In Rogelio Teixeira’s letters to his ex-wife, Sera, there are a few cryptic allusions to a woman named Anna. I am writing Teixeira’s biography. It’s not a real biography, it’s one of those short introductions to an artist’s work. I’m deeply interested in his allusions to Anna.  There once was an Anna in my own life. 

I want to write a proper biography but there isn’t enough of an audience, or so I’m told. The editor of this series of little books, her name is Laura, told me to write it in English, which isn’t to say the language, but clear and concise prose. An impossible request. Teixeira was not just a poet but a real polymath. In fact, he first came to my attention as a collagist. I was living in Pittsburgh at the time and saw his work in a museum, the name of which I can’t recall anymore. The collages were incredibly small, some as small as one or two inches across. 

We’ve settled on the idea that there should be six chapters. One on his novella, The Flying Saucer, one on his theater trilogy (Three Plays about Animals), one each on his first three books of poetry (Pygmy Songs, Gypsy Songs, and The Lepers), and one on his visual art that was collected posthumously in a coffee table book called A Sun Dial on the Moon: Paintings and Collages. Teixeira killed himself while staying at the Ambassador hotel in 1987. He was in Los Angeles for his sister’s wedding. The hotel was pretty rundown by that time but he wanted to stay there because of its infamous history. He hung himself with a belt on the bathroom door. His wife, the second one, was in bed asleep. No one knows the context, the full mental state, that sort of thing. Everyone says he seemed happy or as happy as an artist such as Teixeira could be. 

I worked with my Anna at a bookstore and she came between me and my first wife. I shouldn’t say it that way, she didn’t “come between” us. I was as guilty of that transgression as anybody. When I think about it now, I was more in love with Anna than I was with my first wife. That must be how memory works because I never would have said that in the moment or even a few years ago. I guess the way I’d put it now is that I miss Anna more than I miss my first wife, though I do feel bad about that fact. 

I met my first wife, her name is Becca, when I worked at a movie theater in Berkeley. She was getting her degree in Spanish, not the language as much as the literature and history of the Spanish-speaking world. Once we got together, it didn’t feel intellectual enough to work at the movie theater so I got a job at the bookstore, the bookstore where I met Anna. That was a stupid decision. The movie theater was a rep house and I probably could have learned more there than in a thousand bookstores. The irony being that I was too ignorant to understand that at the time. Looking back, I have no idea why we got married so young. I think it was a case of playing with fate a little. A case of thinking let’s just see where this thing goes. Anna was fun. It wasn’t that Becca was unfun, but Anna was more like a character and Becca was more like a real person. Anna got me into bands like the New York Dolls and Suicide. She and her friends would get wasted and go to A’s games. That’s how we started our thing. After an A’s game. Anyway, they’re both gone now. Or out of my life at any rate. Anna could be dead. I wouldn’t put it past her. Becca is alive, though. She teaches at an all-girls prep school in Maryland. We don’t really speak, but it’s easy enough to find out where people wind up these days. 

Teixeira’s first wife was the painter Serafina Reyes. They lived in Santa Fe until Teixeira met and fell in love with the documentary filmmaker Lucinda Hazan. That’s who was in bed when he hung himself. As far as I know there were no letters between Teixeira and Hazan. The reason there were so many between him and Serafina Reyes is because he spent the summer of 1979 at some kind of artists’ retreat in the Blue Ridge Mountains and then later he was hospitalized or in some kind of rehab for a few months at a place called Canyon Ridge. One of his letters from there is scribbled on a piece of stationary that says across the top, Find Hope at Canyon Ridge. 

After we went to see his collages in the Pittsburgh museum that I can’t remember the name of, Becca bought me the one piece of fiction he ever wrote, The Flying Saucer (mentioned above). It’s a novella written in the form of a long suicide note left by the fictional photojournalist, D.T. Zuma. In it, he compares the moral complications of that conflict to the Second World War and the Spanish Civil War which were, at least in his mind, more heroic. It’s probably his weakest piece of writing, but I’ve read it more than any of the others. Teixeira was himself a photojournalist in Vietnam during the war, and, as I said earlier, he also committed suicide. Another strange thing about that book is that he originally wrote it in English. But then, out of some kind of shame, rewrote it in Spanish and pretended that the English version, which came out two years later, was actually a translation, when, in fact, it was the inverse. Serafina Reyes tells this story in a short documentary about the Santa Fe poets on YouTube. I think it ran on public television in New Mexico. There’s something about that story that makes me like him almost as I would a father (which is to say love) and, by extension, that book.   

Getting back to this mystery of Anna, there are five allusions to her in the letters between Teixeira and Serafina Reyes. The first one is in a letter dated June 17, 1979. Serafina mentions that, “Anna writes from Lucerne where she’s staying for the summer (right on the lake). She’s photographing naked sunbathers—all men.” And then in parentheses she wrote “(e c & b).” Teixeira replied that he had recently had a dream of Anna. In it she was parasailing. They were in Acapulco or someplace like that. Her memory, he wrote, “nagged at him.” In the very next letter Reyes replied that Anna had “endured” an accident while boating. The use of that word, endured, has a heaviness to it that I can’t quite explain. Teixeira does not mention Anna again until his stay at Canyon Ridge, which was in 1982. He writes, “I had a vision or dream of Anna (hard to tell the difference in this place). She wore a green hospital shirt with her name stitched into it with red thread. She stared at me for a long while without saying anything. I wanted to ask her something but I thought if I spoke she would run away as a deer would in the forest.” In the next letter Serafina doesn’t mention the dream or vision, but relays the news that Teixeira’s brother, Manuel, had died in a motorcycle accident in the Sandia Mountains. The last letter (as far as I can tell) that Reyes wrote to Teixeira was dated October 17, 1982, and it contains the final mention of Anna. She begins by writing, “your fig tree finally died.” And then at the end she says how she found some old letters. Mostly, she writes, “from Paul and Andrea, a few from Martín, and two from Anna (Montreal or Vermont, hard to tell). I reread the ones from Anna, very beautiful. You should take them with you.” 

The funny thing about my Anna is that I didn’t even try to hide it, my love for her was so intense. I keep saying love now, but I’m not sure that’s the right word. She didn’t want anything to do with me long term though so that left me in kind of a bind. I don’t think we ever exchanged letters. That’s a lost art. I don’t envy those in the future who’ll have to trawl through our emails and texts. The archives will be poorer, that’s for sure. Speaking of which, I’ve done some very minimal research into the Anna mentioned in Teixeira’s letters with Serafina Reyes, but I haven’t turned anything up. I think though that some things are better left unresolved. Like it is with difficult music. 

Bryan D. Price’s stories and poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Santa Monica Review, Bridge Eight, Diagram, Boulevard, JMWW, Rhino Poetry, and elsewhere. His collection of elegies, A Plea for Secular Gods will be published by What Books Press in 2023.

Gina Lumsden Kropf is a photographer and mixed media artist currently residing in in New York, NY. Gina was born in Raleigh, NC, where she began her BFA in studio art with an emphasis in photography. She spent 2 years studying photography and painting at Las Positas College in Livermore, California, 2 years at the University of Missouri, St. Louis, studying photography and figure drawing, before returning to Meredith College to earn her BFA. She spent 15 years working in photography studios and running her own as the principle photographer, before settling in Manhattan to continue her studies in art. Using the skills and techniques she acquired in the photography field and the classic photo techniques she learned in college, Gina employs various photographic mediums such as digital photography & manipulation, analog /120mm film photography and acrylic paint. Her work explores aspects of individuality, non-conformity, and the human figure. She incorporates these ideas into her chaotic world , where she searches for understanding of human nature and her own understanding of her life and how it evolves and takes on new meaning with the passing of each decade.

The first hour driving north they listened to a best of REM compilation CD and traded few words. The freeway became a single carriageway and the suburbs turned to new builds spread further apart and without trees. The houses were the same shape and had roofs the same colour. Soon they passed areas of land cleared for upcoming developments and after that only signs for coastal townships to the west. The vegetation was low and sparse. The sky ahead held high scattered clouds. The weather was mild and they wore shorts and light jumpers.

At a petrol station they bought sausage rolls and ginger beers and Drumstick ice creams. They finished the sausage rolls and ginger beers outside and kept the Drumsticks to eat in the car. The young man got the keys from the attendant to use the toilet and when he came back out the older man took the keys from him. The older man went in and looked down into the bin and checked behind the cistern and hand towel dispenser. He scanned around and caught himself in the mirror shaking his head. He walked out.

Both men swore at having to wait to pull out onto the highway behind a row of semi-trailers they had overtaken earlier. The REM CD started again and the young man asked if he could change it. He put on a CD of American rap. Several times the older man moved to turn it off but stopped himself. 

They turned left and drove for another fifteen minutes before they passed a welcome sign to a township and slowed down. Everything felt still and quiet. Only a few driveways had vehicles and not a single person could be seen out in the open. One street was lined with old gums and the afternoon sun stretched their shadows across the road. The buildings ranged from newer holiday mansions close to the water to caravans and mobile shacks further back. Their own family shack showed a few signs of aging but was otherwise unchanged. The older man pulled some keys from the glove box and unlocked a utility box and the cabin itself. The cabin released a scent that was salty and musty but above all familiar. They stepped in and paused to take in the dated holiday décor and furniture. Light through the faded pink curtains fell onto the brown linoleum flooring and plastic countertops and table. An old striped couch sagged in one corner beside a bookshelf of boardgames and paperbacks. Opposite was a faded beanbag in a spiderman pattern. The young man pulled back the curtains and the full light brought them back to the present. The older man who had almost said something about everything being the same turned and saw that the young man was not the child from his memories.

