“You have to tell.”

“I don’t have to do anything!”

“Tell me. Now.”

She rose from her seat. The glowing yellowish skin of her legs poured out from under her skirt. The man stayed where he was seated, his long arms stayed crumpled in front of him, piled loosely on the table.

I watched from the table diagonal from them in that crowded restaurant on that dreary night so long ago. But I remember it so well. I remember their faces, sunken, sallow, and severe. I had only caught the last bit of their conversation because they raised their voices, but I had been watching them for some time, nursing my drink. I watched her storm out, and I watched him not follow her. I watched him stay there for another hour, ordering three more drinks and staring straight ahead. He never looked in my direction, he never noticed me watching him. I finished my drink and had one more while I watched him, and when he called for the check, so did I.

I walked outside when he did and I followed him at a distance for a long time. We walked twenty blocks or so together.

I told all of this to Jim. He sat and listened.

“So where did you follow him to?”

“Another bar.”

“What did you do? Did you talk to him?”

“No, I just watched him for a while, until I got too drunk and just walked home.”

Then Jim got mad at me, he said my story was pointless. Jim is my cousin, he’s twelve years younger than me. He just got a new job in sales.

He told me that he had a dream that the CEO’s wife came to their sales kick off and asked all the sales reps if they were going to hit their quotas. He thought it was funny so he told the other sales reps. They asked him why he was dreaming about the CEO’s wife.

“It wasn’t sexual,” he told them, “it was fear-based.”

“Sex and fear are intrinsically linked,” they reminded him.

Jim said that must be why I used to follow people around. He said that I was a voyeur, that I was excited by following people around. I followed men and women around just the same, he also noted. It was fear, he claimed, fear of getting caught that drove me to do it.

Jim sat across from me in his living room, holding a bottle of amber beer, almost golden in the light—visible through the clear bottle. I was holding one too, resting on my knee, mine was not illuminated quite the way that Jim’s was.

“I tried it,” he said.

“What?”

“You know, the thing. I followed this guy when I was at the sales kick off.”

“One of your colleagues?”

“No, just a random guy in the bar. The other sales reps and I were all drinking at a bar there after the last day of meetings and the company dinner. I decided to leave early, these guys are all a few years younger than me, and I’m new so I don’t need to be getting drunk with them.”

“So you left.”

“Yeah, I left,” he sighed, “and as I’m leaving, I just see this weird older guy. He has a slouching gait and he looks out of place, kind of disheveled, older than the rest of the crowd there. I think he was leaving the same bar I was at, which was weird. He didn’t belong there.”

“That’s how it starts.”

“Right. And I can’t get your fucking stories out of my head. I really blame you for this. I would have never thought to do this, I would have never noticed the guy. But I’m thinking about you, how you would have followed him, so I get this magnetic pull to walk the same way as him, which I hardly notice at first, until I realize I’m not going towards the hotel, I’m just walking maybe twenty feet behind this guy, keeping a steady eye on him…and time slowed down… or stopped for a minute…or I wasn’t present…like, I had the idea to follow him, I thought of you, then my mind went blank, or I blacked out or something, I disconnected with my thoughts, and then I snapped back in and I was several blocks down the road, back in my body, following this old prick.”

“I’ve never thought of it like that.”

“Does that happen to you, too?”

“That’s exactly what happens. That’s why I could never articulate a reason for it. I never put my finger on it.”

“Great. So you infected me with your mind virus.”

“I never told you to do anything.”

“But you told me all about this shit. You suggested it.”

“That’s not how that works.”

“Yes it is. Shut up and listen.”

“I’m listening.”

“So I follow this guy for like 3 miles, way outside of the downtown area, through this shitty part of town, into the industrial part, where there are warehouses, and trucks, and auto shops, no real residential buildings that I can see.”

He stopped for a minute and rubbed his chin, then he went on.

“By this point, there are no other people around, so it might be obvious that I’m following this guy, but he never turns around and looks behind him, also, I’m a ways back and it’s dark…I was trying to stay blended into the background wherever I could, in case he did look back. The more I think about him looking back and confronting me…the more I can’t stop following him.”

“So where did you go?”

“I followed him all the way to his house. After all the industrial buildings, there was a tiny neighborhood and his house was there, just a little one story house. There were two or three others around it. It looked like the last bit of an old neighborhood that was taken over by industry.”

“And?”

“And nothing. I looked in the window and I saw him being greeted by some woman, probably his wife. They sat down at a little table and there was food on it. She started to serve him.”

“So you watched them eat?”

“No, I left. I felt strange. It was midnight. Why was this old man leaving the bar with the young people to go have dinner with his wife at midnight? It didn’t make sense to me.”

“He probably worked there.”

“Where?”

“At the bar.”

Jim looked at me, “I didn’t think of that,” he said.

We spoke about something else entirely for the rest of that night. It was six months later that Jim was stabbed to death while he was following a man home in Indianapolis while he was there for a sales conference. The man later testified that Jim had been following him for years, but it was Jim’s first time visiting Indianapolis, as far as I knew.

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In my dream I was courageous and jumped immediately to action. I began, as quickly as I seemed to notice that it was happening, pulling huge chunks of rubble off the bodies of those crushed. Teleporting in that dream-like way from where I was seated, all the way to where the action was happening, suddenly on the steps of this angry cathedral, it watched me as I hurried, frantic and sweating. The first person I freed was a small blonde woman, completely naked except for the dust that covered her pale skin. She gasped for air as I freed her and she clung to my forearm. I peeled her off and kept trying to pull back the rocks. I pulled rubble off of a middle aged man. His body was crumpled and bloodied and horribly disfigured. I couldn’t tell if he was alive.

I turned around and the naked woman, her hair clumped with dust, was sitting dejected on the steps. She stared at me with her empty sullen eyes.

At that point, I heard my cell phone ringing and I was back inside somewhere, it was a small room, like a den, with old furniture and shelves lined with books. There were books in piles on the floor. The doors were split double doors made of glass, the wooden trim painted white, they were almost like shudders.

I answered my phone, and it was my old boss. My boss who was fired from the last company that I worked for. He was urgently telling me something.

“Anthony,” he kept saying.

“Yes, it’s me. How are you Lawrence?” Never Larry, always Lawrence.

“Anthony, these motherfuckers, these animals at Pine Valley,” Pine Valley was the private equity fund that purchased the company where Lawrence I worked together, “they started a brand new fund. I hear the first one is tanking. They are supposed to exit these companies on a five year horizon, but they are all duds, they can’t sell them, because if they ever did, everyone would know that they aren’t worth shit! So they are just starting a new fund. We have to do something.”

I sighed, Pine Valley was the reason that Lawrence got fired.

I realized all at once that I was in the midst of responding to tragedy. I told Lawrence.

“Listen, I want to talk to you about this, man, but I can’t talk now. I’m busy, I’m at this horse race and the fucking bleachers collapsed and I need to try to help these people trapped under the rubble.”

“What the fuck? Why did you pick up? Go!” Lawrence screamed into the phone. He was easily excited.

As I opened the split glass doors, I felt someone move beside me. I tried to walk back outside to help the people trapped under the rubble, but I couldn’t. I thought I heard someone walking around me. I felt cold soft lips land a kiss on my cheek, and then my lips. I opened my eyes. My wife’s face was right above mine. She was wearing a green wool hat.

“Bye,” she said softly, “see you later, I love you.”

“Love you too,” I said as she disappeared from my vision.

I laid in bed for a few moments longer and stared at the dull white ceiling, the morning light creeping into our bedroom. Where was she going again? The dentist, I think. She is the only person I know who would book a dentist appointment at seven AM on a Saturday morning.

After I showered and had a coffee at home, I walked to the grocery store on main street. I grabbed a few things and walked around aimlessly. They had a little coffee bar in the back with a barista working. She was maybe twenty one, she was tall and thin, her nose angular, her eyebrows thin. She had dark hair, pale skin, and light brown eyes. She wore a bandana over her hair like the girls used to do when I was in high school. She had a discerning intelligent look in her eyes. I decided to get another coffee. I needed to wake up more.

“Hello there,” I said to the barista.

“Hi, what can I get you?”

“Just a cold brew, please, black,” I said, thinking about the hot sun rising outside.

She rang me up and poured the dark syrupy liquid into a plastic cup and snapped the lid on. I looked to my right and then to my left. When I looked forward again there was a small man directly in front of me wearing a balaclava. His face was round and dark but his cheeks were rosy and he was smiling. I took a step back, surprised at how close he was. I tripped over some packages of water bottles on the floor and fell into the display of drinks behind me. The barista smiled and laughed a little, still there with my coffee. The man looked concerned. He reached out and said something to me in Spanish. He grabbed me by the hand and pulled me back up. He smiled again, brilliant and white and beaming with happiness.

I stirred as I felt it getting lighter. I opened one eye to see Claire’s closet door open. The light shining out of it. She stepped back out, slipping a long sleeve t-shirt over her naked torso. She smiled at me. I laid on my back with the covers up to my chin.

