt to teach me Czech phrases, but I have struggled to retain these in the way that I have retained bits and pieces of Italian and German and Spanish and French. Zuzana is affectionate. Zuzana looks at me with what one might refer to as the petal-dust eyes. On July 4th, a week after the two of us first met, Zuzana agreed to go watch the fireworks with me along the Hudson River. Only we never made it to the Hudson River. We stopped off instead inside a corner bar where we got wasted while listening to the jukebox. Our songs played out to the sonic echo of pyrotechnics. Our songs played out to an electrified sky. Zuzana and I do not demand a great deal of each other. Our interests hedge toward the mundane … dinner and a movie. Last week we went to The Metropolitan, where we sat by a window and discussed Pieter Bruegel’s The Harvesters while gazing out across Central Park. The two of us prefer to stay at home and eat takeout. The two of us prefer to sit along the esplanade and read. The two of us prefer to have ravenous sex, the kind where the windows shake and the walls run damp with perspiration. On nights, and there have been a handful of them, when I have slid my arm from beneath Zuzana’s shoulders, only to tiptoe into the kitchen where I can write, Zuzana will appear several minutes later, her face cast in the ghostly glow of my computer screen. “Why do you need to do this now?” Zuzana will ask me. On certain nights, I will allow Zuzana to lead me by the hand back into the bedroom. On certain other nights, I will convince Zuzana that she should just go back to sleep. Zuzana and I are similar in certain ways, yet we are not similar enough to justify anything beyond what we have been doing. And it is because of this that I have decided to break things off. There is someone else, a woman who has been away for most of the summer. This woman and I had gone out a couple of times back in the spring, and while I am uncertain whether we are meant to be friends or something more, I also recognize that this woman is inbound, and that Zuzana is outbound, and that the city moves too quickly for anyone to stand in wait until he can be sure. Entire theses have been written about this, which is to say the meet-cute world of serial dating in a metropolis, about the ill effects of trading up or swiping down. Lipstick Jungle. Guinea Pig of Love. Throughout Gotham Proper, any long-term commitment takes on the auspices of a surrender. Exchanging vows signals the beginning of a slow and steady drift toward the suburbs, toward North Jersey, toward Long Island, toward the crimson edge of everything that had drawn one toward Valhalla in the first place. Among the undesirables—And I include myself among those ranks—dating in New York City serves as a reminder that we will always be the underclass, and that we will never be well-suited to the pass/fail immediacy of surface apps. And so we demure. Either that or we search for an outlet, and whereas that outlet might provide us with fulfillment, it might also provide us with an excuse. It's not about me, it's about the work, and so on … even though the work is almost inevitably about us, for better or for ill.“I see,” Zuzana says after I have explained the situation. Zuzana runs one finger along the pattern of her dress. I sip my coffee, and then I begin to atone. “No,” Zuzana interrupts me. “She is coming and I am going, and so there is no need for you to say anything more.” Zuzana has shifted in her seat, and she is facing west now, toward 2nd Avenue. “Part of me just feels sorry for you,” Zuzana continues. "Based on what I have seen, I think you are going to keep on doing this whenever anybody attempts to get close to you. And I think that you are going to end up alone when you are in your fifties. By then it will be too late.” “Too late for what?” I say. Zuzana scoffs. Her jaw is set in such a way as to indicate that there will not be any further discussion. And so we allow for the white noise – a distant car horn, a whirling blender. I think that you are going to end up alone when you are in your fifties. I sidestep any display of emotion by generating a mental checklist of all the would-be baptisms, birthday dinners, wine tastings, graduations, church socials, bad art openings, group vacations, investment opportunities, weddings, funerals, hospital visits, housewarmings, engagement parties, holiday traditions, fishing trips, recitals, and general inclusiveness I will be able to avoid just by remaining unattached. I enjoy being in a relationship, I do, right up until the point at which a paramour’s friends or family begin to insist that I do not meet their standards. It’s not that I don’t think you’re a nice guy, the drunken sister of an ex-girlfriend once informed me. I’m just not sure whether you are the right guy for her. That comment burned, and it left its brand upon my id. Why not tell a man with pockmarked skin that he should have taken better care of his complexion as a