Let’s unpack, he said.

By the time they headed out again the sun had faded but was still bright and clear and warmed the skin. They walked along the tea-coloured river and some of its spray whipped up at them on the wind. The bare sandy path turned to grass shaded by short trees and palms along the front of the caravan park. The smell of a barbecue drifted by. That and running sprinklers were the only signs of other people. Past the caravan park the river turned away and ran parallel to the ocean, separated by a strip of dunes. They continued straight over the dunes to the beach. The sea was clear despite the wind and choppy crests. To the south the land stretched out to form half a bay and to the north the beach cleaved a long open curve. The older man hopped down into the water as far as it was deep enough to take a shallow dive and he came back out to collect his snorkel and flippers. They went in together up to their waists and spent a minute spitting into their masks and pulling on their gear. 

They swam straight out. Here and there one of them dove down to inspect the beds of seaweed or spinifex shells or small sandy fish on the ocean floor. Releasing air before rising, the bubbles raced ahead to the surface.

They sighted a rocky outcrop and made their way over to it. They split up to explore its corners and ledges. The young man swam over the flat top just below the water line. 

Over here, he called.

The older man looked up and swam over and they treaded water and watched a wobbegong shark swaying against the rock. A surge of swell pushed them over the shark and they fought to clear away to a safer distance. 

They moved on. An octopus crawled from one ridge to another. Down in one of the deep lower ledges the antennas of a lobster poked out. Fish flowed by, alone or in schools.

They grew cold and swam towards the shore. Along the way a large ray glided over a sandy stretch and out beyond their sight.

The sun was on its descent and the sea was calming into a dark reflective layer. They stared out and dried themselves.

Looks nicer now than when we went in, the older man said.

The young man nodded.

Pretty much got the whole place to ourselves.

Yep.

Better than when we used to come on school holidays. It’d be packed.

As the sun reached the horizon several small trawlers came into view headed in the direction of the jetty and boat ramp. From the corner of his eye the older man watched the young man watch the boats. 

The birds cooed and garbled as the men walked in the chilled morning air to the kiosk. They bought the paper and iced coffees and walked back to the cabin and sat in the sun and read and drank. The older man suggested a game of tennis at the caravan park courts but when he went to look he could only find racquets and no balls.

See if I can get some at the kiosk tomorrow, he thought out loud.

Hm, responded the young man.

It got to lunch time and the older man fried some sausages and onions that they ate wrapped in sliced bread with squirts of mustard and tomato sauce. 

They looked through the board games but there was nothing good for two people. The pack of cards was missing full suits. They tried the word puzzles in the newspaper but gave up having only completed a few.

Late afternoon they repeated the walk to the beach and went out snorkeling again. The water was rougher. Churned up sand fogged the visibility underwater. The young man gave up after a short spell and swam to shore. The older man persevered until he was spooked by being out alone.

The young man and his towel were gone.

The young man wasn’t at the cabin either. He arrived an hour later as the older man was frying some pre-made meatballs and boiling water for spaghetti.

Where you been?

Just a walk, said the young man.

The older man drained the spaghetti and served the food into bowls.

Next time tell me.

The young man started eating.

I mean it. Hey. Look at me.

The young man looked at the older man.

Stop acting like a kid. This isn’t a holiday. No pissing off. You do exactly what I say. Alright?

The young man held his look.

I want a response. Now. 

Yes. Dad.

The following day brought rain and an answer to how long they could keep it all up.

The dad woke early to the loud pattering on the aluminium roof and couldn’t fall back to sleep. Even from within the cabin he could make out the scent of eucalyptus and powdery soil carried by moisture on the air. He remembered how as a baby the son had always slept best under low and breaking clouds. That had been a long time ago in another country with an altogether different rain that made no sound or smell.

His thoughts drove him out of bed. The son’s bedroom door was shut and he treaded quietly until he decided it was late enough and he fried some eggs. When he was done eating he gathered and washed the dishes and dried and put them away.

He sat on the couch and reread over parts of the newspaper bought the previous day and tried to start one of the paperback thrillers off the bookshelf. He kept listening out and looking to the door to the bedroom in which the son slept. Then he had to retrace where he was up to on the page.

At midday he went to the door and pressed his ear against it. He placed his hand on the door handle. After a moment he let go and stepped back. He went and opened the front door and stared at the dripping outdoors.

The son emerged mid-afternoon in his boxers and singlet. He ate two slices of bread and drank a glass of milk standing up.

Going back to bed, he said and shut the bedroom door behind him.

The rain eased and the older man found a flimsy umbrella and left the cabin. He hadn’t changed out of his sandals but at least they wouldn’t soak up water like shoes. Halfway along the route the rain picked up again and the wind brought it sideways. He collapsed the umbrella and when his t-shirt became drenched he took it off.

At the beach he stood and looked out. The ocean looked unaffected by the rain. He walked in and lay on his back and stared up into the grey clouds as drops streaked by. The sun was hidden and he had no sense of time.

After coming out of the water he strolled along the beach and came within view of the jetty. Several trawlers were unloading. It was later than he had thought. A few locals gathered to buy catch. They hustled back and forth between the car park and the jetty in their raincoats. He squinted his eyes to watch the locals and the fishermen interact. Sea gulls swirled in the wind overhead or bobbed on the waves. A figure on the jetty talking to a fisherman looked like his son. He walked ahead until he could see better and the moment he was certain he stopped. He bit on the nail of one thumb and stood like that for some time until he sucked in a deep breath and turned and walked away. He took residential streets where some houses had lights on in some of the rooms but he stared down and ahead and kept tapping the side of his hip with his fist.

The cabin door wasn’t locked and the son’s bedroom door was open. The older man went in. He turned over the clothes and looked through the cupboard and under the bed. He came back out and stood on the spot. He started tidying and packing up the main room.

A while later the son came in. He smiled and held up a plastic bag.

Dhufish, he said.

Right.

It’s cleaned and everything.

How’d you pay for it?

Said I could give a hand unloading tomorrow.

Uhuh.

The dad took the bag and cooked the fish. They ate it with a side of the leftover spaghetti with butter melted through. The son offered to wash up. The dad sat down and tried to continue reading the paperback thriller. The effort distracted him enough that he didn’t notice the son go into his bedroom and return.

You went through my stuff.

The dad sat up.

You can pack anyway. We’re leaving in the morning.

Why?

No people. No money. No taking off.

There wasn’t any money. I haven’t done anything wrong.

So you say.

Just because I talked to the fishermen.

Don’t take me for an idiot. I wouldn’t trust them any more than I trust you.

I can’t just stay inside doing nothing.

The son was crying.

I knew this wouldn’t work. I’ve been too easy on you. I’m taking you to Giggidup. 

Fucking hell.

Don’t blame me. That’s the way it is. 

The American rap CD came on and the dad ejected it and put in the REM best of compilation. They followed the road out of the township and turned right onto the same highway that had brought them up. After several kilometres they took a turning lane off the highway and headed inland along a road that only curved a few times. Whenever another vehicle came from the opposite direction they had to edge over onto the loose gravel. The sky was packed with fast moving clouds as if the wind was sweeping them away after the recent downpour. The land turned firmer and the bush thicker and taller until they entered a long stretch that had been scorched in a fire the last summer. Young shoots of dark green broke up the vast black. The REM CD ended and the son asked if he could put on his music and the dad said no. He switched on the radio.

The road ended at a T-junction and they had to wait for a stream of dust-covered cars and trucks to pass in both directions before pulling out onto the south-bound lane. This highway was straight and flat and they travelled at the same static speed as the vehicles before and behind them. They passed flat dusty farmland and industrial agriculture buildings. Glimpses of hills beyond the farmlands to the east rose into a range that drew nearer. They turned left off the highway and headed towards them.

The dad turned off the radio and tried to talk. He told the son how he had known Reece since he was a similar age to the son. Reece was level. It would be better out on the orchard for the son to get his act together. With a stranger. There would be plenty of work and nowhere to go. Reece had helped another friends’ boy a while back by taking him in.

You just want me to suffer, the son said.

All I ever do is help you. That’s the problem because you never bloody help yourself.

I do.

News to me.

I try.

Well now you can prove it. This is your last chance. After this…

What?

They approached a road sign and the dad’s attention turned to finding the right turn off. Once back on track he made a last attempt.

You think everything will last forever. That’s why you never put in the hard yacker. Instead you look for easy outs. Even just a few weeks out here you reckon is a life sentence. But it’s not. Everything passes. One thing ends and another begins. Sometimes you just gotta see it through. A few weeks is nothing. Just try. Please. 

This was your plan all along. You just want to get rid of me.

That’s not true.

The land swelled up and turned green and forested and they slowed down for several bridges or to pass through townships with old stone or timber halls. They turned off onto ever smaller roads and eventually onto a loose dirt driveway leading through orchards to the end of a valley where there was a homestead and large sheds. They pulled up and a man around the same age as the dad came out.

Jim, said the man.

Reece, said Jim.

This your boy?

This is Shane. Shane, Reece.

Grab your stuff and bring it up.

Shane unpacked two bags and lifted them onto the porch.

Head on through, said Reece. Your room is down the hall. Last door on the right.

Shane lumbered between Reece and Jim and disappeared into the dark passageway.

How long you want him here for? asked Reece.

However long you can put up with him for.

If he works he can stay forever. We’re going into main harvest.

Good. Wear him out.

How much do I need to keep an eye on him?

I don’t know. He’s been ok. He knows it’s up to him now. 

He might hate it.

Probably.

What if he bolts?