“You slept in,” she almost whispered.

“How are your chompers?” I asked.

She sat on the edge of the bed, she placed her hand on the comforter over my chest.

“I went to yoga,” she said, “I canceled the dentist, remember?”

“I guess I didn’t.”

“I turned down the AC a little, it was freezing in here, you’re all bundled up.”

“What are we doing today?” I asked her.

“We don’t really have plans.”

“Do you want to go to Best Buy and look at the TVs?”

Claire smiled at me.

“Okay,” she said.

I loved going to Best Buy to look at the TVs. It reminded me of when I was in high school, I would smoke weed with my friends and go to the mall. We’d be shocked and lambasted by the bright lights as soon as we entered. We’d practically skip down the halls. We’d eat at the food court, try on sneakers, go to Dick’s Sporting Goods and play on the putting greens, we’d try out baseball gloves, and pick up the heaviest weights we could. We’d go to Best Buy and stare at the wall of giant colorful flat screen TVs in awe.

Claire and I made eggs and toast for breakfast, had coffee, and headed out the door. Best Buy was a short drive away to the outdoor mall in the main part of town. It wasn’t quite like the beautifully lit indoor malls of my youth, filled with strange independent stores that sold colorful polished rocks, and semi-legal varieties of “incense,” but it would do. I played some music from my phone and Claire asked me what it was. I told her.

“Do you like it?” I asked.

“I’m deciding that,” she said, which meant no.

We walked into Best Buy and I was washed over with the feeling of unlimited possibility. The gadgets, all interconnected, made of perfectly moldable plastic and metal filled me with an acute joy so potent that I could hardly focus on the specific and physical, I was overwhelmed by the ethereal and generic. The lego block transformer robotic toys and objects, speakers, TVs, cameras, vacuum cleaners, fans with no spinning blades, speakers with no wires, lithium ion batteries powering useless ambient blue light. I have been programmed since my youth to crave these gadgets, and crave them I do. I shuddered at the possibility—the opportunity! I walked over to the camcorders, something I have always wanted but have never bought. Something I’m sure I wouldn’t use. I picked up a bluetooth speaker. I saw the tiny round woofers behind that beautiful fine black mesh. I wondered about things like stereo separation, audio file compression, and the acoustics of my living room, but I pushed those thoughts out of my pesky little brain.

I walked over to the home theater receivers. That was too big-time for me, I just wasn’t ready for thirty-two channel surround sound. My experience was only slightly deterred by the general sad feeling that filled the Best Buy that Saturday morning. The limited staff looked dejected, their worn faces did not spell technological wonderland, they spelled anger pitted against powerlessness. There were some broken displays, some boxes blocking critical aisles that led to the cable section, the silver snakes that sent the wonderful signals, the coded messages that blared out from the speakers and filled my own organic receptors. I was reminded of my age, that Best Buy would never be the same as it was fifteen years before, or twenty years before then, in the golden ages of big box stores, a bygone era that I hardly had a chance to experience myself.

Despite this, nothing could have stopped me from enjoying the television display. Just listen to the sound of that word. Telegram, telephone, tele-VISION. The word spoke its power. The magnificent wall of criss-crossed rectangles, shining beautifully. Huge in scale. Fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty, ninety, one hundred inches! One hundred inches of pixels and light. How many feet is that, even? I walked over to Claire. She was transfixed by a small TV with a strange white border. I looked at it, the color was dull, it was in a single, solitary display in front of the wall of TVs.

“What is this?” I asked.

“It’s the frame TV,” she said.

“What does that mean?”

“They are so popular right now. It means you can put a frame around it so it doesn’t look like a TV.”

“Like, what kind of frame?”

“A picture frame.”

“It will still look like a TV, what about the screen in the middle?”

“Well, you leave a picture of art on the TV and then it looks like a painting. See, look,” she pointed as a still life with flowers appeared momentarily on the screen.

“Still looks like a TV to me,” I said.

“Yeah, it’s dumb,” said Claire.

“Why can’t you just have a TV that looks like a TV? Why do you have to pretend it’s art, which is not particularly convincing, by the way.”

“I don’t know. If you don’t want a TV, don’t get one, that’s what I say.”

“True,” I pointed at the price.

“Yeah they cost way more too,” Claire said.

“What the hell is this?” I pointed to a small picture frame that had the image of a record on a turntable shot from above. It said, Frame Speaker.

Claire read the description and started to laugh.

“It’s a speaker,” she said.

I started to laugh too.

“That one really looks like a frame,” I said. I imagined everything in our house being disguised to look like something else. The TV and speakers would be art hanging on the walls. Maybe we could put a frame around our sinks and toilets too so no one could tell what they were. Our dishwasher could be behind a false bookshelf. Our entire house could be a series of trick items, sure to leave no sign of us living there.

Claire and I walked over to the fans and spent the whole time fantasizing about our home full of hidden household items. Claire loved the idea of a framed toilet.

We ended up buying a fan because the air had been a little warm and stale in our bedroom the last few nights but it wasn’t hot enough for the AC yet. I told Claire we should get a window AC unit that actually looked like a window, complete with a screen that played a live feed of what was happening outside the window.

There were two fans for sale, one was $69.99 and the other was $699.99. We decided to get the $69.99 fan, Claire pointed out that no matter how good the second fan was, there was no way that it was ten times better than the first. It didn’t even look like a frame or a statue or a bookshelf or anything, it just looked like a fan.

On the drive home I told Claire that I wanted to call Lawrence. She looked skeptical.

“He told me that Pine Valley started a new fund because all of their companies aren’t worth anything.”

“Not this again. Are you sure you want to indulge in Lawrence’s conspiracy theories?”

“It seems legit, from what he said.”

“You didn’t even like working for him, you were so happy when he got fired.”

“I know, but he’s not so bad. He was stressed.”

“When did you talk to him?”

I thought about it.

“I don’t know, last night, I think.”

“On your way home from work? I didn’t hear you talking to him last night.”

“Or maybe this morning.”

“This morning? No you didn’t. You were still asleep when I got home.”

“Well, I talked to him at some point, I’m fairly sure.”

“Alright well, you can call him back later.”

“I will.”

We walked back inside and set up our fan. There was a ton of plastic packaging and strange instructions on how to assemble the little stand that propped up the spinning tower. I finally got it moving, and I watched the brilliant blue light spin back and forth like a search light, as the cool air slid by my face and past me into our open bedroom. Claire was quietly napping, fully clothed, on top of our made bed.

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“Hello,” the old man says, “Can I help you find anything?”

“We’re sort of just browsing,” the tall dark-haired man says, “where would fiction be?”

“Well…I have very little…it’s almost all art books, history, philosophy.”

“I’ll check out the art books,” the woman says.

“Those will be that way,” he points to another room within the expansive space, open to the rest with a large entrance, rectangular with white trim, “they started in there, and they expanded out,” he gestures with his wrinkled and veiny hands, moving them like a leisurely breast stroke in a backyard pool.

“Follow me,” he says to the man.

The tall dark-haired man follows the old man’s slouching gait. The bookseller leads him over to a huge set of shelves with books piled kneehigh in front of them, three piles deep. He does another circular gesture with his hand.

“These are all fiction,” the old man says through his mustache. The younger man watches the loose sleeve of his quarter zip sweatshirt swirl around his thin wrist as he gestures and restores his hand back to his side. The young man laughs, not outwardly, but inside of his own mind, for the “very little,” fiction that the bookseller has is more than any normal bookstore, and of better quality, for reasonable prices.

The old man sits back down, and he watches the young man leafing through the books. He peers back over the piles to the woman, but she is lost behind the stacks, and he cannot see her. The tall man knocks over a small stack of books and mutters something to himself as he bends down to rebuild it.

Later, after the couple leaves, the old man stands up from his chair when it is time to close up his shop. He powers his computer down, walks around to make sure the side door is locked, turns off the lights, and walks to the front where he shuts the door behind him and locks it. He checks once, twice, three times that the door is locked by turning the handle, then he walks down the long hallway, his shadow, mutated and multiplied by the flicking fluorescent lights, slides on the tile floor behind him.

The old man walks across the frigid parking lot, the December wind slices through his thin jacket and thinner skin, passing right through him. Snow blows off of the bare trees and the parked cars and swirls in its icy white anger around the bookseller’s nose, until he climbs the four steps to the porch of his duplex, where he’s lived on the bottom floor, a two bedroom apartment, for forty years. He’s rented the top floor out for the past ten to an old widow, who he actually went to high school with, but did not remember until she showed him a dusty and faded yellow yearbook. Before that, he’d rented it out to a landscaper with a bright, ruddy complexion. When he’d first bought the house, he’d lived in the whole thing with his wife, before he had converted it into a duplex.