teenager? I have spent the bulk of my adult life feeling as if I have been a burden upon the people whom I adore. I struggle with this, although I have struggled a great deal more with the idea that I am not the caliber of human being that others would like to receive at their front doors. The moment passes, and, eventually, it comes time for Zuzana and me to say our goodbyes. The two of us hug, a halfhearted hug that leaves one arm dangling like an empty windsock at our sides. Then a brief wave, and Zuzana heads uphill toward the 6 train. I, in turn, hightail it back to my apartment so that I can get some sleep. Around 7 PM, I set out toward Central Park. Once there, I follow the ellipse until it lets me off along the north side of the Delacorte Theater. The Delacorte is home to Milton Hebald's Romeo and Juliet sculpture. Whenever I think of Hebald’s sculpture, I tend to think of it in deep winter, with a 2-inch mound of snow accumulating along the back of Romeo’s head. I would die here, Hebald's bronzework seems to say. And it would not be a tragic death, to perish now, at the celestial height of all emotion. This is love as an act of bravery. Or is it love as an absolutely glorious mistake? Love as an elegy; the poison pill that lovers take. Elizabethans. I have mentioned another woman, and I am on my way to see that woman now. Besima. Besima is Canadian and she is a schoolteacher. Besima stands 5'9” and she is bookish and brilliant and she wears Louis Vuitton frames that bring out the accents in her cheeks. Besima and I met online. We exchanged emails. We shared our first date at a bar called David Copperfield’s, and, once there, I presented Besima with a copy of Oliver Twist (as a playful nod to the whole Dickensian motif). At the end of that night, Besima gave me a quick peck just before she disappeared into a taxi. Three weeks later, when Besima and I met up again, I leaned in to kiss her at the end of the night. Only this time the gesture seemed contrived, as if I had been seeking reassurance along a nonexistent front. Besima left to spend the summer in Ontario a few days after that. Tonight will be the first time that she and I have seen each other since. Besima and I have the potential to become great friends, which would be grand given that I need great friends. But our great friendship, which is to say our potential friendship—a friendship that will require several months before it can be cemented—that friendship is commensurate upon me understanding not to push things beyond their established limits. Historically, this has been an issue for me, and it has been an issue because I tend to view male-female relationships from a perspective of wins and losses. I am referring here to a negative trait, long-standing and hardwired, that finds its basis in my lack of self-esteem. I do not think myself attractive, and so I seek out others who can provide that validation for me. This harkens back to my childhood, and to my peer group, and to a suburban rejection of everything I held dear, if not the pedestrian idea that the brooding measure of a man has something to do with heterosexual prowess. I come from a place of Catholic guilt and shame and deflection (based on hypocrisy). I come from a place where people define themselves based on what other people insist that they should be. I want to be loved. No, what I want is to be wanted. No, what I want is to be someone who is perceived to be wanted. Whether that is true or not makes almost zero difference to me. I crave attention. I am a child of Eros. I grew up on the suburban myth of a big-city romance. As a teenager, I would idealize men and women based on movies like The Apartment and Manhattan and When Harry Met Sally. I came to envision love as resembling some sort of a thunderclap, an epiphany, a jolt from out of nowhere that went off like a starter pistol, precipitating a breakneck sprint along the uptown streets. Bring it in … and now cue the strings. Only none of that was real. In fact, it wasn’t even real to any of the writers who had originally imagined that it could be. A case in point. I remember reading a 1991 New York Times profile about Woody Allen and Mia Farrow that explained how they lived across from each other along opposite sides of Central Park. Whenever the two of them were on the phone, they could signal, wave and gesture, Woody from high atop his 5th Avenue penthouse and Mia from an upper-floor apartment along Central Park West. As a seventeen-year-old from the suburbs, this struck me as idyllic. As an aging cynic (with the added benefit of hindsight), it strikes me as emblematic of just how complicated any of these big-budget romances tend to be. I am close now. Besima and I have agreed to meet at an outdoor bar just off of Riverside Drive. Besima lives 1.5 miles north of that bar, a half-mile south of Columbia University, which seems appropriate, given that she is an academic. Besima arrived in New York City around the same time