Nah, he won’t. He’s too lazy for that.

Alright.

Jim received a call a week later. 

Must’ve jumped ship in the middle of the night, Reece said. I drove round all morning looking for him.

Jim arrived the next day and stayed with Reece for a week. He heard how Shane had acted keen and worked hard for the first few days before becoming moody and quiet.

I should’ve warned you, Reece said.

It’s not your fault, Jim said.

Jim slept in the same bed Shane had slept in and each time he crawled into it part of him expected to find it warm. During the day Reece went to work and Jim took an old photo of Shane to neighbouring properties and businesses in town and the next towns over. People greeted him with smiles or curiosity before he explained why he was there at which point their expressions turned to something like pity or judgement or both. He came to hate this moment. Worse was when they asked questions and he went away thinking over all the parts he had avoided saying. At the end of each day he kept hoping he might walk in to Reece’s house and find Shane. There was more chance of that than getting anything from the locals. On the morning before he drove back to the city suburb where he lived Jim went to the local police station and filed a missing person report. The officer acted interested until he heard more about Shane and then his eyes glazed over and his energy dropped like an electric toy with a dying battery. Jim came out of the station with his hand over his mouth and his tongue kneading his cheek. He looked left and right down the street one last time and then up at the small round clouds casting shadows over the buildings and countryside. He started the car and turned off whatever started playing on the stereo and backed out onto the road.

Matthew Crowe is a writer from Western Australia. Having lived until recently in Scotland, he is now based in Canberra. His stories have appeared in Dostoyevsky Wannabe: Dundee, Passengers Journal and Westerly Magazine.

Sonia Redfern is a New York City-based painter exploring landscapes on reclaimed fabrics. Born and raised in Brooklyn, Redfern moved to Arizona to pursue an undergraduate degree in astrophysics, though her concentration pivoted to visual arts. While she remained enamored with astronomy, she found a deeper sense of fulfillment in her visual arts practice. Redfern continues to bring her curiosity about the world from science into her artwork. Upon graduating with a BA in Studio Art from the University of Arizona in 2007, Redfern relocated to South Korea and later to Australia. Her years away from home influenced her visual vocabulary, and helped to inspire the fabric works that she creates today. Redfern has exhibited nationally and internationally, including in Washington DC, Illinois, and South Korea. Her work is in private collections throughout the United States, as well as in South Korea and Israel.

One

That winter, when I finished grad school and had no money at all, I took a job as a packer at a dental lab. I was young and married and had two babies to support. I was not desperate, I just needed money. I had student loans haunting me and all the same, I remained optimistic. My wife knew me on many levels, from deli clerk, to cashier, to substitute teacher. This however, was a new level. I had never been a dental packer before and with my degree, I did not have to be one, and that is why I did it.

Out of all the jobs I had worked, people seemed the most impressed with this one. At church service when I said: “I am a dental technician,” they would raise their eyebrows and nod in approval. Of course no one truly knew that I was a dental packer who scraped by on minimum wage. All the same, I worked with teeth and did my best to appear professional.

“You work at a dental office?” they would ask.

“Dental laboratory,” I would reply. “There’s a big difference, and if you don’t work in the
field, you wouldn’t know. There’s all kinds of things that go into that side of the business.”

“What things?”

“We do all the work.”

“And the dentists?”

“They make bad impressions.”

“Impressions?”

“Yeah, that’s how you tell a good doc from a bad doc. The good ones make good
impressions.”

“And then?”

“We fabricate the crown if the impression is good.”

“How do you make a good impression?” They’d ask.

“On the job training, it’s a skill. Not everyone can do it.”

“Are you guys hiring?”

At which point I would look sad with my lips curled and say: “There are levels to
becoming a tech. You have to start in the shipping room as a packer. Once you’re miserable
enough, you move up.”

“I’m miserable just from hearing the job description,” they would say.

“Pray for me, brothers,” I would say.

Two

Millionaires owned the lab. An older married couple, Mr. and Mrs. Johnson had become entrepreneurs with their dental business. They lived on Todt Hill, the highest natural point of Staten Island, and the five boroughs, and the highest elevation on the entire Atlantic coastal plain from Florida to Cape Cod. Mr. Johnson oversaw cases for quality check in his big square glasses frames, while Mrs. Johnson handled payroll for all of us employees. Mr. Johnson showed tough love, and when he got mad at technicians for not reading what was written on RX’s, everyone in the lab could hear Mr. Johnson’s temper. His screams were a hot tea kettle and I was glad Mr. Johnson had never screamed at me that way. Mrs. Johnson was not as loud as her husband, however, she was much more intimidating. She was a witch that could cast a spell on you, and turn you to stone with her sharp eyes. If you were on your phone, she knew. If you were taking too long on your unpaid breaks, she knew. If you did not wear the uniformed scrubs, she knew. She thought she knew everything.

One time, Mrs. Johnson stared and yelled at me for being on my phone while I was reading back a list to print FedEx labels for the outgoing shipments. She thought I was doing something else on my phone and asked Gomez to spy on me. Richard Gomez, a Puerto Rican man, was as old as the scratched up wallpaper at the lab. The viejo had dedicated his good years of life to the laboratory.

“Boss lady says you’re screwing around,” Gomez said.

“But I’m printing labels,” I said.

“She wanted me to look at your screen and tell her what I saw,” Gomez said. “But between you and me, Maestro, I don’t care if you’re staring at tits on your phone.”

“I don’t do that,” I said.

“I’m not looking for a confession, that’s between you and God. I’m jumping as high as
Mrs. Johnson wants me to.”

“Well I’m not doing anything wrong,” I said, opening Instagram, looking for memes to
make me feel better.

“I believe you, kid. But you’re rubbing the Johnsons the wrong way,” Gomez said.

I stayed quiet, thinking how absurd my job was, and continued doom scrolling on Instagram. I wondered how Mr. Johnson and Mrs. Johnson dealt with each other daily. Did they love each other? Or was everything in the name of business? They both annoyed me, like an overbearing mother and father disciplining their troubled teenager.

The lab was on the first floor of a corporate building, bordering a gynecologist and a community college. The lobby of the lab had a water fountain that reminded me of Mami’s mop bucket when she used too much bleach. There was cream wallpaper all over the lobby of the lab, which you had to be careful with or else Mr. Johnson would get mad. Another feature of the lab was that the water cooler inside of the Johnson’s office was off limits to staff. We had to drink tap water while the admin got to drink the good water. Gomez didn’t drink from the water cooler, he said he didn’t want to get mixed in politics.

There was the removable dentures department, the ceramic department, the digital department, and my department, the shipping room. The shipping room had case pans on the walls like bookshelves in a library. Each case pan had a four digit sticker on the face of the pan, which if you stared at all day, would hurt your eyes. I looked at some of these case pan numbers, 1994, the year I was born, 2005, when I graduated elementary school, and 2050, a year that I hoped I would not be working in this damned place any longer. The production of teeth at the lab was high and to manage the cases, Gomez quality checked every crown, bridge, and denture before I shipped them.

I believed things were good in life, renting my own basement apartment, a caring wife, two crying babies, a used car, a job, and the thirst for more. Having these things and my youth ahead of me made me have pena for Gomez—he had been working at the dental lab twenty five years and had the color of each tooth shade memorized in his head, as his own life had changed shades. All he had to show for his years in the workforce was a white lab coat and a hunched back from sitting over his bench, working on the art of teeth over his years. He was well over sixty five and limped with each step he took.

My first day as a packer, while I wrapped stone models in bubble wrap and tied them with a rubber band, Gomez was watching me from across the counter. He had passed me stacks and stacks of cases to wrap and pack after he checked and invoiced them, and when I believed I was getting a smooth rhythm for things, I poured all of the contents from a blue case pan into an open lab bag, and the most important component of the case, the black capsule which secured the fabricated crown, did not make it inside the bag. I dropped a capsule which housed a ceramic crown, hitting the floor and bouncing all over the place like a Freshmint Tic Tac missing your mouth. We looked all over the maldito shipping room for the crown. Behind the shredder, under the trash bin, below the blue cabinets. We scratched the hair on our heads. The white ceramic crown had vanished before my eyes. I thought this a good thing, an act that showed I was not a robot after all, but a human being.

Three

Gomez pulled me aside and I followed him out of the shipping room. He guided me to
the loading dock of the corporate building and pulled out a vape pen and inhaled the pen until he began coughing violently.

“First things first,” he said, catching his breath, “You gotta loosen up, you’re too stiff.”

I listened to what he had to say.

“Imma tell you a few things,” he said, blowing clouds of cotton candy smoke in my face, “to get you by.”

I nodded, and he passed me his vape.

“These people, the Johnsons, they’re loaded,” he said.

“Loaded off drugs?”

“Off of your hard work and sweat,” he said. “If you drop a crown, break a denture, it doesn’t matter, Maestro. No one is losing a meal. You get what I’m saying?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Gimme back my pen, you’re chiefing. And another thing. Lunchtime is your time. Take your time, for the love of God, kid. This place will run with or without us, so better off taking your time.”

I liked Gomez, even if he was pussywhipped by the Johnsons. Maybe he had no choice.

“And what about the missing crown?” I asked.

“Forget the damn crown,” Gomez said. “They’ll remake it, big deal.”

“I thought you were going to yell at me back here.”

“I ain’t your boss.”

“How long have you worked here?” I asked.

“Twenty six years at the end of winter,” he said, spitting and coughing.

“Did you always want to be a dental tech?”

“My life was set after the Job Corps.”

“Like the peace corps?”

“Hell no.”

“They sound the same.”