The door creaks as he opens it. The front room that flows into the kitchen is dark. He walks in and takes off his coat and shoes, turns the lamp by the woodstove on. He turns to the living room wall, where there are newspaper clippings pinned to a bulletin board. He looks at them closely. Some of them have been there for years, and some of them were just added. He rubs his hands together, trying to brush off the cold. He opens the iron door to his woodstove and peers in at the coals, still burning a brilliant orange and red. They crackle and sizzle and glow like precious stones filled with light, waves of heat are visible. He reaches down and fingers a dry log sitting by the fire. He uses cured oak. He throws the log into the fire. He closes the iron door again.

When he is done adding the wood to the stove, the bookseller walks to the back of the house. There, he has a covered porch that does a little to block out the wind, but is not insulated. He opens a cloth pouch sitting on the end table by the porch and finds his long carved meerschaum tobacco pipe and a bag of his favorite pipe tobacco. He fills the bowl up, grabs his thick sheepskin jacket off a hook by the door, and walks out onto the porch. The cold chills his ears, but his jacket is warm, and he sits on the old wooden rocking chair and lights his pipe with a wooden match that he strikes on the stone floor. He covers the pipe with two fingers on his right hand and puffs rapidly to get it going. He inhales the sweet tobacco smoke and exhales slowly through his nose and mouth.

He rocks back and forth as he smokes the pipe. There are only a few items on the porch, there is no other chair. There is a small foldable card table next to him. In the corner of the porch leaning against the wall is a metal spade with a wooden handle. Next to that is a large metal pail with a bag of powdered lye in it. There is a metal scooper on top of the bag.

The bookseller looks out at the backyard. It slopes way up to the hill, and there is a fence there. He does not allow his tenant to go past the fence. That is where he keeps his vegetable garden.

He often shares his crop with the widow who lives above him. He will even give fresh vegetables to some of the artists who live in the subsidized housing above his book shop. The widow who lives above him often sees him come inside covered in dirt, with his spade, and his pail, he leaves his wheelbarrow outside. She sees him go up there every evening, and sometimes, though she isn’t totally sure, she thinks that she hears him digging at night.

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“Imagine you’re a bug, no, not a bug, something bigger. Imagine you’re a nail in a board on a fence.”

“Can I stop you there?”

“What, no, why?”

“I feel like a nail in a fence is not necessarily a lot bigger, or even bigger at all, than a bug.”

“Fine, okay. Not bigger, just different. You’re a nail in a board on a fence.”

“Okay…I’m imagining it.”

“What does it feel like?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Yeah, I mean, what do nails feel?”

“Depends.”

“On?”

“Whether they are used or not, like in a box with a bunch of other nails or in something, in wood.”

“You already said in a fence.”

“I know what I said.”

“So?”

“So it probably feels like you’re engulfed. Inside of something, like you know, maybe in a sleeping bag, but way tighter, and the sleeping bag is hard, and you pierced into it.”

“But nails don’t feel.”

“It’s an exercise.”

“But they don’t feel. It’s like you asking me to think like a rock.”

“I don’t need to ask you to do that.”

Dan and I talked like that for a while then I hung up the phone. My bathroom is brilliant—painted a muted yellow and the tiles are sparkling and white. I did the lighting myself. It’s not grating or too yellow or too white. It’s warmer than the cool cold fluorescents you normally see, but still natural and rich, so you can see what you’re doing. I sit on the porcelain throne, and my legs grow numb and they begin to tingle and sparkle and hum and vibrate while I sit there until I finally rise. My joints creak and my spine straightens out like a string.

Mainstream campaigns of finance and economics, imperialism and breakfast, symptoms of something greater, nothing greater, nothing simple, nothing bright. The drums beat in my ears and the bass vibrates my skull. I want to feel that thing again. That ever so slight, ever so sulfurous and violent thing that runs up and down the back of my neck into my brain stem, that thing that rattles my skull. My skull that houses my brain. My brain that is sucking up blood like a sponge. A teacher told me once that gray or pink brains were dead brains. Live brains were bright red. That shocked me. That shocked me more than when I found out they performed brain surgery without anesthesia because you have no nerve endings in your brain, and you can’t feel anything.

After the call and my bathroom visit, I go upstairs to find something to do. It’s boring here and there are only a few people, but their faces are gone. They look blank, like bowling balls with no holes, but, you know, head-shaped. The hallways here wind tight like a ball of yarn, twisting and turning into themselves. Upstairs they have cards and games, I don’t really have anyone to play with but I take the pieces out of the boxes and look at them really closely. The little metal battleship, the cannon. I like the war themed ones. I also like the pieces from Sorry. I remember playing it as a kid. It has little colored pins as the pieces. I like the green ones, but the blue is so blue. I hold them over my eyes so I can’t see anything else, just blue.

“Do you think he can see us out there?” I said to my mom the last time she called me.

“What do you mean, baby?”

“Well, I mean, we put him out there, in the ocean right, can he see us?”

“Yes, he can. And he is watching us, always.”

When I put the blue Sorry pieces over my eyes, I think of my dad. We spread his ashes in the ocean when I was eleven.

I’m bubbling and bubbling over it all this morning. Bubbling like the waves over the rough sand and rocky beach. Sometimes they turn the radio on here. Sometimes they leave it off and turn on the TV. I haven’t nailed down the schedule yet, and I don’t think they have either.

Big Eli is the only one up here with a face. He walks over to me and sits down.

“Do you want to play a game?” I ask him.

He mumbles something to me, like almost gargles. I try to say, you know, come on Big Eli, play with me, but he ignores me again.

It was when I was ten that I first got in a big fight at school. I never knew how strong I was until that day. I remember the brown wooden desks, attached to the seats. I remember the golden shiny paper year, 2001, stapled to the bulletin board. I remember my teacher, Mrs. Abbey, with her long, slender fingers that stretched out into her long fingernails painted red, her gold jewelry, and her wrinkly hands. I remember this kid, Eli. That’s what made me think of him, but he wasn’t big like Big Eli. He was scrawny and mean. He always wore a shirt from some fire department event, straight dark denim jeans, and faded, dirty white New Balance sneakers with the laces tied so tight that the excess made huge loops that dragged on the floor. One day, he pushed me in math class and called me something, I don’t remember what. I grabbed him by his shitty worn out shirt that he always wore and I slammed him down onto the floor. He tried to get up and I pushed him back down again. I didn’t even really know how to punch, but I slammed the big bottom meaty part of my palm into the soft part of his nose the second time he tried to get up and he fell back and hot red blood came streaming out of his nose.

The teachers told my mom I was like a wild animal, that I had a savage look in my eyes. She told them that my dad was very sick. That he was dying of cirrhosis of the liver. They went a little easier on me then, but not much. I still got in-school suspension for a week.

Sometimes I wake up in the cold dim morning, when the sun can’t come out from behind the thick dark clouds, I feel locked in my dream and it’s like trying to remember a name you can’t recall, where everything is on the tip of my tongue but I can’t push through to what is real, to what the day actually means, to who I am. I pull the covers over my head and hunker back down into my bed but it doesn’t work. I still get up and my head is heavy and I feel like crying.

I walk over to the radio and look directly into the innumerable tiny holes that make up the screen covering the speaker. I feel the music hitting me in the eyes, my hard over-hanging brow, the bridge of my nose, and my unusually high cheek bones. It is my cheek bones that make me look crazy. Intense, wild, violent, not dull and muddy like the civilized types. I have high cheek bones and a narrow straight nose. I have intense, beady, black eyes.

Big Eli follows me over to the radio. He is humming, in the way that he always does, but he can’t really keep his lips tight enough together to make it work.

Someone told me that Big Eli used to be a great football player but he took too many hits and it scrambled his brain. Someone else told me he was born like this. I heard from a nurse that he had a big accident, so I don’t know what to believe. When I look into his eyes I see mountains, fields, empty rooms, cars, grasslands, and snowy hilltops. I see his vibrating lips that try to push together to hum. I see his soft muted dirty blonde hair turning gray. I see a child.

Dan and I used to do coke in the bathroom of the Rusty Spoon when they had a DJ on Saturdays. There was only a two dollar cover and there were always girls there. One time I was so blacked out I didn’t even remember meeting this girl and I woke up next to her.

She looked at me in the morning and asked, “do you know my name?”

She was naked, her hair was dark brown. I remember her skin was so white that her pink nipples popped out so brightly.

“No,” I said, “I don’t.”

She laughed and told me what it was, she didn’t seem to mind. I only had flashes of memory of the night. I remembered she had black platform sandals with thick shiny straps. She took them off on my couch. She said she wasn’t from around here and was visiting a friend. She asked me to drive her home.

“Do you have a car?” she wanted to know, she didn’t seem to think that I would.

But I did have a car. I drove her home even though I still felt drunk. I was driving so fast I remember and she asked me to slow down.

Dan called me later and told me what happened. He said they turned the lights on at the Rusty Spoon and kicked everybody out. We walked outside then, he said, and saw a whole group of girls who didn’t know where to go. Dan told them to follow us and we took them to a bar we knew would be open, cut the whole line and got them inside.