I did, which was 2006, when the country was still in its post-9/11 era. For a Canadian whose parents had emigrated to Ontario by way of Bosnia, adjusting was not easy. At the time, Besima could not purchase a cell phone in New York City without a background check, and she could not travel within the US freely. Her address and her employment status were both being monitored. She had applied for a green card, but the process kept getting delayed. Despite this, Besima immersed herself within the city, and she gravitated toward its pockets. Given the choice, Besima opted to teach in the public education systems of the Bronx and Harlem, as opposed to the more prestigious academies located south of 96th Street, and in Brooklyn.I make one final turn after which I can see Besima. I can see Besima sitting alone at a table in an otherwise deserted dining area. Unfortunately, my mind is still fixated on whether Besima and I are destined to be friends or something more. We are destined to be friends. My heart and my gut seem to be in agreement, and I am fairly certain that Besima has already arrived at that exact conclusion. The only issue is my ego. A fit of conquest. The need, yet again, to be perceived as a person who is wanted, as a person who keeps pace. I need clarity. I need to be able to comport my affairs in a binary manner so that my friends will not be confused. Or maybe I need to make new friends. And maybe I keep chasing all of the new friends away. Is a life about reporting back? It is not. Yet I know that I will have one drink before hedging the conversation toward a place that it should not be.
***
Zuzana. She existed in the middle of things, arriving as she did sixteen years after the first time that I had experienced true love and thirteen years before the place that I am now, which is alone. I am writing to you tonight from a one-bedroom walk-up which is situated directly across from a post office, roughly one half-block from a railway (but not a train station), and approximately two-tenths of a mile from the Lehigh River in Northeastern Pennsylvania. Nothing happens here, and the townspeople prefer it that way. On an April night when the weather allows for the windows to remain ajar, one can hear the neighbors coughing from a hundred meters away, just as one can hear the diesel blast of the tractor trailers barreling hard across the I-80 bridge. This is not a place where I would have envisioned myself, nor am I the person whom I would have envisioned myself as becoming. I am a shipwreck, and I have washed ashore here. To some extent, I have been subsisting in exile, even though I am financially secure (at least for the time being), and I have a meaningful job at a company that emphasizes the right things. For me, exile exists as a place where, to quote the poet and essayist Elisa Gabbert, “not suffering [becomes] a form of suffering.” My life is calm here, but I prefer the chaos. I seldom reflect upon the periods in my life when fortunes soared and stasis ruled the day.A bit of context. When I left New York City, I had no money and no prospects. I had been sober for five years; I had not dated anybody for four. During the summer of 2017, I took to splitting my time between Manhattan and the Poconos. In short order, I had been offered a full-time job in the Poconos area, and at about the same time, I had met a woman there, as well. In the job, I saw an opportunity for stability. In the woman, I saw an opportunity for escape. But, oh, how much of love is dependent upon slanted truths and omitted details? It’s that old story wherein one partner says to the other, “Do not move here on account of me,” and the other partner insists that he or she had been planning on moving there all along. Only this woman and I, we were not partners so much as we were co-conspirators. Our first kiss felt arcane. It felt like witchcraft, or perhaps the beginning of some unholy alliance. The two of us were sitting by a fire in the backyard of a lakehouse, and the October breeze came rolling in from off the water, and the embers crackled, and the two of us got high, despite the fact that I would rarely get high even before I had gotten sober. I made a pass, and this woman rebuffed me. Shortly after, she relented, but only if I would agree to take a sip of wine first. And so I did. If I wanted a second kiss, this woman contended, then I would need to smoke a cigarette with her. And so I did. At some point during that cigarette, this woman looked toward the fire and she said, “I’m gonna hurt you, Bob.” She said that with concern and she said it with forewarning, and I ignored her, and that is on me. By mid-November I had fallen in love with this woman, and I told her as much. She did not tell me that she loved me until two months later, when the two of us were lying in bed one afternoon. She had her back turned toward me, and she whispered the words as if they were an allocution, or a mea culpa. (She had admitted to sleeping