“I was a legend back then,” he said, passing me his vape. “I got kicked out of every high school in New York when I was a teenager. They shipped me to the Job Corps in Kentucky. That’s where they trained me to work with teeth.”

“You learned the trade at a juvenile center?”

“Damn straight,” he said.

“Isn’t Kentucky racist?”

“Most of America still is,” he said. “First night on the bus ride to the center, the bus driver told us to shut the fuck up if we didn’t wanna die. The streets was all dark except for fire burning in the distance. We drove through an organized KKK meeting, and held our breaths as the bus climbed the hill of the street. Once we got to the top of the hill, we could see the pointed white masks shadowed by their flames. The bus driver floored the gas as we went down the hill, and we didn’t look back.”

“You get a GED or something from that place?”

“I got kicked out from there too. Started a riot started in the mess hall. No one forgets my name in Kentucky. I was a badass.”

“You still are,” I said.

“Don’t gas me up, Maestro.”

“You never got your high school degree or your GED?”

“Nah,” he said.

“And you’re a master dental technician,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said.

“That is badass,” I said.

“Hit this and shut up,” he said.

I took some more hits from Gomez’s vape.

“I can help you,” I said.

“Help me how?” he asked.

“I can help you get your GED.”

“Pff,” he coughed, “I’m too old for that shit.”

“You’re never too old for education.”

“You gonna teach me?”

“I’ll tutor you,” I said. “If you want.”

“What’s the catch?” he asked.

“You help me around the lab.”

“I already am,” he said.

“Por supuesto,” I said.

“Que pasa, gueys?” Dario said.

Dario was a Hondoran dental tech who worked off the books for the Johnsons for the last ten years.

“Pasame el lapiz,” he said.

Gomez passed him the vape.

“Today’s Mrs. Johnson’s birthday,” he said. “Están cantando happy birthday right now, and they got a pastel from Mother Mousse.”

“Damn we missed the cake,” Gomez said.

“They asked for you,” Dario said.

“Damn,” I said.

“They never celebrate our birthdays, pínche gringos. They only celebrate their birthdays and always give us the leftovers. I want a glazed chocolate donut, but they’re always gone by the time Mr. Johnson gives us the box in the morning. We’re not animals, we’re people,” Dario said.

Four

When we got back inside the lab, I squeezed into a pair of blue nitrile gloves; I needed large ones, these were medium. It was all the lab had in stock. I tied a plastic white apron around my waist, and completed the uniform with a blue disposable mask, tying the white loops around my ears.

After a month, I didn’t have to think about what to wear each day. The lab made those kinds of things simple. My wife told me it was important to keep a positive outlook on things, no matter how rough the waters.

In those days I had an attention to detail like no other pendejo in the lab, heck, in the world, barraged with daily incoming and outgoing dental crowns and dentures and custom trays and bite blocks and more things that required my undivided care, should God grace me with caring about such trivial things in life. I read the names of the patients on the case pans enthusiastically, calling out the best names to Gomez, who would sometimes chuckle. I chuckled too y la vieja bruja Mrs. Johnson would scold us across the hallway, saying “no laughing allowed, get back to work!” And we weren’t sure if she was joking or not but all the same we cut that shit and became robots on a mechanical car assembly line whenever she reprimanded us.

“Wanda Dickerson,” I said.

“Good one,” Gomez said, catching his breath over what was hard to distinguish between a laugh and a cough.

“Daphne Cummings,” I said.

“Oh god I’m gonna cry,” he said.

“I’m already crying,” I said. “Here comes your bestie.”

“HIPAA violation,” he said.

We laughed until Mrs. Johnson put us in our place, respectfully. I tended to my work, stretching out a long piece of bubble wrap, placing an upper and lower model at either end, and rolling it like sushi. I held a rubber band around two of my fingers, tying the bubble-wrapped model; there was no way, por el nombre de mi madre, that this product was breaking throughout its shipment route, I had never been more sure of anything my entire life, if I had failed as a husband, father and writer, por lo menos, I was a good wrapper of dental products and somehow I believed I was making a difference, doing a good thing, a service for someone who would be relieved their fake teeth didn’t break. Thinking about those things, I began wrapping these stone models, capsuling these ceramic crowns as if they were my own.

“Come to the back room,” Gomez said. “I want to show you some things.”

I followed him.

The back room was where all of the technicians worked behind their benches, some with Bunsen burners and others without. Other benches had grinding machines mounted and this was the bench where Gomez led me. Most of the technicians were from Latin America and Korea. They greeted me in Spanish as we squeezed by their work stations to our bench. The back was also very hot, I don’t know how these technicians bore with the heat all day, I was close to ripping my clothes off that winter. Gomez had an upper yellow cast model in his hand which he was pressing against the grinder.

“I’m going to teach you how to make bite blocks,” Gomez said.

I leaned into the grinding machine’s loud buzzing as the bench vibrated. Gomez began trimming the upper yellow cast model. He pushed the arch’s excess stone trim against the grinding machine until it was rounded to the way that he saw fit.

“How do you know how far to trim the model?” I asked.

“I just feel it,” he said.

A true art form.

“Feel it?”

“Yeah,” he said, as though things were that simple. “Twenty-two milliliters upper, eighteen milliliters lower.”

He passed me the lower yellow cast model and put his hand over mine and moved it so that I was trimming the model under his guidance. I knew if I was trying this on my own or didn’t have Gomez’s hand as a guard, I’d trim my fingers. I tried paying attention to what I was doing. I wasn’t sure what Gomez was doing at all, or how he had these measurements memorized in head, and all the same, I gave him my undivided attention. I admired him, and saw him as a mentor I never had; he took the time to show me how things got done. When someone teaches you, they become family. Gomez and I were connected, and I’d never admit any of this to him, I knew he would laugh me off with violent coughs, and so I kept these thoughts to myself. He turned on the Bunsen burner and held a sheet of pink wax over the blue flame dancing side to side to the rhythm of other techs’ grinding machines and air duster blow guns coiled like electric blue vipers.

The smell of the acrylic dentures curing in a bath of lukewarm water made me dizzy. In an effort to retain a few of my brain cells, I hit Gomez with some GED tips.

“They’re going to ask you to write an essay,” I said.

“I’m not good with writing,” he said.

“You’ll need at least five paragraphs,” I said.

“I’ll never get that shit.”

“An introduction, three bodies, and a conclusion.”

Gomez remained quiet, working with his hands over the bench. He placed the heated wax sheet over the trimmed stone model until the impression became a pink molding. He heated another wax sheet over the Bunsen burner and began rolling the sheet like a fruit roll-up at which point he curved the roll into an arch and mounted it to the model, creating a thick occlusal rim layer, like a mouthguard for boxers.

“It all starts with a good impression,” he said.

“A good impression,” I said.

This was Gomez at his peak. He might not ever get his GED, and as I watched his artistry, I began to understand why he never got one in the first place. I didn’t push the subject any longer. There, in that moment, I began thinking I can’t end up like Gomez, working for people who only care about themselves without any regard for the human behind the production.

“Maestro, come to the front, they need you,” Mrs. Johnson said.

“That’s your queue, kid,” Gomez said.

“Yeah,” I said.

That was as far as I got trained as a technician, and it was about the only lesson I needed to confirm that I had to get out of this God forsaken place. I believed the lesson was all Gomez needed to confirm he wasn’t interested in taking any tests at his age. The shipping room was overloaded with invoiced cases ready to be packed and wrapped and sent out for shipment. I began gathering bubble wrap and rubber bands and got to work, standing behind the counter in the shipping department, where Mrs. Johnson believed I belonged. I tried looking for God or a sign from Jesucristo or at least something spiritual in the details of finished dentures and ceramic crowns and found nothing.

Five

When I came to the reality that I was a dental packer, and nothing more, I got sad. I lasted six months at the laboratory before I decided to not show up to work one day, and then I never returned.

Two years later, when I was dressed in a tie and pointed shoes, I was using the public restroom in the building where the lab was. I was standing next to Gomez, pissing in the urinal.

“Small world,” Gomez said.

“Small right?” I asked.

“Small,” he said.

“Yours is small too,” I said.

We bursted into laughter. I thought he might not recognize me, and felt I should have gone inside one of the bathroom stalls, this way no one would have seen me.

“Diablo, Maestro, I miss your smart ass.”

“I miss you too, Gómez.”

I finished up and began washing my hands under the sink. I scrubbed under my fingernails and was thorough but quick. There was a leather couch in the bathroom, which I could not understand, and Gomez sat down and stared at me in his white lab coat. I wanted to leave the bathroom and Gomez, and I believed I didn’t owe anyone an explanation or apology for going MIA.

“I teach English at a community college upstairs.”

“I’m happy for you, Maestro.”

“Did you ever pass your GED?” I asked.

“I never needed that shit,” he said, coughing his brains out.

“I’m happy for you, Gomez.”

“Wait here, I’ve got something for you.”

I sat down impatiently on the leather couch in the bathroom. Gomez returned with pink bite blocks sealed in a denture pack. He was a good mentor, and didn’t deserve the short end of the stick on account of my disappearance, and all the same I smiled.

“The case we worked on,” he said.

“Never got delivered?” I asked.

“Patient died,” he said.

“I don’t want it,” I said.

“Take it,” he said.

“A good impression,” I said.

“Ya tu sabes,” he said.

I reluctantly accepted the dental product and let out a breath of fresh air when I exited the bathroom, taking a mental note to never use the first floor bathroom again, and why should I? There were fully functioning facilities upstairs.

“A Good Impression” was the first-place winner in Brooklyn Review’s 2023 Short Story Contest.