“Five minutes later, I saw you making out with her,” he said, “you had that look in your eyes, the animal brain look, I knew you weren’t conscious, you looked like Charlie Brown.”

“Charlie Brown?”

“When you get fucked up enough you look like Charlie Brown. It’s disgusting.”

That was five years ago. Before I ended up here. Before the bugs and the blank faces and the outbursts, before I stabbed Tim, my mom’s husband.

No one visits me much these days, because I’m way out here. It’s hard to get here from where most of my friends and family are, it’s like a two hour drive.

Doctor Johns walks right up to me after I leave Big Eli, humming into the Radio (he picked it up after he saw me do it).

“Hey Sam,” he says.

“What’s up?”

“I need to talk to you about something. Follow me to my office?”

“Okay, sure.”

I follow Doctor Johns’ sweeping gait. The rows of fluorescent light rain down on me in successive blows, Johns looks like he is a ghost, tall and gaunt, flowing in his loose fitting slacks and white Doctor’s coat. The tiles in the floor and ceiling peel by like the skin of a hard boiled egg, the thin film between the shell and the soft white meat.

Doctor Johns turns a corner, he opens the door to his office. He holds the door for me and I walk by. I sit down in the chair across from his desk. Doctor Johns has a narrow head. His hair is thin and barely covers his white scalp. He wears glasses, narrow with dark rims. His eyes are dark like tiny holes in his white, white irises. His nose is long and pointy. If I were to compare him to anything, it would certainly be a bird, but of which variety, I do not know.

“Here’s the deal,” Johns says to me in a hushed tone, lowering his upper body and placing his elbows onto the desk.

I don’t respond.

“You’re the only one in this place that I can trust.”

“Me?”

“Yes you, have you noticed that?”

“Have I noticed wha—”

“That this place is crawling.”

“I mean I have noticed a few blank faces.”

“It’s all there is, it’s nothing,” he rose in his chair again, “I mean it’s not nothing, I mean there is nothing, nothing left to hang onto, no one left to trust.”

“But why me?”

“Because you’re real.”

I feel the electric tingle I felt in my legs earlier in my finger tips, my arms feel numb, and sweat begins to pool in my arm pits. I feel it drip down across my ribs and down to my waistband. My mouth feels dry and I try to speak.

“Doctor Johns, can you please stop? Is this a gag, man? Why are you messing with me?”

“It’s all very simple, Sam. It’s not complicated at all. There are certain things that have to happen, certain ways things are done, if you know what I mean. And I think you know what I mean.”

“I don’t.”

The doctor stares at me. He continues talking but I stop listening.

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The sky was so blue that every shape interrupting it looked violent. Cut out with a knife. So blue that the air might as well have been sucked out of it—a vacuum. From my apartment window, a particular brick building shot out of the ground and into the azure, cutting straight lines through the giant mass of blue behind it. The fire escape made me sad. One clay pot with no plant rising from it sat on the landing.

There was a burn on the roof of my mouth from a scalding hot slice of pizza. I’ve been burned before, but this burn was different. I woke up with a pain in my mouth and I spit dark blood into the sink while I was brushing my teeth. My morning coffee was painful to drink and I found that to be crushing, not knowing that my first cup of hot coffee was vital to my emotional well-being. I went for a walk to try to ease the suffering, and it was hard to be upset when the sky was so god damn blue.

Last night I had a strange experience. I went on a date with a girl and we sat in the corner of a bar. In that corner there was a speaker and the speaker was right behind my head. I couldn’t hear anything she was saying and I kept asking her to repeat herself. She repeated herself and I still didn’t hear her and so I’d give up on hearing what she said. She wasn’t talking loud enough. I asked if we could move seats and she seemed annoyed even though we’d already moved seats because she had hit the table and spilled my beer all over it. It was not a good date. I did not hear a lot of what she said and she kept asking me questions like do you consider yourself more of a lemon or a lime? And I was just not able to think of good answers because I don’t have conversations like that. Like weird questions. If you could only have one condiment for the rest of your life, what would it be?

My walk went through a park, and the park had a loop in it. There was a plaque on the stone paving of that path that said: 1 lap=1 ⁄ 3 miles. I did three laps because that made sense to me. The plaque invites you to do at least three laps, and if you do more, it would make sense to do them in multiples of three. There are certain forces in the universe that shouldn’t be pushed against. That is just my opinion. I put my tongue on the roof of my mouth and moved it around. The grooves and ridges felt deeper and more pronounced. I looked down at the cobblestone path. There was a lot of dirt in some of the cracks, some were clean.

There’s not a day that goes by where I don’t miss my best friend, Dylan, who I grew up with. We met when we were thirteen, in our hometown in upstate New York. We became friends fast, we had the same sense of humor. Dylan came over to my house, only a couple blocks from his, one day after school. He’d seen this weird kid who had always lived two houses down from me out in his yard. This kid’s name was Mitch Davis. I was eating something, I can’t remember what now, when Dylan came in, through the garage and into the back foyer by the kitchen. My parents had an open-door policy for my friends because they wanted us to hang out at my house, where they could supervise.

“I saw Mitch Davis out there. Staring at the sun,” he said to me, as I sat at the table, eating.

“Yeah, he does that.”

“Do you ever worry that he’s so close to you?” He asked, with a sick look on his face.

I was playing along, “yeah, but you get used to it after awhile.”

“I always imagined him as some kind of creature, like a werewolf, or a gargoyle.”

“A gargoyle?” I asked, “so, a statue?”

“Well, yeah, but not a statue, like those cartoons, you remember those cartoons? When we were kids they had those cartoons where the gargoyles came to life, and they were big and they hopped around on roofs terrorizing people? You remember that?”

I knew what he meant. “Kinda,” I said.

“That’s Mitch. He doesn’t move around much during the day, but at night, he comes to life. I picture him with big legs like a frog, hopping onto your roof at night. Jeez man, I’m creeping myself out.”

“He lives close to you, too.”

“Not as close.”

“Sure, so if he’s nocturnal, why is out there, staring at the sun?”

“He’s probably charging up.”

“Or he’s waiting for it to go down,” I said.

“He’s going to hop over here tonight and break in. He’s going to try to eat one of your sisters. They’d be no match for his fatty stomach acids.”

I was taking a sip of my drink when he said, ‘fatty stomach acids’ and I spit it out and started choking.

I got back to my apartment from my walk and came up to the metal door covered in graffiti to unlock it, but there was a guy standing in front of it, smoking a blunt. I walked up and tried to just appear as if I was going to the door behind him, with my keys in my hand, so he’d know to step aside, but he didn't budge. So I stood in front of him, and said excuse me and he looked at me, through me, and said, “what?” Then I felt it for a second. I felt the rage. My heart thumped in my chest, blood beat in my toes, the hot roof my mouth pulsed. I breathed in as deep as I could. I wanted to take my fist and put it through his throat, and I could too, but I didn’t. I just smiled and said, “move.” Which was not as polite as I could have been, but trust me when I tell you, it was all I could muster.

He furrowed his brow and frowned. I saw a brief contemplation happen, he turned his head, realized he was in front of a door and narrowed his eyes at me. Then he just walked away without saying anything. It occurred to me that he might have been out all night, it was still early. Relieved that I had won, I entered the key into the door and unlocked it.

I went inside and sat down at my computer. I had a lot of submissions to the magazine the past week. I needed to read them all before all of my self-imposed deadlines. I looked at the inbox of my email for the magazine and all the submissions were marked the same. Fiction and poetry. There has never been a good way for me to go about this. I did not trust myself. I began to read the first few lines of a poem by a woman from Wales:

The pavement pock-marked by sunlight—
The evening left its imprint. Here I am,
Here they are. Paint chips and delivery drivers…
Dogs with muzzled noses walk, tails wagging,
As if spring was made for them.

I sipped more coffee. I ignored the pain. My brain was buzzing and crackling, noise rattling around like members of an unpracticed band, competing with each other for their share of the song. I looked up to my right at the window sill, the plant I’d received as a cutting from my friend months ago was blooming into something. I felt a sense of responsibility for it, and as it grew, so did my pride. I thought about the Welsh flag, a red dragon posing in front of a green and white background. The poem went on:

A couple sits in the sun and
From my vantage they appear happy.
But I imagine them fighting instead,
Her wanting more,
Him wanting less.