with an ex of hers ten days prior.) Our relationship lasted from October until May, and there were several breakups in between. One night when it was all but decided, I went over to this woman’s house and we put her kids to bed, and we went downstairs and we sat in the living room and we watched TV. My heart felt light, and so I smiled, and this incensed her. “Whatever it is you’re feeling,” this woman said to me, “I don’t feel it.” – a comment that dug its nails into my psyche. When I went home, I wrote these words inside a notebook: People who are in need of saving should not develop a Messiah complex. It brings things low, and it breeds enablement. Our dismount was awkward, and it took place in stages. By early spring, the two of us were living seventy-five meters apart along the same street. We could wave to each other in lieu of texting. We could walk over to see each other in lieu of a phone call. Less than a month after this woman and I had called it quits, she took to seeing a woodcutter who lived one block away; a woodcutter who had also been the previous tenant in the apartment where I was the current lessee. I cursed the wind. I began to long for the city, where sorrow only lasts until one turns the corner. There are no soulmates in a metropolis. There are no soulmates anywhere, really. Soulmates are for platitudes. Soulmates are for small towns and bad fiction. Soulmates are for suburban stopovers where the talent pool is limited and where people marry for lack of knowing how else to proceed. In the wake of this affair, I felt unlovable, and, as such, I began to question whether I had been attempting to force love out of people before they could get up the energy to leave. I had a checkered past. I had objectified women. I had been a good boyfriend, but a bad bachelor, and it seemed as if all of that was beginning to pirouette its way back to me in streams.
***
Nightfall, and I am looking out a tenth story window from inside the Hotel Richland. The Richland is located along the southern boundary of the Lower East Side. Tonight is Mischief Night, and I have been here for six days. I was initially scheduled to check out this morning, but I added an extra night due to a hangover, my second of this week. The first hangover was mild, and it occurred after a twelve hour binge in Greenwich Village. This second hangover carries with it a reminder of the old ways, of a melancholy that all but shrouded me throughout my thirties. I feel skittish. The only light in the room comes from the ghostly glow of the TV. I am wearing sweatpants and I have the heat turned up to seventy-two. There are fast-food wrappers crumpled up along an end table and there are breadcrumbs in the sheets. I have no cash left in my wallet. I withdrew $220 from my checking account during the overnight hours. This according to a pair of receipts.I feel spineless. I want to divebomb through this window. I want to sweep down low across the rooftops; I want to springboard over ledges. I want to glide my way through Chinatown, then veer left onto the Bowery, toward the colonnades, up through the arches, onto the bridge, where I can dematerialize into a ray of light that’ll cascade like so many particles into the river. I want that. I want to transcend. Only I am stuck here, a fool and his bad choices. I deal in self-deception. As such, I prefer to look out at things that cannot look back. Up here, there is no barrier between what is art and what is architecture, between what is progress and what is preservation. Up here, every bit of skyline is being bought up by the speculators. So many structures, a great many of them already living under the threat of demolition. Will you become a landmark or a relic? It is the quintessential question of aging. I can trace this back to its flashpoint, the glint of the muzzle. Toward the end of 2019, I began to allow myself a drink on occasion. I did this as a matter of ceremony after eight years off the sauce. Only now I am backsliding. I am giving in to the wrong impulses. I am wading into what are both bleak and terrestrial waters. Last night I turned a three hour outing with an old friend into a twelve hour trainwreck on my own. I have no wisdom to impart. I am not penning an advice column. The starch has faded, and my line has gone slack. I look forward to drinking these days. I spend two hours of every binge feeling charismatic, and then I spend the rest of those evenings chasing the glow. I am in the bars again, and being in the bars means barhopping, and, at least for me, that barhopping means a babbling stream of toxic chauvinism and wasted money and awkward rejections and shameful boasts. I lack control. The longer the night, the more compelled I feel to meet somebody, to end up dick-deep in some woman whose name I cannot recall. I pursue this not out of a need for companionship, but as a means of compensating for the extra hours spent desperate and semi-lucid and alone.Be aware that these