About the Author

Daniel Barrios (he/him) is a Dominican/Puerto Rican writer living in New York City. He received a 2024 fellowship from the Periplus Collective. He is a recent MFA graduate from Southern New Hampshire University’s low residency Mountainview program, and he has been awarded residencies through Under the Volcano in Tepoztlan, Mexico, Sundress Academy for the Arts in Knoxville, Tennessee, and Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. You can find his words in Querencia Press, The Bitchin’ Kitsch, and Assignment Magazine Online. You can find him on IG and Twitter (X) @pastelesaregood.

This year’s Brooklyn Review editorial team is thrilled to announce the winner’s the 2023 Short Story Contest: This Time It’s Personal, judged by novelist Ernesto Mestre. We were truly inspired by the amount and quality of submissions we received — big congratulations to this year’s winners!

Stay tuned for the Poetry winners coming soon!

First-Place Prize

A Good Impression by Daniel Barrios

Judge Ernesto Metre writes, “There is an extraordinary sense of realness established in the particular workplace of the two central characters in “A Good Impression,” a dental lab in which false teeth are crafted. At first, the reader becomes immersed in the common anxieties and terrors of failure and meaninglessness that literary fiction generally assigns to such settings. But soon enough, the story’s themes lift from the precise descriptions of the craft to the art that any task becomes when pursued with enough devotion and an insouciant disregard for those who make judgments about significance and value. When the narrator experiences the nearness to such magic with a co-worker, he tries to offer something in return by judging him through the scales of the other world. The story then becomes a powerful lament about the transcendence we miss out on when judging ourselves with the metrics of others.”

Daniel Barrios (he/him) is a Dominican/Puerto Rican writer living in New York City. He received a 2024 fellowship from the Periplus Collective. He is a recent MFA graduate from Southern New Hampshire University’s low residency Mountainview program, and he has been awarded residencies through Under the Volcano in Tepoztlan, Mexico, Sundress Academy for the Arts in Knoxville, Tennessee, and Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. You can find his words in Querencia Press, The Bitchin’ Kitsch, and Assignment Magazine Online. You can find him on IG and Twitter (X) @pastelesaregood.

Runners Up

My Generation by Eugene Stein

Of Eugene Stein’s story, Ernesto writes, “There are thorns in all our sides about the lives that we have somehow failed to live, particularly when we should be grateful for the blessings of the one we have, a very human situation adroitly captured in “My Generation.” A tale about a wistful and somewhat self-deluded husband and his longing for a younger man, the story artfully simmers between near-disaster and an acceptance of lost pasts and of that metaphysical thorn on our side that may just kill us if we try pulling it out.”

Eugene Stein lives in Los Angeles with his husband and children. His short stories have been published in Iowa Review, North American Review, Colorado Review, Witness, Catamaran, and Michigan Quarterly Review. His story in Iowa Review won a Pushcart Prize, and his story in Michigan Quarterly Review was reprinted in Harper’s. He is currently working on a novel.

Heartwood by Torsa Ghosal

For Heartwood, Ernesto writes, “What do we do with those voices that we know are speaking to us but that we can’t quite hear? In “Heartwood,” Bhumi becomes enamored of a professor who thinks he can transpose the voices of the majestic sequoias. In Bhumi’s search for the meaning of their eventual breakup, the story majestically shifts into the speculative, and Bhumi becomes an Ariel-like figure trapped forever in the core of one of those trees, the ending evocatively capturing the dangers and allure of condemning ourselves to relive perennially the wrongs of our pasts.”

Torsa Ghosal is the author of a book of literary criticism, Out of Mind (Ohio State University Press, US), and an experimental novella, Open Couplets (Yoda Press, India). Her fiction, non-fiction, and translation have appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Berkeley Fiction Review, Literary Hub, Bustle, LA Review of Books, and elsewhere. A writer and professor of English based in California, Torsa grew up in Bengal, India. You can follow her on Twitter @TorsaG and Instagram @torsa_ghosal

Before living inside a giant sequoia tree, Bhumi used to live in a townhouse in Fremont, first with a professor of poetry, and later, with a data engineer. Although she didn’t come from money, she made decent wage working as a programmer at a social media company and could afford the rent by herself, but four years ago, during an afterwork social, she had accidentally ended up at an open mike on Shattuck Avenue, where the poetry prof gave the evening’s standout reading, demurred like a real celebrity in the face of applauses, and the next thing she knew, they were making out in his thriftily furnished studio on the next block. She was prone under him, locked in the simple geometry of his limbs, her eyes on the two gerbils digging up primal chaos in a cage opposite the bouncy mattress, when her jaw loosened. Her ulcerous mouth softened. She knew she had to see him regularly, so she could relax and metamorphose into a more positive person.

Very soon they leased the Fremont townhouse together, though there were periods—the three summer months, for instance—when she bore the rent alone. Living with a man was an extreme adventure sport. She was starting to see why her mother cherished her father’s absence for the better part of the day and rarely complained about the adda sesh and table tennis that delayed his return to their small flat in Indore. Ma was okay single parenting Bhumi, if she could keep her house a spouse-free zone. The rules of cohabitation with a partner were fuzzy unlike the dorm arrangements Bhumi had known in boarding school and college. It was like having to build a massive ocean bridge after gaining construction experience from Lego.

Her boyfriend’s attachment to an ideal of frankness awed Bhumi. She was as taken with the blunt, unvarnished thrusts he used to enter her body as she was with his raw compulsion to diagnose personal and social follies. He was a bougie millennial not doing enough for the burning planet. He didn’t think the art he had staked his life on made much of a difference, but he was terrified of trying something else and facing new types of failure. He also had a wild dislike of certain other poets, the mid ones who acted oh-so-precious about their words, didn’t create space for a fair exchange with readers but invited them to bow before the majesty of their sentences, those sterile gilded monuments. Bhumi learned to slink around him when he was on the cusp of a rant, hop over the landmines of his insecurities, and honour his changing dietary needs (now vegan, now paleo). For her labours, he kissed her on the head several times a day, especially when she was busy coding in her home office, as if to interrupt her flow state. Apparently, he found her most attractive when she was not focused on him.

The healthy equation was disturbed once he won a grant to write a book in which he would honestly and objectively (his words in the proposal document Bhumi proofed) transcribe his conversations with trees. She thought the project charming, assuming he would jot down stuff he spoke at a house plant, perhaps the pothos that had made its way from his studio to the box window of their shared apartment. But on his non-teaching days he started camping out in a nearby redwood forest to make field recordings.

He was not after the rustle of leaves or bird songs. He wanted to catch the redwoods talking. He returned from these excursions tanned, dehydrated, and shorn of meaningful vocabulary. His standard response to anything she said were variations on sounds good, too bad, amazing.

He was fussy about the project and refused to show her his notes, even after she baited him with charges of fudging them. But this one time he got into a jolly mood eating chaat at a neighbourhood café and pulled a bunch of spectrograms from his phone’s cloud drive, all of which visualized ultrasonic sounds emitted by a hundred-year-old sequoia. He said he’d nicknamed the sequoia after her. Bhumi. Earth. What endures.

His diagrams plotted active frequencies against time and were hopelessly gorgeous, the swirl of pigments suggesting a quiet devastation, like someone had torched the lips of purple carbon paper, and a stack of sheets was singing now, the ghost sparks traveling inside. When Bhumi held an image closer, its blues turned a dreary brown, the trail of fire looked a lot like blood spilling out of a wounded animal. Her boyfriend mimicked the sounds rendered in the spectrograms with his mouth. khat-khat-khat, like heels clicking on concrete, hail on tin roof, teeth grinding. How stupid she had been to doubt his ability to hear organisms she didn’t think capable of communication.

Bright orange red striations in the final diagram branched and spiked into hysteric peaks. The busy configuration reminded Bhumi of a stressed, gaping larynx, the CT scan of a child’s haemorrhaged vocal folds that would never return to their original state, how they were before girls in school gagged the child for telling on them. She could see herself tripping into the moist laryngeal abyss where bloody warts hatched dense knots of long-stemmed, shaggy fool’s mushrooms. She scrambled to leave the cartilaginous litter but as in a nightmare, she was getting pushed through the pale gills of a jawless creature. She was getting swallowed in.  

The spicy tamarind chutney dripping from dahi vadaa yanked her back into the chaat café. She licked her wrist clean. Her boyfriend placed his hand on hers and needlessly conjured his bass fuck-me voice to say, when trees fall sick, they cry like you and me. With a pinch of horror, Bhumi realized her namesake was also diseased.

Her boyfriend seemed super happy recording shrieks of the sequoia, and though Bhumi didn’t care much about tree life, his progress cheered her. He had grown up feeling nobody really saw or heard him. His younger sister, the more studious and athletic child, was cherished by his father’s side of the family—the Ukrainian side, the only side that mattered to him. US academia and the poetry community had their ways of making him feel like an impostor. But now, at thirty-nine, he had found his tribe: Bhumi and the trees. Some nights Bhumi desperately wanted to spread like a massive evergreen conifer, fill their home with her thirsty feeder roots, her damp earth scent, claim all of him.

###

Their second Halloween together the professor suggested hosting a party for his grad students. Bhumi made meticulous lists to shop for food and wine. He volunteered to do the decorations which when finished looked odd and autumnal but not exactly spooky: strings of dry leaves made from plastic laced a mantle mirror, two black lanterns picked from a Halloween Store guarded the entrance, and an Amazon-bought elaborate silver candelabra that would be returned after the event prettified the dining table. He transported the gerbils from the upstairs loft to the living room, so the mirror could multiply their movements, add some frenzied activity to the décor. He had also picked their costumes—a black ankle-length skirt with small pleats for Bhumi, to be worn with a puff-sleeved bodice, and a black, high collar coat fitted around the waist to go over his own white silk shirt.  