I introduced Dylan to weed when we were fourteen, in the ninth grade. I’d gone up to stay at my family’s camp in the Adirondack Mountains and my older cousins were there too. The two of them, twins, were seniors in high school at the time. They brought a big bag of what they kept referring to as, “white widow,” with them and asked me if I’d ever tried it before. I lied and said I had, wanting to seem cool. When I hit the joint for the first time I coughed so much they laughed at me. They told me this wasn’t like the stuff I was getting, this was different. I had no frame of reference, but I believed them. We were sitting around the bonfire. I stared at it, mesmerized by the flames, the coals, the floating embers. My cousins, Sam and Will, told stories about their girlfriends, about running from the cops at parties that were busted. They talked about driving drunk in the old camry they shared. I laughed harder than I had ever laughed. I looked at the fire and I couldn't feel anything else, their voices sounded like talk show radio hosts, I kept imagining they were talking into mics. Will and Sam were identical twins, they were finishing each other’s sentences. I kept looking at them and it was freaking me out. Like I was somehow seeing someone else look into a mirror.

I begged the twins to roll me a joint from their “stash” (that’s what they kept calling it) and let me take it home. They kept teasing me about it, saying that I couldn’t get caught with it, that I couldn’t tell anyone where I got it from. That if my parents found out and I blamed them, they’d kick my ass. I was serious. I assured them over and over again that I wasn’t dumb, that I would get away with it, no problem. They agreed, and Sam rolled a joint for me. Sam’s a cop now. Will is a physical therapist. They still look the same but Sam is covered in tattoos and much bigger than Will.

I went over to Dylan’s house as soon as I was done unloading the car from the trip with my dad in the driveway. Dylan’s dad didn’t live with him, his parents were divorced, and his mom was never around. She was either at her boyfriend’s house or at the bar. Dylan and I did whatever we wanted at his house. We tried to make fried chicken one time and we burned ourselves with the hot oil, the chicken came out undercooked, and we ate it anyway.

He wasn’t opening the front door when I rang the doorbell so I went to the back. His mom’s car wasn’t there, but that didn’t mean anything. The backdoor was often unlocked if he was home. That was locked too, so I took an old gift card that was in my wallet and used it to break in. Dylan taught me how to break in like that. He never had his key with him. I walked into the back of his house into the kitchen and called his name. No one answered. I stood for a minute in the dining room and was thinking of where he might be. He might be walking around the neighborhood by himself, as he often did. I thought he might be at Burns’, but I didn’t want to share the joint with Burns. Then I heard something in the front room, like someone move. So I creeped up and peered in. I saw Dylan laying on the carpet with his eyes closed. He had huge headphones on, plugged into his mom’s old stereo. There was a record spinning on the turntable. He must not have heard me come in at all. I walked up to him and kicked his foot. His eyes opened in terror. I saw relief on his face, and then anger. He threw off the cans.

“What the fuck are you doing here? How did you get in?”

“The door was unlocked,” I said.

“I thought you were coming back tomorrow.” Dylan said.

“No, man, today.”

“You scared the shit out of me, dude. What the fuck?”

“Listen pal, I had to okay? I have made a discovery that you’re going to want in on.”

Dylan took the needle off the record he was listening to. He put the headphones back on their little stand. He was always so neat around his house. His mom would come home drunk and make a mess trying to make food and he would wake up the next morning and clean it all up. I pulled out the joint, which I had hidden inside of an empty pack of gum. I held it up so Dylan could see.

“Where’d you get that?” He said, his eyes were lit up now.

“The twins.”

“Those assholes?”

“They’re really not so bad now. They’ve chilled out.”

“I bet,” Dylan said.

We proceeded to go out in the back and smoke the whole joint in Dylan’s garage. We heated up philly cheesesteak hotpockets in his microwave. Dylan repeatedly warned me that they were super hot, which I knew, but he was extra concerned. He said he burned his tongue on one and it hurt for a week. We waited as long as we could for them to cool, opening them up to let the steam billow from the center. We turned on the cartoon network and laughed at everything, especially the commercials.

I decided to accept the Welsh poet’s first and third poems. I needed to read them again and ask a few colleagues to read them too, but I had the final say, and I liked her work. I felt accomplished, not because I read a lot of the submissions, but because the one I read was going to be an acceptance. We were one step closer to having the work we needed for the next issue. I edited an online indie magazine to occupy my time when I was not working on my own writing projects. It didn’t pay a lot but it paid something, and any income coming in on a regular basis was welcome.

As I opened the next email, a text from a woman I’d been on a few dates with interrupted me. A different woman than the one the night before. Her eyes were light blue eyes with green around the pupils. Dating in the city as the years went became stranger and stranger. A match on an app initiated the conversation. Small-talk over text followed that. All of this led to a first date which consisted of two to four drinks at a bar of my choosing. I tried to pick a place I know of that is a fair distance from each of us. The ideal location was a bar with low-light, a tasteful menu, a nice ambiance. This woman was the strongest candidate that I had met in months, she was self assured.

There is a physical space between all things. In that space can live anything. Sunlight, air, blue sky, particles, dust, and scents—feelings. A woman, to me, is first a pair of eyes. And those eyes have always been in complete control of my happiness. I can feel the distance between her eyes and mine. I sense everything between us and I can’t cope with that space, with that distance. It should be waded into like the warm tide, small waves reaching up to my ankles, my calves submerging in warm salt water. Instead I try to stay dry. I try to get close to the water and look in. I wonder why I can’t see what’s happening underneath.

She texted me and said that she could come over the next day. I’d suggested that I cook for her. We’d already been on several dates, and she’s stayed over at my apartment twice. I was excited, I knew that I could cook well and I knew the effect that can have. I resolved to be open this time. To not obscure my own sense of sense. To not give this woman a false notion of who I am, one that I’d never live up to.

Dylan and I started smoking weed every single day. We started and we didn’t stop. We smoked before school, during school, and after school. We stole money from our parents to buy the weed. We stole from the kids in our suburban high school who thought they were drug dealers. We got a reputation as stoners and we lived up to it. Dylan was smoking more than I was, because I still had to go home to my parents who were starting to become suspicious. They’d scrutinize my eyes to see if they were bloodshot.

My mom would say, “Let me smell you! You smell like fucking pot!”

I’d slide past the accusations, make up excuses, say I was tired from school. Say that I played basketball in the park there were older kids smoking cigarettes, that was probably what the smell was. Dylan didn’t have to worry about that. He’d stay up late smoking, listening to those big cans, lying on the living room floor. He wasn’t sleeping a lot. He’d miss class all the time and fall asleep at his desk. The school called his mom but all she did was scream at him one night then she forgot about it. She was only home a couple nights a week at most.

He’d stay up late watching videos about string theory and the big bang. He’d retell me everything but he would mix up the details. He’d make parts up. He’d laugh his ass off trying to remember what he was saying and then he’d stare straight ahead and look at me and say, “There used to be nothing.” I’d sort of nod and agree, I guess I didn’t know for sure if he was right. I didn’t care.

By our junior year, we both had girlfriends and the four of us would drive my dodge grand caravan to a hiking trail on the edge of our town. You could go off the path at a certain point around a fence and hike onto this big energy plant’s property. No one was out there at night and you could see the stars. If you went far enough you could find a cliff that overlooked the river and there was even what we called a waterfall there, but it wasn’t much of one. Dylan and I carried backpacks full of Olde English forty ounce malt liquor bottles and we drank them at the falls with Kristy and Megan, our girlfriends. Megan cheated on Dylan later that year. He told her he didn’t want to go to a party at her friend’s house with her and she got mad at him and went to the party alone. She ended up sleeping with some lacrosse douchebag and Dylan was devastated. She even told him the next day what she had done. I remember that she acted like she was in the right because he refused to go to the party.

Head swimming from reading poetry, I stood up from my desk chair and looked out the window. The sky was interrupted by wispy clouds, as if they were suggesting to take over, gradually, not all at once. I’d agreed to meet my friend for a drink later on in the evening. We’d discuss what we were reading, and what we were writing as well. Professional friends were the only friends that I had. They were the only ones that I could handle. I didn’t have a social life outside of that and dating, and I didn’t want one. My days consisted of reading, writing, reading more, and going for walks. I’d miss a call from one of my sisters and mean to call them back all day. Sometimes I would. Most of the time I wouldn’t. I used to have some wine at night but I didn’t enjoy that much anymore either.

I dated Kristy from the summer before junior year all the way until we graduated. I cheated on her many times and she never found out. I hid it from Dylan as well. He was still hurt over Megan and it felt wrong to be guilty of the same crime, even though it was a different victim.

One night I walked three miles in the cold to a girl’s house who I had met working in a kitchen of a restaurant in the town over from ours. She was a server and two years older than me. I was seventeen at the time. I walked in the cold black to her house, and I remember feeling nothing. With each breath of cold air that I felt enter into my nostrils, I asked myself if I felt bad for what I was doing. I had the anticipatory feeling of sexual excitement, but that was it. I liked the feeling of lying to everyone too. I liked the feeling that I had my own little private world that no one knew about. I could insulate everything from everyone and no one could get to me. The problem was that I always saw myself as an underdog, which gave me permission to break the rules. I felt that it was my right to even the playing field.

I sat back down at my computer and reread all of the Welsh poet’s submissions. I was procrastinating opening the other files. The final stanza of her third poem ripped something from my chest.