are the fledgling stages, a series of unremarkable deviations. The skin loosens; the jowls sag. I do not lie so much as I omit details. I commit oversights. I go from running five days a week to running four. Minor variances, but they can lead to a place where the road narrows and there is nothing but the Valley of Gehenna below. I have struggled to reclaim my honor, and I have no interest in an about-face. I need to stop drinking. Nostalgia is for the discarded. Three days from today I will turn forty-nine, and as I enter year fifty, I have occasion to consider that the most gratifying period in my life took place between 2012 and 2016, an incandescent metamorphosis during which I was newly sober and entirely celibate and only sporadically employed, all while still living in New York. Those years felt like deliverance; they felt like nirvana. Those years felt like coasting through a sundrenched mist after a quarter-century spent charging into a headwind with a massive chute fused to my spine. I ate better upon getting sober, and I slept better, and I began to turn inward. I had divorced myself from the conceit that one needs a lover – or some ongoing bevy of sex partners – to make him feel whole. This past August, I received an email from an ex-girlfriend, Meghan, my first true love, and one of the two great loves of my life. Meghan and I were in a relationship from the spring of 1993 until the fall of 1995. I was young and she was younger, and we both had separate worlds we needed to explore. There was a breakup, and following that breakup, Meghan and I lost touch. For a time, I would hear things, that Meghan was doing well and that she had married well, and that she had settled long in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Meanwhile, there was no way of knowing. I had gone looking for Meghan online, only to discover she had the digital footprint of a person who does not want to be found. But then there was this email, and at the heart of it, a question: Would I be open to Meghan coming to visit me in the Poconos? I was, which is to say that I had accepted. And, thus, one night toward the end of summer, Meghan and I built a fire and we ate outdoors, and we worked through a quarter-century of gasp and void. It was the beginning of something, a reclamation. It was an eleven hour conversation that did not ebb until the dawn. Meghan has been to visit me a few times since that night. Earlier this week, she came here, to the Lower East Side, and the two of us spent a couple of days together. We walked through Little Italy and Tribeca and Washington Square. We went to the Whitney and the Met. We had dinner at the White Horse Tavern, after which we attended the fiction writer Sara Lippmann’s book launch at P&T Knitwear. After P&T, Meghan and I disappeared into the Village, where we got drunk, a good drunk, a warm drunk, the kind of drunk that makes me wish that I was capable of doing things in moderation. Meghan grounds me, and I am spellbound by her. I should also mention that Meghan has been tremendous for my psyche. When things went sour with that woman who had cheated on me, I stopped believing in myself. I took a header into the dark south. Intimacy, or at least the physical manifestation of it, is like a drug. It is like a mainline cocktail to the soul, the sudden removal of which can create a vacuum. I did not want to overcome that emptiness so much as I wanted to avenge it. I wanted to meet somebody, somebody who was fierce and smart and accomplished and who could make me seem attractive by association. And I did meet somebody like that eventually, only when I did, I resorted to drinking because I thought I needed to. This cheapened me, not only in my own eyes, but in the eyes of everyone who had supported me. I could go on for another ten paragraphs. I could expand on the idea of love and its apparent station in my life. I could comment on the age of androgyny and the inevitability of an asexual revolution; of the cultural shift from time management into energy supply. I could tell you that I like to think about love as a way of honoring the principled people in my orbit, but that I also like to think of it as a form of integrity. I could bring matters full-circle by explaining how Besima and I have become the closest of friends, how I met up with Besima this past Thursday, and how we went to see a movie at the Lincoln Square 13. I could run deep along any number of tangents, but instead I would simply like to impart that my life, at its most profound, has been about moving forward. And that my fears, at their most paralyzing, have arisen from remaining idle for too long. Companionship has been a struggle, particularly because I am selfish and I have an overwhelming indifference to remaining on my own. That aside, I feel privileged to be able to sit here and look out across Valhalla on a Saturday in late fall. There is more. There is an ocean. But the room is paid for, and we’ve got time.