Bhumi thought the idea was to look dark Victorian until another Bengali woman, at least ten years younger, ten pounds bonier, but with a heart-shaped face that could be mistaken for hers, showed up in a generic grey-brown jumpsuit. An editor of the college’s literary magazine, she had come early with a bottle of cheap Barefoot wine and a gym bag stuffed with board games to help the hosts set up. She would be sitting out the cosplay, Bhumi assumed, but after helping lay appetizers on the table and clinking wine glasses with the hosts, she wrested a crafted headdress out of her bag.

Tendrils with narrow wispy leaves shot down her paper crown. Oh, the Casuarina tree, the prof remarked, and his student grinned, swaying the impractical headdress, a delicate tree caught in the wind, before informing Bhumi she was not any she-oak but the one a Bengali poet called Toru Dutt saw from her window at dawn, the subject of a fifty-five-line poem. More students trickled in wearing rather ordinary clothes but wrapped in intricate webs of textual references that escaped Bhumi. She felt ridiculous laughing at their inside jokes.  

Turned out the prof too wasn’t any vintage man but a specific one. Lord Byron. Ironically baroque, the Casuarina Tree quipped and pivoted toward Bhumi wanting to know what she was. The professor answered for her. A noble lady. Casuarina Tree shook her head, disapproving the vagueness that, she said, reeked of sexism, and insisted that the party recognize Bhumi as Ada Lovelace, Byron’s mathematician daughter. The distinction pleased Bhumi, the hint of an incestuous dynamic between her lover and her was tantalizing, until another student declared Ada Lovelace was either crazy or had a lifelong fear of madness.

Tipsy from drinking wine and cider, students fawned over the professor’s redwoods project. His upper body wiggled every time a wave of adoration passed through it. Bhumi learned his project’s brand-new title from the conversations: Infinite Book of Secrecy. Isn’t that, like, Shakespeare? asked a gangly man with a translucent bell-shaped covering drawn over his head reaching past his shoulders. Sure, it is Shakespeare, the professor said with a shallow laugh that confused Bhumi. Casuarina Tree seemed to have caught on though. So, the allusion was not intended? she asked. This time the professor bit into a cracker and licked crumbs from his lips, slowly, almost flirtatiously, without answering.

Bhumi was relieved when the party moved on to playing board games. Code Name, Scrabble, Cards Against Humanity: entertainment with rules she could understand. She had played Scrabble competitively in the college circuits of Mumbai. Although the lack of practice had weakened her speed of word recall, she remembered enough to demolish the poets. Casuarina Tree came closest to beating her. After their tight match, the prof brushed aside the paper leaves tickling his student’s face to congratulate her. This gesture added to his silence about her own winning streak inflamed Bhumi. But as they were cleaning up after the party, the prof dramatically kneeled before her, as though in supplication, and gushed his praises. He had no idea Bhumi had such great people skills, that she was so good at Scrabble. It was the first time he seemed truly in awe of her.

###

They broke up before the holidays. He picked a fight saying he was tired of guessing her thoughts, and accused her of hiding her true emotions, which left him unsure and bewildered. His allegations blindsided Bhumi. She habitually overlooked his flaws—like how often he forgot to take out the trash, how long he took to bring out his credit card when they were grocery shopping, and how much he complained about grading student work. He, on the other hand, was searching for an excuse to abandon her. She didn’t care for the excuse—poor communication, my foot. The real reason had to be some bright young thing. So effing predictable.    

After he moved out with his belongings, she couldn’t bear to return to the stripped down twelve-hundred square feet townhouse. Her secret fear was she would die alone in the building, and her corpse would rot without anyone knowing for a long time. To carry on, she had to devise various hacks. She bought pothos to fortify every window of the house. She considered gerbils too but skipped them because they required more than water refills. She started to attend random social gatherings to get through the evenings.

Soon she was a regular at a Bay Area Scrabble Club that convened at the Dyer Street IHOP on Fridays. It was at one of their meet ups, more than a year after the breakup, that she ran into the Casuarina Tree again. The woman’s face looked smaller, swathed in coal-black feathery hair, no trace of the twisty highlighted bun Bhumi remembered from the party. She was lugging a backpack with a Balenciaga logo (Bhumi couldn’t tell if it was an original) and had come in a high-end electric car.

Bhumi read the signals—the car brand was an ensign of desi tech wealth—and sure enough, over a match, Casuarina Tree told her she’d dropped out of the poetry program to earn a certificate in data science. She was training pricing algorithms for a startup. Bhumi asked if she liked her new line of work, and the woman said there wasn’t that much of a difference between writing poems and analysing data. Both required you to find patterns and connections among unlike things. Bhumi lost to Casuarina Tree this time. Along with studying data, the woman had been memorizing the Scrabble Players dictionary.

Was Casuarina Tree in touch with the prof, Bhumi asked, feeling somewhat pathetic for failing to maintain a dignified indifference about his affairs. He had mailed his former student a draft of the Infinite Book of Secrecy for feedback some months ago, Casuarina Tree admitted, but they were not in touch beyond that, not really.

That night Bhumi lifted a self-imposed moratorium on stalking her ex’s Instagram—of course, he was not wallowing in sorrow over their separation, and she didn’t expect him to take her back, but she was frustrated by how little she learned about his life from the feed. There were posters of poetry readings, reflections on the challenges of the writing life, and a series of images showing everyday objects hashtagged dailywonders.

###

Casuarina Tree had been asking around for a new place to rent at the Scrabble meet ups. Although Bhumi hated living alone, she hesitated before inviting the woman to sublease a bedroom in her townhouse. But the impulse to watch the woman, possibly figure out if she had anything to do with her ex, ultimately crushed all other concerns.

And Casuarina Tree jumped at her proposition: I was hoping you would offer, can’t wait to move in. What Bhumi found peculiar was not the woman’s enthusiasm but that she didn’t haggle to bring down the asking rent. Bhumi had quoted a higher-than-market rate thinking any self-respecting desi woman would bargain. There would be a round of back and forth before they settled on a satisfying median. But nope.   

Bhumi’s new tenant ritually challenged her to matches around dinner time. A local champion now, the Casuarina Tree was essentially unbeatable, but she encouraged Bhumi to study the dog-eared, fiercely underlined copy of the Scrabble dictionary she owned. Leafing through its pages, Bhumi could inhale a heavy patchouli scent, as though Casuarina Tree had sprayed the book with her deodorant. She much preferred practising against an engine between prowling on GitHub and Slack during work hours. Letters patterned into a range of mathematical possibilities in this happy phase of her life. When Bhumi saw POETRY, she could picture sixty-eight combinations: tepoy, ropey, pyre, ryot (this last one supposedly meant tenant farmer in India, but Bhumi had never heard the word used there or anywhere else). BREAKUP contained upbear, beau, and puke.

She was getting over her ex, fully regaining her self-confidence, when the tech recession hit. Rumours of a mass fire flared. She considered it her duty to comfort the Casuarina Tree, who was new to the industry, with stories of mad productive techies thriving in an earlier financial crisis. She was consoled in return. Casuarina Tree reminded Bhumi she’d been with her employer for over seven years, an anomaly in the Bay Area, and if there was such a thing as reward for loyalty, she had nothing to fear. Despite exchanging reassurances though, they played a low scoring match that evening. No bingos on either side. Casuarina Tree’s best word was AZURE, worth only thirty-four points with Z on a triple value square.  

Since reaching adulthood Bhumi had been moving in search of career opportunities which left her with no close friends. Scrabble with Casuarina Tree structured her days, and the two had become, at least Bhumi hoped, something like friends. But if Casuarina Tree lost her job, she would have to go live with her parents in Gainesville, and if Bhumi, who was on a H1B visa got laid off, she would have to fly back to Mumbai within a sixty-day window.

Returning jobless and empty-handed to India terrified Bhumi. How could she face the cousins she gifted Costco-bought Toblerone on the other annual trips? And what would her dear mother think—the great joy of the woman’s lonely monastic life was bragging to the neighbourhood aunties about her daughter’s successes in America. No, Bhumi would rather die than shame her mother.     

She and the Casuarina Tree were binging Love is Blind after wrapping a Scrabble match, both rooting for the happiness of a hot desi data analyst with major body image issues stuck in a gerbil playhouse with a desi jerk, when—for no particular reason, she recalled a popular Bangla children’s story about a prince who got separated from his friends and started living inside a mango tree. A demon ruthlessly chased the prince—demons were always pursuing prince and princesses in these stories—but just as the demon got closer, the prince found the strength to transmigrate from the first mango tree to the next. He kept shifting homes until—. The middle of the story was a blur, but Bhumi remembered the end where the prince steps out of the tree, finds the parrot holding the demon’s soul, and kills it. A neat resolution.

She wanted to ask Casuarina Tree whether she knew the story in their shared mother tongue, but when the credits rolled, Casuarina Tree said rather casually, you know, I used to camp out in the sequoia grove with your ex.

Bhumi tried to regard the woman with an expression withholding judgement but failed to suppress a frown.  

It was a no-nonsense arrangement, Casuarina Tree insisted. The prof and she didn’t hook up. Just that she felt sorry for the man. He would set up his gear in the woods but, he was so tired from teaching and housework, that he inevitably nodded off. Someone had to watch over his recording equipment. He was hopeless at sound editing and visualization too. He had been able to establish the significance of his project in the grant application, peg it on the coordinates of climate crisis—the correct historical coordinates for nature writing—but he lacked technical dexterity.