And the grass still grows,
The budding flowers blooming,
I’ll utter your name again,
If not now, soon.

When I was in college, I took a class on short stories. We read The Death of Ivan Ilych, A Tell-Tale Heart, A Good Man is Hard to Find, A Rose for Emily, Babylon Revisited, and others I can’t remember. My professor reminded me of Charles Manson. He was a small man with a shaved head and a goatee. He had a wedding ring tattooed on his finger. He was an alcoholic and heroin addict but had been sober for twenty years. He told us about shooting up and reading Tolstoy in a cabin in a rain storm in front of a fireplace. He made it sound nice. I called Dylan because I remembered he loved The Great Gatsby when we were in high school and I wanted him to read Babylon Revisited. Dylan didn’t go to college, he was playing in a band and waiting tables in a restaurant.

Dylan sounded drunk when he picked up the phone. It was three in the afternoon.

“Is today your day off?” I asked him, after catching up for a minute.

“No, I’m going in for dinner,” he was slurring.

“Are you sure you should, man? You sound like you’ve been hitting the sauce,” I asked.

“Don’t worry about me pal,” he said laughing into the phone, “They do not give a fuck here, trust me.”

That much I could believe.

“Well, I called because we read this short story in one of my classes by Fitzgerald, I know how much you liked him.”

“Yeah, listen man I gotta go though. Me and Burns need to hit the slopes before we go into work to get straightened out.”

“Okay, man. Be careful.”

“I always am.”

“Sure,” I said.

“But before I go, what was the name of that story?”

“Babylon Revisited.”

“Got it,” he said, and hung up.

Years went by and Dylan and I didn’t talk as much. I finished college and applied to grad school right after. Dylan was still playing in his band. They were starting to get a buzz going around them in our town and they’d opened for some national acts. They’d even traveled with one band for a whole leg of their tour. I saw a video of them playing to a huge crowd and Dylan looked so happy. He was smiling ear to ear after the song I saw them play. I was so happy for him, and I was going to travel to see them play but I got busy with work and my applications so I didn’t end up making it.

I decided to go for another walk and get something for lunch. I read through three more submissions and they were all rejections. I felt my phone vibrating. It was my older sister, I picked up.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hey,” I said back.

“I’ve been wanting to catch up, how are you doing?”

“I’m just plugging away,” I said, “I was reading submissions all morning.”

“I really liked the last issue,” she said, warmly.

“You read it?”

“Of course I did!”

“How’s Brian and the little one?”

“They’re both good. Brian got a promotion so he has been working a lot, but we got a neighborhood girl who comes over sometimes just to give me a little break. I’m still here, but I can relax a little while Tim is running around.”

“He’s running now?”

“Yes, he’s almost two! You need to come see us.”

“Well, I’m planning on coming back up there soon. I just need to look at the schedule and get a train ticket.”

“Just do it, you can make time for us, can’t you?”

“Of course I can. Should I stay with you or mom?”

She laughed through the phone, loosening up for the first time.

“I think you should stay here. It’ll somehow be calmer, even with the toddler, plus he’s going to want to play with his uncle.”

“Okay, well I just stepped out to get a bite. I’ll call you later after I look at the calendar.”

“Okay, I’ll let you go, I love you.”

“Love you too.” I hung up.

Dylan hung himself from the rafters of his mom’s garage three years ago. The same garage we first smoked that joint in. No one knows why he chose to do it there. He was living in an apartment with Burns twenty minutes away. I was in my last year of grad school when it happened. He called me sixteen times the night that he killed himself. I was with a girl who I was infatuated with at the time. I was over at her apartment and I only saw that he was calling me once, I didn't assume anything, and I was busy so I put the phone in my backpack, on silent mode and went back to whatever I was doing. Much later that night, I saw the missed calls and still didn’t think anything of it. I tried to call him back but he didn’t answer. I didn’t know then that it was already over. It was a Friday night, and Dylan had the habit of calling me when he was drunk. He always said that getting drunk and high wasn’t fun without me. If I didn’t pick up, it wasn’t unheard of for him to just keep calling.

Dylan’s mom didn’t find him for three days. She wasn’t even at her house for three days. Dylan had left the sliding garage door halfway open. All his mom could see were his shoes hovering over the cement floor. If he hadn’t left the door open, his body may have hung there for weeks. She never used that garage. Of course Burns didn’t fucking tell anyone that Dylan hadn’t come home for three nights. I was furious at him, even though it wasn’t his fault. I wanted to be furious at Dylan’s mom and I was, but I saw in her eyes at the funeral how shattered she was. She’s gone way down hill since then. She was already a drunk, but it’s only a matter of time now.

I thought about that night more than I’ve thought about anything. I have thought about it in the shower. I think about it first thing in the morning, in bed, as the day comes into focus. I’ve sat at my desk writing and felt sweat bead under my arms, sweat that smelled different, sweat that stung my nose. I’ve placed self-imposed bans on the visions of how I could have acted. I’ve replayed that night in my head over and over and I’ve pleaded with myself to forget it and just move on. I have tried to convince myself that there is no use running through it in my brain anymore, that it is done, but my brain doesn’t listen.

I have a clear image in my head that I always come back to. It’s like a dream but I’ve never actually dreamt it—I’m always awake. The image is of a brain scan, like one that I’ve seen in movies and am not sure to what extent exists. I see my own brain scan and a doctor is watching it, seated in a dimly lit room at the desk in a lab coat. He is clean cut with sharp features. He has a military style crew cut and dark rimmed glasses. The scan shows different colors swirling around the black and white image of my brain—greens, blues, purples, and pinks slide across the grooves. Every thirty seconds or so the screen flashes a deep red, the color of bright, fresh blood pooling into a test tube at the doctors office. The other colors that were swirling around the brain are enveloped by the red, and then quickly the brain appears blank, no colors, just the outline. The doctor looks surprised each time this happens. He is a man who appears unaccustomed to surprise. He looks like he planned for all the potential outcomes. Yet, he appears to move the mouse around to see if the program has lagged, and then sighs and writes something down in his notebook. He keeps seeing the red come and the colors go blank and he is more and more perplexed, confused, even anxious.

I blamed the girl I was with that night. Her name was Anna. I hated her for it. I hated her for making me so out of control. Anna made me forget what mattered. I’d burn red with rage when she tried to contact me for a few months following his death. Real rage. I couldn’t reconcile my contempt for her.

When I was nine years old, I stepped on a bee and it stung me. It was the first time I felt that rage. The bees in my yard lived in tiny little holes so when I stepped on one, it stung my heel and I fell to the ground and cried and looked up at the sky while I did. I felt alone at that moment, alone and left to solve my own problems. I didn’t just keep lying there. I went inside and I got my boots on. I grabbed the hose with the attachment my mom used to water her plants. I spent the rest of the afternoon spraying the ground where the bees were. They flew out from underground and when I saw them hovering there, I stomped on them with my boots. I killed dozens of bees that day. I was talking to myself the whole time. I got stung three more times, but I didn’t cry again. Each time I got stung, it strengthened my resolve to destroy the bees.

Anna came over when I first found out and tried to comfort me. She was crying. Her touch felt sinister, her eyes looked black. When I first met her, Anna’s eyes were a warm brown color, with yellow flecks in them. In the right light, they were almost gold. She wore an old blue t-shirt of mine when she came over. She made me soup that she brought over in a glass tupperware container. She wanted to come to the wake with me and I said no.

“I was just going to study that night, and you made me come over!” I yelled at her after I told her I didn’t want to see her again.

“Made you?” she managed, through sobs.

“Yes, I would have been here if it wasn’t for you. I would have picked up.”

I was pressing my fingers hard into the crown of my skull. My eyes were bloodshot and I hadn’t slept. I moved closer to her.

She inhaled, labored, her airways clogged with phlegm.

“You’re scaring me,” was all she got out.

It’s hard to remember what else I said that night. It felt like I blacked out, without a sip of alcohol. I know I threw the soup container into the wall and shattered it, soup flying everywhere. I know she jumped up from the couch and ran for the door, frantically pausing to unlock the deadbolt and the doorknob. She messed up once and couldn’t get the door unlocked. I felt her fear building. It was real fear. She got it right and ran out.

She still tried to make up with me after that. She said she understood I was upset. I didn’t want her to forgive me.

The best thing I can do is spend time with people who don’t know about what happened. I’m going to get a drink later with someone who has no idea. The people who know what happened all treat me like I’m a little kid who they can’t act normal around. I left the apartment again and realized I forgot to call my sister back. I would do it when I got up in the morning. I went to a bar to meet up with my professional friend. We had a surface level conversation about a project he was querying with an agent. It was just as banal as I expected.