The cashier, whose name tag reads Barbara, scans my items, a two-liter of Coke and a Milky Way, my usual. It became my usual once I discovered the total, $6.66. Barbara, wearing a faded Looney Tunes T-shirt, won’t say the amount out loud like she does with every other customer. Instead, she stares at me as if I’m summoning a sugar-powered demon. The number never fails to get a reaction, unlike the fact I’m dressed as a cell phone.I pay and grab my stuff off the counter, which is made difficult by the big white gloves velcroed to my hands. The bells tied to the gas station’s main door jingle as I exit. Outside, the sun hangs in the sky like a giant Fuck You. Sweating, I eat the Milky Way on my walk back to the store, arriving just before my boss, Hank. I’m able to get the contest sign from my rusted-out Buick and lug it to my corner before he flips on Cellular Dude’s lights.The sign advertises Cellular Dude’s mascot-naming contest. Motorists driving down Highway 71 are supposed to shout names for the store’s mascot, me, from their cars. At the end of the month, Hank, the Cellular Dude, will pick his favorite. There’s no prize, so most people don’t shout anything. A couple of days ago, a lady in a convertible called me a jackass, but most of the time I’m just an invisible dancing cell phone.It’s okay. I come from a lineage of unnamed people. I only know my dad by the numbers on his slaughterhouse work badge: 5156252. I only know my mom by the smell of the hot dogs she used to leave defrosting in the sink before leaving for her second-shift cleaning job. The light turns red. A row of cars starts to pile up. I wave the sign, do a little jig. People inside the cars avoid looking at me, but I look at them. I like to imagine I’m a part of their lives, of their commute, that I’m going where they’re going. My favorite is pretending I’m a planet the cars are orbiting, that they all know my name, but I don’t know theirs. The light turns green. The cars inch away. A Honda slows down next to me. The car behind it honks. The Honda’s driver’s-side window rolls down to reveal a middle-aged man sporting aviator sunglasses, which reflect my painted face, the blown-up pictures of apps taped to my chest.“You look like a Chip, maybe a Charles,” he shouts through cupped hands.Once he says it, he’s gone, down the highway and around the block. Chip? Charles? I wonder which one Hank will like better. A couple of hours pass, and I walk back to the gas station on my lunch break, craving another Milky Way and Coke. During the walk, I imagine what life would be like as a Chip or a Charles. I imagine “Chip Was Here” carved into a park picnic table, imagine parkgoers being able to perfectly picture me in their heads. I imagine a skyscraper office where Charles is drilled into my door like a landmark.Sitting in the gas station’s parking lot is the exact same model of Honda as before. I run a white glove across its hood, hoping it’ll uncover my new name. The entrance of the gas station opens, and out steps the middle-aged man.“Holy shit, it’s the cell phone,” he says, slapping me on the back. “Man, I bet that job sucks. I’m Jerry, by the way. You?”“Pete.”“Why not Pete then?” he says as if it’s obvious.I watch as Jerry gets into his car and backs out of the parking lot before I go inside. I gather my Milky Way and Coke. Barbara frowns as she sees me approaching the counter. She goes to scan my usual, but I throw in a pack of gum at the last second. She cocks her head, flashes me a look of confusion mixed with relief. She says my total out loud, but all I hear is, “Why not Pete then?”Kkkkriiissshhh. I yank off a glove. “Name’s Pete,” I say, extending Barbara a fleshy hand.