The woman made Bhumi’s ex sound ridiculous, and Bhumi was ashamed by how this thrilled her. Fussy he was but bumbling and technologically challenged? No way. Yet, it would be nice if she could file him away as a silly, unworthy man.

During the long hours of field study, the prof had mentioned Bhumi to his student. And I was obsessed, the student said with a fierce glow washing her eyes that worried Bhumi. When she prodded to know what exactly the prof had said about her, Casuarina Tree didn’t offer anything of note. This and that, she murmured before jolting up with pride and saying, we nicknamed a tree Bhumi.  

Bhumi was unsettled to think this woman sharing her couch, her lease, her bowl of trail mix was circling her in stealth long before she knew it. The spiny green branchlets of Casuarina Tree may have been dangling outside her peripheral vision, but they were looming all the same, even advancing to gather in a stressful knot around her neck. The woman was like an appendix, the tiny organ that had played an unclear role in Bhumi’s digestion since birth but became known to her right before she was rushed into an emergency surgery.

Did the professor and Casuarina Tree still visit the woods? Bhumi asked.

No. While helping the prof, the student had discovered her love for tagging, classifying, and clustering data. Casuarina Tree lectured on about the similarities between the creative brain and the classifying brain, but Bhumi didn’t follow. Her brain was busy classing every word the woman uttered, her every little hand movement as a treachery.  

###

When Bhumi was laid off, she kept it a secret from her roommate. She would find another job and then reveal, her suffering safely in the past. If Casuarina Tree asked to play Scrabble, Bhumi made excuses. She was so mad at the woman, so angry with herself, she could not focus and if she could not focus, she could not win, and a win was the only acceptable outcome now.

Meanwhile, her visa clock was ticking, every tick threating to undo a life built like a controlled experiment. Out of despair, she sent her resume to any job matching her skills on LinkedIn—didn’t matter if it was lower paying than her last gig or an entry-level position. To keep up the semblance of normalcy on weekdays, she drove up and down I-5, burning fuel, stopping for coffee at a different Starbucks every time. The Central Valley could not decide whether it was an unnaturally cold summer or an unusually warm winter, and she nodded when men and women at the cash registers made small talk about the unfriendly weather.

Driving without destination was like being on an endless vacation—Bhumi could get used to the feeling if her savings didn’t begin to show a sizable dent, the stock market didn’t continue tanking, and fuel prices didn’t go up. Soon Bhumi suffered cortisol spikes first thing in the morning. The teeth grinding was back, and along with it the sense that every millisecond of calm was nothing but a prelude to some horror.

She thought to concoct a farewell meeting with her ex and would have acted upon the thought if a quick glance at his Insta didn’t reveal he was on an extensive book tour. He had pinned the picture of a massive redwood to his feed with a lengthy caption explaining how the tree gave him clarity and a sense of direction.

Bhumi too was desperate for clarity and direction. So, around the fiftieth day mark of her job loss, after looking up flight prices to India, she set out for the redwood grove her ex visited.

The forest was a green yolk splattered at the junction of three suburbs. It had to be popular with families and hikers on holidays but since this was a foggy weekday, Bhumi had no trouble finding parking.

Her shoes crushed the reddish-brown dirt and the copious tree litter, wily ferns brushed her ankles, as Bhumi craned her neck to study the spiderweb of leaves and branches blocking the sky. It was freezing among the aggressively tall sequoias. Sheets of fog had gotten trapped in the jumble of vertical lines, some of which were living wood, others were charred poles. Bhumi began to delight in touching the soft, mushy surfaces, running her fingers through depressions and blisters, choreographing her path around slimy golden molluscs and the round-capped Super Mario mushrooms that grew on dead matter. She had read mushrooms didn’t have skin—their insides were their outsides—and wondered if her ex would be attracted to such bare-bodied things.  

How to find a tree in a forest? Through a rush of jitters, Bhumi realized she had come to see not any tree, but a totem—her namesake that was supposedly writhing and groaning in pain. Perhaps she would catch the vibrations it discharged, and it would sponge her troubles.

She wandered listening for strange sounds but detected nothing other than the high-pitched calls of chickadees and the slushing of a hidden stream. Her feet got caught in a mess of duff and roots in front of a spectacularly ugly sequoia with large cankerous bulges. She who knew so little about plant life could figure the tree was living on borrowed time. Critters had bored tiny dark holes in the trunk, brown needles started at the bottom, and someone had engraved, DSO + REN on its bark. Had to be lovers’ initials. She almost wished they belonged to her ex and Casuarina Tree, but the letters didn’t quite fit unless they had secret nicknames for each other. Bhumi’s mind was already unscrambling the letters into other words and seeing other possibilities. Sonder. A category of yacht. Sonder, she had read somewhere, was also a word for vivid life of things.

She pictured her ex falling at the sequoia’s feet to record its cries, his knees spore printing the decomposing litter, while she was home, waiting for him. She leaned closer to the trunk before making a hard fist to strike it. The first strike didn’t do anything for her. Second time, quashing the fear of injured knuckles, she hit harder. A third hit punctured the creased skin capping her finger joints. The most delicious sensation. She didn’t want to stop bleeding.

An air of intimacy gathering around the dying redwood slowly calmed her. She had no idea how long she’d been standing there, a rubber doll looking up in anticipation at a giant organism, when the stomatal openings heaved as though in recognition. The tree’s hideous lips teased her into surrendering control. An impossible crack formed on the bark. There were more cracks inside calling out Bhumi, Bhumi, Bhumi.

Would the trunk fork and crash, swept in a torpedo of sadness with her? Bhumi stepped back to wrench away while she was still intact—a put together thing. But the roots were jawless tentacles that leapt and hooked to her bruises, knotted around her waist and limbs, and with a loud thump, slammed her flat against the base to swallow her.

###

Bhumi was not living inside a hollow pit. Her new home had pestled her flesh and bones, and though terrified at first, she had stopped turning and twisting to set free. She had no memory feeling bodily pain seeping like fog into the wood and becoming elastic. She hadn’t exactly become the tree, but she wasn’t anything else either. She was now dizzy in love with the early morning light. The ancient base of the tree was a trampoline. She shot up sometimes to plead with the sun, begging it to stay longer. She was not a fan of the bioluminescent invertebrates that crawled all over her visual field at night.

Living inside a tree wasn’t stressful, though it could get boring. She learned to channel luminous vibrations toward the nearby fungi for entertainment and received bursts of microbial energy in return. She was shocked by how little she missed her old life—her job, her family, boyfriend, pay checks and immigration paperwork. But even so, during the peak hiking season, she craved drama. She wanted the Casuarina Tree and the prof to show up, so she could know what had passed between them. Sometimes she choked remembering experiences that didn’t seem to belong to her—like playing hide and seek with a big man who she could tell was lying when he said he loved her, his child. She got excited thinking she had gained mystical powers to parse other people’s memories, but it was false confidence.

Hot flashes of wakefulness grew scant. Bhumi had stopped counting the years when a fast-spreading fire came close to destroying her. She joined the chorus of blighted leaves to ask for help, all the while doubting anyone heard them.

Ultimately her home didn’t burn in that fire. It was chopped down to show in a hysterically bright forest museum. The tech company that had employed her started managing a portion of the forest to offset their carbon footprint, and Bhumi lay prone in a blanched hall, part of an exhibit schooling visitors about native species.

Chained and attached to the floor, Bhumi could not read the museum label describing her, which didn’t bother her until a child visitor read aloud the title. HEARTWOOD. The dense, dead part of a tree trunk.  

What an insult. Bhumi had the urge to fight whoever had her illustrate inert matter when she was a living, breathing, and throbbing organism. But she was too lethargic from decades of inactivity to properly rouse in rebellion.

HEARTWOOD. Scratching the surface of her numbness, Bhumi tried to reorder the letters into other possibilities. Rooted, Dearth, Threw. Even this exercise proved difficult beyond a handful of obvious combinations.

Every now and then Bhumi tried very hard to focus on the chatter among visitors about the text on the museum label. Over the years she would learn HEARTWOOD on the plaque was followed by a few lines composed by a California poet. The lines contained no decipherable words. Only diagrams. During guided tours certain museum staff said the diagrams represented sounds sequoias emitted in distress. Some visitors rejected the explanation in favour of an alternate theory. It was the voice of a woman the poet loved, they said, a woman who had lost the ability to speak in an accident. His lover had freed the poet from his obligation to words.

“Heartwood” was a runner-up for the Brooklyn Review’s 2023 Short Story Contest.

About the Author

Torsa Ghosal is the author of a book of literary criticism, Out of Mind (Ohio State University Press, US), and an experimental novella, Open Couplets (Yoda Press, India). Her fiction, non-fiction, and translation have appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Berkeley Fiction Review, Literary Hub, Bustle, LA Review of Books, and elsewhere. A writer and professor of English based in California, Torsa grew up in Bengal, India. You can follow her on Twitter @TorsaG and Instagram @torsa_ghosal

About the Artist

Kira is a visual artist. Their abstract work manipulates landscape visual tropes and centers themes of environmentalism and the anthropocene. Kira’s work was most recently shown at Gallery Petite in Brooklyn at their first solo show, “The Fire When We Burned Everything”. They have been featured in a variety of literary publications, including the Iowa Translation Workshop’s Exchanges journal, the Minetta Review and Oneirocritica. Kira lives and makes art in Brooklyn, New York. You can follow them on instagram @aaronakirasg.