When I laid in bed that night, I wished that I could go back to the feeling I used to get after a long day of running around my neighborhood in the summer before I ever had a girlfriend or a job or any other responsibilities. We’d spend the days riding our bikes around, smoking weed, playing basketball, and drinking beer. Those humid summer nights, when the sun wouldn’t go down until after eight o'clock and the air smelled sweet. Usually Burns, Dylan, and I would sit on a stoop, in a park, or in a lawn chair somewhere and smoke our final joint for the night. As I got high, I looked at the leaves of a low hanging tree branch spread out against the sky and started to lose focus on what was in front of me and what was behind. Dylan and Burns argued about free will and I listened, never interjecting. By the time I laid down after a day like that, I’d fall asleep within two minutes.

Lying there after I had hung out with my writer friend, I begged the god I don’t believe in to let me feel just one tenth of that tired feeling again. I inhaled and I felt it waver. I hardly slept, and when I did, it took so long to get there. I couldn’t smoke weed anymore, it sent me into an acute panic. It made me think only of Dylan again. It made me sit there and watch him put that rope over his head, as I yelled at him to stop, as I tried to get up and run over to him, to tackle him to the ground and hold him there so he couldn't get up.

I woke up the next morning and the sky was a translucent gray, the bright light behind the clouds dispersed across it. I saw the receiver, turntable, and the headphones on their stand sitting in my living room. After Dylan’s funeral, when everyone went to the bar to get wasted, I broke into his mom’s house and stole her stereo system. No way I was going to let that thing get thrown out or sold for fifty bucks. I didn’t even bother to ask her if I could have it. I just took it.

Dylan died in January and it was a record low temperature that year. They had to wait three months for the ground to thaw to bury him. I knew Dylan wanted to be cremated and I told his dad that but his dad was Catholic and wanted him to be buried. Since Dylan didn’t have a will, and his dad was paying for everything, I lost that fight. The wake and the funeral were well attended. Dylan was a popular guy. I remember the long line of people who came up to his mom and dad and paid their respects, his mom looked like a ghost. His parents didn’t say a word to each other.

The burial was three months later. It was not well attended. Dylan’s dad was there. His mom wasn’t. One odd attendee was our old English teacher from high school. I was shocked to see him there, but he gave me a big hug. It was still cold out in April when they could finally dig the hole for Dylan’s coffin. The priest was this old Irish man with a round nose, a bald head, and a bright red face. His breath was coming out as thick steam in the cold of the day. I remember the sky was a sharp blue that day too. The priest said a few words and they began to lower the casket down. Some people walked up and put a flower down on the wooden box. I stood next to the hole for a while and stared at the big wooden grooves that outlined the box that held my best friend. When that part was over, the priest said a prayer. After that he sang an Irish blessing standing up in front of us in the cold. I’d heard it before, I couldn’t remember where. He sang it once himself and then asked people to join in. I felt myself sing along:

May the road rise to meet you,
May the wind be always at your back.
May the sun shine warm upon your face,
The rains fall soft upon your fields.
And until we meet again,
May God hold you in the palm of his hand.

I woke up the next morning. The woman who was coming over that night did not know about Dylan. I haven’t told her much about myself yet, either. I’ve realized that you can go a long time without revealing much about yourself. I thought again that this one would be different. The burn on the roof of my mouth felt like it had healed just a little overnight. There was no blood as I brushed my teeth.

I wondered, as I looked in the medicine cabinet mirror, what it would be like if I told her about him. I would like to tell her the good stories first. I’d like to tell her about him and leave out a lot. I’d like to let her into my apartment tonight, to pour her a glass of wine, to take a record from my shelf, and as the needle hit the grooves, I’d like to say, did you know that this is my best friend’s record player? How would I know that? she'd say, smiling, and I'd laugh.

And the grass still grows,
The budding flowers blooming,
I’ll utter your name again,
If not now, soon.

The man turned to her with a furrowed brow.

“Did I do something funny?” He asked

Sadie had a pain in her stomach, she felt a little faint, she needed to eat. She popped the olive from her drink in her mouth a little prematurely, as she liked to eat them after the drink was empty.

“No, no,” She said through a toothless smile. “I was just remembering something that happened to me today.”

“Well then, shoot, I like funny stories. What happened?” 

Sadie detected a slight drawl in the man’s voice. Maybe Tennessee. He wasn’t from around here. Not originally. Sadie finished the last sip of her drink. 

Sadie often sat at this bar. She liked the dim lights and the little plastic tassels that hung from the mirrored ceiling. She sat there in the afternoons before she was technically off the clock and felt the cold, salty soul of the dirty vodka martini she was drinking hit her tongue. The bar wasn’t really the kind of place to order a martini, but the bartender there knew how to mix a drink, and since Sadie was always there, he didn’t mind making her one. She exhaled the boozy aftertaste through her nose. The wind was whipping outside the windows. 

Sadie was a writer. She wrote two short stories that were published in magazines about a decade before. A dark, fur coat hung over her shoulders. Her nails were painted a vermillion red. Sadie never wore gold—her silver jewelry clinked together when she lifted the coupe to her lips, which were painted the same hue as her nails. Sadie didn’t write much fiction anymore, she worked for a newspaper, covering local politics, police scandals (of which there was only one), and she tried to cover corruption, but hadn’t nailed a story down yet. 

Sadie hadn’t eaten anything since she had a few crackers with some cheese in her apartment the night before. She had fallen asleep on the couch with a bottle of chenin blanc tipped over on her coffee table, empty, so it didn’t spill. She felt her stomach grumble and the haze of drunkenness buzzed by her ears like a mosquito as she finished her third martini. Her mother had taught her to make cocktails when she was a little girl. She told her that it was important for women to be able to make proper drinks for their guests. When Sadie was seven, she began giving her lessons. 

“Do you know why it’s called a Manhattan?” She asked Sadie when going over the recipe. 

Sadie looked up at her mother, expectantly, happy that she was paying attention to her. She did not, however, know why the drink had earned that name, she might not have even been aware of Manhattan at all.

“It’s two ounces of rye whiskey, one ounce of sweet vermouth, and two dashes of bitters.” Her mother was really enunciating each number. 

“Two-one-two,” she said, satisfied, “is the area code of Manhattan.”

Sadie's eyes moved from the bar cart to her mother’s.

“That’s where it gets the name.” Her mother said. “Now you make one.”

Her mother loved to host. Her parents would have lavish parties when she was a young girl, and since she didn’t have any siblings, she would attend them and bartend for the adults. Her mother always took martinis or old fashions, her father would have scotch on the rocks. To this day, the smell of scotch truly repulsed Sadie. It reminded her of the searching look in her father’s eyes as she would hand him the glass. Her father often handed her back the empty glass without saying anything as a way of telling her to refill it. When she did bring it back, though, he was always warm and thankful.

“Listen,” Sadie said, and put her hand on the man’s wrist. “I'll tell you the story, but I’m about ready to faint. Let’s go around the corner and get something to eat. Are you hungry?”

“I mean I…”

Sadie cut him off. 

“I know you’re hungry, now finish that beer and let’s go.” 

The bar they sat at was made of oak, long and L-shaped. It had comfortable stools that were fixed to the ground, which made it easy to slide onto one and begin to melt, as Sadie often did. The railing by her feet was just high enough to be comfortable. Behind the bar was an old electric organ, which looked like it hadn’t been used in decades. 

There was resignation in the man’s eyes. There was even a trace of concern, it seemed like. He didn’t register as excited. He tipped his glass back and finished his beer in a few big gulps. 

Sadie called over the bartender and insisted on paying for the man’s beer in addition to her drinks. He didn’t protest like she thought he might. He wasn’t really talking all that much. Sadie looked down at his large hands for a wedding ring and didn't see one. He had pale blue eyes like her father did, but his were focused, like they had little beams of light behind them. He had a calm energy about him, but he was surely paying attention. He reminded her of a street lamp on a cold, dark road during a snowstorm. She might have written about his eyes, if she still did. 

By age nine, Sadie started finishing the adults’ drinks at her parent’s parties. They were all young professors at the college her parents worked at. They’d talk about change, political revolution, which only amounted to them getting drunk via their child bartender. They always told her how cute she was. Sadie started by eating the muddled fruit and sugar at the bottom of the old fashioned glasses. The cherries and oranges tasted sweet, with a hint of nutty bourbon that burned a little on the way down. Soon Sadie would just finish a half drunk glass of whatever was around. She could make a replacement or just forget it, it was not as if anyone would remember. 

Sadie was twelve when her parents were having a party and her dad’s best friend, Jim, got drunk and started to play the piano. Jim was a professor of ethics. They had an old upright piano in the living room that was out of tune and falling apart a little, but Jim was pretty good. He started playing Sexy Sadie by The Beatles but she changed the lyrics to, “Pretty Sadie.” 

He began, singing, “Pretty Sadie, what have you done? You made a fool of everyone.” 

Sadie knew the real lyrics, her parents loved The Beatles. 

“Will you cut that out, Jim.” Her dad had said firmly.

“What’s wrong, man?” Jim slurred

“Just stop.” Sadie had never seen fury in her father’s eyes like she had that night.

“Sadie, sweetheart, go to your room.” She had thought about protesting but she didn’t, she was afraid of her father’s eyes. She’d gone to bed that night crying. Not understanding why she was being punished. 

When Sadie stood up from the bar, she felt the weight of everything around her at once. The floor tiles screamed at her and crawled through the back of her eyes. She looked up at the mirrored ceiling as she put her arms through her fur coat. The man placed his hand on her back momentarily, in a respectable place, as she gathered up her purse and scurried towards the door, surprisingly light on her feet, for how drunk she felt. 

“There’s a Chinese place around the corner,” Sadie said as she hooked her arm around the man’s arm, his hands were in his pockets.

“Do you like Chinese food?” She asked, and looked up at him.

“I like it fine.” The man said. “I don’t even know your name, lady.” 

“Oh.” Sadie began a forced laugh that went on a little too long, and then became a genuine laugh. 

“You sure got the giggles.” The man said. Sadie was sure she heard a southern accent now. 

“My name is Sadie,” she said, “and yours?”

“Walter. Pleased to meet you.” He didn’t smile. He even had a southern name, Sadie thought.

They were seated immediately in the Chinese restaurant. This was a classic American Chinese place, paper lanterns, large booths lining the wall, bamboo shades blocking certain areas, and large circular and small square tables in the middle with white tablecloths and red napkins. Walter and Sadie sat across from each other and stared in silence. Sadie’s stomach was still hurting. She swayed a tiny bit in the booth. She had watched Walter’s eyes as she had removed her coat. It was the only sign so far that he might be a sexual being. 

He finally broke the silence. 

“Do you make a habit of getting drunk and inviting strange men to eat with you?”

Sadie gasped playfully. She wasn’t sure how to respond right away.

“No.” She said, “But I was way too hungry to go all the way home and heat up something for dinner, and I hate dining out alone, so I decided to ask you. Seeing as you were the only one around.” 

Walter raised his eyebrows and nodded, he wasn’t satisfied with that answer, Sadie could see it. 

The waiter came and they ordered a feast. Sadie just kept suggesting things and Walter didn’t stop her. Finally the waiter said that they shouldn’t order anything else. 

“Too much food.” He said. 

“So what is this funny story you were going to tell me?” Walter said, seeming to gain some amusement of the situation he found himself in. 

“What?” Said Sadie. 

“Come on, it was five minutes ago,” he said, in a deadpan tone, “You laughed at the bar and you told me that if I came and ate with you, you’d tell me what was so funny. So here I am. What was it?”

“Oh, right, right, it was just something my boss said. It wasn’t that funny. He’s this big, fat drunk.” 

“Your boss is a drunk, huh?” He asked.

“Oh yeah. Big time.” She said, nodding.

“Uh huh. Okay. Tell me what you were really laughing about.” Walter’s eyes pierced her. She was always surprised when she met someone who wasn’t just simply satisfied with a lie. Sadie sighed loudly. He was waiting patiently.

“Okay so you sat down, you’re kind of a big, burly guy, but you’re handsome. You look like you work with your hands, but you’re smarter, better looking than that. I saw you order that beer, and I knew you would. You asked for a chilled glass. You poured the beer yourself. You’re wearing work clothes. Then you ran your hand through your hair. It was too much. It was like a commercial for beer. The ones they play during football games. I was imagining we were on a set, and I couldn’t help but laugh.” 

“Hmm, I guess that is funny.” Walter said, and he laughed a little, but not much. 

Just then, the food started to come out. They had ordered spring rolls, scallion pancakes, crab rangoon, sesame chicken, fried rice, beef and broccoli, and lo mein. It was truly a comical amount of food. They ate in relative silence, as Sadie always remembered her parents doing, when they actually ate together.

When she and Walter had eaten all they could, it looked like they had hardly touched anything, there was still so much left over. Sadie ordered two beers, assuming that Walter would want to wash down the salty aftertaste, just as she did. His eyes narrowed, knowing that she had ordered him a beer, but he still didn’t say anything. The beers seemed to come out instantly. Sadie wondered if her mother could have found something to criticize the razor-sharp staff of this restaurant about. 

“So what exactly do you do, Sadie?” Walter said, this being the first time he addressed her by name.
“I’m a writer.” Sadie said simply. 

“And what kinda thing do you write?”

“I used to write fiction and now I write for a newspaper.”

“Why don’t you write fiction anymore?” Walter asked, in earnest.

“I don’t know. It’s a little harder to make money I guess.”

“What do you need money for?” Walter asked.

“To live.”

“Doing a lot of that around here, I see.” Walter said, and sipped his beer from its green, translucent bottle.

Sadie frowned.

“And what do you do?” Sadie asked.

“I’m a painter.” Walter said. 

“What do you paint, houses? I saw they’re building new buildings on the campus downtown, is that what you’re in town working on?”

“No, I live here.” Walter said.

“So what do you paint, houses, buildings…what?” 

“Neither.” Walter said and smiled.  

“What else is there?’ Asked Sadie.

“Well, I’m an abstract painter, an artist. I also teach.”

“Abstract huh, like what?”

“A lot of faces.” 

“Wouldn’t that be more realistic then?”

“Not mine.”

“I see. Where do you teach?” 

“At the university.”

“Oh wow, both of my parents taught there.”

“Really, what are they up to now? Are they retired?”

“Both dead.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.”

Walter tried to think of another topic quickly, as people often do who accidentally find themselves touching a sensitive area with a relative stranger. 

“Are you working on anything at the newspaper?” He asked.

“I’m always working on something” Sadie said, as she moved some lo mein around with her fork, her bites had become infrequent. 

“Anything interesting?” Walter said, wondering why he was trying to force this conversation. 

Sadie looked up from her plate and locked eyes with Walter. 

“Interesting? Not really, to be honest with you. I’m not complaining, it’s a fine job. Sometimes I do find myself invested in something I’m covering. I feel an occasional sense of accomplishment when I finish a piece, but is it interesting? I don’t think I would categorize it that way.” 

“Fair enough.” Walter said.

“Is your work interesting?” She asked him.

“It can be very interesting. To me, painting is less of an intellectually stimulating act, but it is fulfilling. Teaching can be interesting, it can be frustrating too, it can be boring also. It depends a lot on the kids and how invested they are.” 

“Sure.” Sadie said. “Painting isn’t intellectually interesting?”

“Not particularly. My head is fairly empty during the act. It’s more of a release.”

Sadie rolled her eyes. Walter saw this and narrowed his again.

“I thought you were creative, a writer, you can’t relate?” Walter asked, almost offended. 

Sadie looked up at him and didn’t respond. She had sobered up a bit from all the Chinese food, and she suddenly decided that Walter did not have a southern accent at all. He also didn’t look quite as handsome as he did when he walked in the bar. He didn’t look quite so young, either. His blue eyes were still bright and scanning like searchlights.

“Should we box this up or something?” Walter asked, “there’s a lot of food here, still.”

“No.” Sadie said, rather emphatically. “My mother would roll over in her grave if I ever brought leftover food home from a restaurant.” 

Walter’s brows raised and lowered, his thin lips pursed. 

“I’m trying to decide what that means.”

“Me too.” Sadie said. 

“Did she always order this much food?” Walter asked. 

“No. She didn’t.” 

The waiter came around and once again, Sadie paid the bill. Walter still didn’t protest.

When Sadie was fifteen her mother had come to her and told her that she and her father were going to get separated for a while, maybe permanently. At first, she was devastated, but after a while, she started to see it as a good thing. Her parents hardly spoke to each other at that point. They had stopped having lavish parties and Sadie never saw their friends anymore, especially not at their house. She was mostly independent at that time already, anyway. She was working at a coffee shop in town and she would be driving soon. She went into the spare room that served as her dad’s office one night and asked him about it. 

“Are you and mom really breaking up?”

Her father set down the glass of dark liquid he had in his hand. He was wearing reading glasses, which he only did very rarely. He placed the paperback he was reading down and took off the glasses. He looked right at Sadie with his blue eyes. 

“We’re thinking about it, honey.” He said. “Your mother isn’t happy.” 

But her parents never actually got separated, they never got divorced, they actually never talked about it again. Sadie didn’t bring it up because she didn’t really want to cause a conflict.

“Shall we?” Sadie said, as she finished up signing the receipt and putting her credit card away. 

“Sure.” Said Walter.

They got up slowly from the booth in silence and Walter thanked the waiter, who told them to have a good night. The waiter looked down at all of the food left on the table and shook his head. As they slowly headed towards the door, Sadie reached out and grabbed Walter’s hand. He was a bit startled but squeezed it tight. Her hand was ice cold. He opened the door to the night and it had only gotten colder. The wind was still whipping and there were some big snowflakes coming down, sporadically, not too hard. Walter let go of Sadie’s hand as he led her through the door and the red light coming off the neon sign in the window illuminated the back of her head. When he closed the door behind him, he put his arm around her shoulder and pulled her in. 

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