My husband and I met the old fashioned way, at a gay bar in West Hollywood, in the days before Grindr. Carlos is from Uruguay, and to him, a semi-employed Jewish writer from Jericho, Long Island was exotic. I liked his vaguely Italian accent when he spoke Spanish, and he liked my vocabulary. It’s like my grandmother always said, there’s a lid for every pot.

We moved together to an apartment in Silver Lake (back then, still affordable) and later bought a small house in Beachwood Canyon (ditto) and started a family. One night the supply line to the dishwasher broke and while we were sleeping the water spread over the hardwood floors and got sucked up into the walls. It was a stupid dishwasher leak, and the entire house was wrecked. Just bad luck. Our bulldog Peggy hadn’t so much as whimpered during the night although her basket was surrounded by water, like an islet. In the morning, still ensconced in her bed, she wagged her stumpy little tail, splashing us.

We had to move out immediately while the contractors ripped out the cabinetry and broke open the walls. We had no time to look around and grabbed an apartment that had two bedrooms and allowed dogs, close to the girls’ school in a new building on La Brea called El Palacio – it was no palace, believe me, just another high-rise thrown up hastily to house young professionals in L.A. Carlos and I were the oldest people in the building and our kids were certainly the youngest. Most of the tenants were starting their careers, many still living with roommates, seemingly all of them single, celebrating the end of the lockdown with late-night parties, loud music, and, I assumed, low-key debauchery.

I wore a mask if the elevator was crowded, but no one else did. To these kids, it was as if the pandemic had never happened. I found them fascinating, with their Trader Joe’s bags and takeout meals and poke bowls, the young women in their yoga pants on weekends, the young men in their shorts and flip-flops no matter the weather, none of them getting newspapers delivered – they found my subscription comical or bewildering, if they took notice of me at all. They liked Peggy, stopping to pet her. I felt a little like I was doing an anthropological study, although the conclusions that I’d draw were obvious to me from the beginning: I’m old. I’m a middle-aged married man and I had never felt so old. Also, we’d begun an epic battle with our insurance company regarding our repairs, so that was a lot of fun.

I was especially interested in a good-looking guy who lived by himself at the other end of our floor. His Grindr dates, also handsome, were easily identifiable as they walked confusedly along the hallway, searching for the correct apartment number. Sometimes, if I was getting into the elevator or throwing out the trash, I’d point out Ryan’s unit to them, and Carlos would berate me for getting involved and embarrassing the men.

“Just trying to be helpful,” I said.

Ryan Safaryan was probably twenty-eight or thirty, dark-eyed and curly-haired, and in good shape. Dark skin, sideburns, stubble he carefully trimmed. There had to be narcissism in the immense care he took with his beard, but if I looked like he did, I’m sure I’d be narcissistic too. My type back in the day, not that I ever dated someone that handsome. We bonded over Peggy. He thought she was beautiful, and I gave him bonus points for his acuity; I’m somewhat besotted with my bulldog.

My younger daughter Lily wasn’t happy about the move, nor for that matter was Peggy; they both missed our yard. My older daughter Sophia was fourteen and indignant that she now had to share a bedroom with Lily. Sophia was a would-be sophisticate who tried to befriend the young women in the building, convinced she was their contemporary. Meanwhile I was starting to spend time with Ryan, although Carlos said that our neighbor was just being polite. But I told Carlos that Ryan had intimated that I was a role model. I’d sustained a career, we owned our own home (granted, it was under water, literally), and Carlos and I had been in a relationship for twenty years; as Ryan understood, that’s at least forty in straight years.

“This isn’t going to end well,” Carlos said.

Carlos is very negative and usually right. He’s also a minimalist and saw the flood as an opportunity to rid ourselves of our clutter and start over. He always said the hardest part of being a parent was the paraphernalia. Maybe that was true when we had young kids, but Sophia was starting to make us miss those days when the biggest fights were about bedtime and the demands for additional plush toys. I remember we would play a game called “I’m Thinking of an Animal,” and surprise the kids when the animal turned out to be a human being… Sophia didn’t want to play those games with us anymore.

But it’s true, we were animals, and Ryan Safaryan had his animal urges for sex. So did I – I think the young people were inspiring me, not that I could approach Ryan’s appetite.

My twenties were very different from Ryan’s. I was single then, my friends were getting sick, and there was no such thing as PrEP. “These guys don’t remember what it was like in the eighties and nineties,” I said.

“How could they possibly remember? They weren’t even born in the eighties.”

I wanted Ryan to understand what it was like to come of age and come out in the era when HIV was untreatable. To be a teenager and watch “Cheers” and worry about dying. “They don’t know how easy they have it.” I heard myself and was semi-appalled. “I sound like a grumpy old man.”

“Well, you are.”

I invited Ryan over for dinner, which really meant that I was volunteering Carlos to cook. Carlos disapproved, although not about the cooking assignment. “Why would he want to have dinner with us? Leave him alone.”

“He didn’t have to say yes.”

“How was he going to say no?”

“He could tell me he was busy,” I said.

“Then you’d just pounce on him in the hallway and reschedule.”

There was no pouncing, just for the record. I sat across from Ryan at dinner. He had intelligent eyes, dark and piercing and vigilant, like a junco or peregrine falcon. Carlos made his Milanesa, and we did our usual act, I suppose, as the loving but long-suffering couple who bickered over minor issues, corrected each other when we were telling stories, and were amused/annoyed by our various peccadilloes. Our message in a nutshell: opposites attract. Sophia pressed Ryan for details: did he have a boyfriend (not for a couple of years now), did he want another boyfriend (yes, but no rush), where did he grow up (Sacramento), was he close to his parents (not exactly), weren’t parents annoying? He said he’d wished he’d had parents like Carlos and me. A mixed blessing, that answer. See anthropological study above.

Ryan worked in marketing for a company that made fashionable hospital scrubs and advertised on billboards all over Los Angeles. The people on the billboards were beautiful and apparently the young executives were, too. Their headquarters were in Santa Monica, and he had a long commute given traffic, but he said he didn’t mind the drive so much. In his car he listened to podcasts, mostly true crime, the grislier the better, and audio books about family dynamics and self-improvement. It turned out that he was insecure: he worried about his career, his wastes of time. He thought he should be accomplishing more. He said he watched too much TV, mostly stupid reality shows, and felt he hadn’t read enough. I recommended The Road, a novel about fatherhood and cannibalism. I thought it was right up his alley. He said he wasn’t a fast reader, but he was a deep reader. I knew Carlos would make fun of me for this, ascribing my esteem to infatuation, but I did think that there was something deep about Ryan, some hidden pain that had given him insight and complexity.

Ryan liked dogs, the Sacramento Kings, the habits of highly effective people, and, I guess, screwing strangers. He said he wanted to go to a yoga class with me. Where was he when I was twenty-eight and no one talked to me at the Sports Connection gym? Although later I’d learn that Ryan hadn’t exactly specified an ability to do Downward Dog as a requirement on his dating profile. No, he liked muscular guys who weren’t afraid to express their feelings. Interests: travel, the beach, working out, hella spicy food.

“I think it went well. He stayed a long time,” I said.

“Of course he stayed. He likes the attention. You were hanging all over him.”

I couldn’t tell if Carlos was annoyed at me or amused. “I was not.”

It would have been nice to have a dating app when I was single, I told my husband. Not so much because I’d wanted to have lots of casual sex – I wasn’t theoretically opposed, but at the time I was too scared of HIV and too inhibited – but because dating had been difficult for me. Ryan was lucky. If he ever wanted to start dating more seriously, he could always adjust his profile and take things slower. I wondered what my life would have been like if I’d had Grindr back then.

“Yeah, not sure you’d get the same response as Ryan,” Carlos said. “No offense.”

I saw his point. I wasn’t exactly in Ryan’s league. I had trouble building muscle mass, mostly because it required me to get up from the sofa. My eyebrows were uneven, and I had a large bump on my nose from falling off a bunk bed when I was eleven. Somehow Carlos had looked past all that.

Ryan was so handsome, I said. Beautiful people had it easier in life, didn’t Carlos think so?

Carlos said it wasn’t very pleasant to hear how handsome I thought Ryan was.

“You don’t think he’s good-looking?”

“Yeah. Mostly he’s young. But why don’t you keep your crush to yourself,” Carlos said. “I’d prefer that.”

“It’s not a crush. Well, not exactly.” The truth was more embarrassing. “I want to be his friend.” I wanted to be his friend because I wanted to be younger. I know how stupid that sounds. I wanted to be younger, not just a guy with adult responsibilities and a dad bod and a career that was stalling. I loved Carlos and our daughters and the life we had built together. But I still had regrets about my past, about lost opportunities and mistakes, the zigzag path my life had taken. All the wasted years. Everyone was supposed to have had so much fun in their twenties. Instead, I remember a lot of worrying and a lot of loneliness. Was I listening to the right music, would I get promoted, did anyone else overhear the faux pas that I’d just made and that I’d obsess about for months, would I always be alone? I remember all of that. And I remember a lot of people with wasting syndrome, which meant I had no right to complain about anything. Friends were dying, and I was going to whine about staying home alone on a Saturday night? It was unseemly.

In the ’90s I stopped writing screenplays that weren’t selling and got a job in publicity and began to climb the corporate ladder. In Silver Lake Carlos and I lived in a courtyard building south of Sunset. A fountain in the middle of the courtyard burbled intermittently, erupting every hour or two, like Old Faithful. Our neighbor Alan in the unit next door lived a spartan existence. He was a travel writer who seemed quite old to me but was probably in his fifties, my age now, and who still had a thick moustache from his Castro clone years. He freelanced for an automobile club magazine and scraped together a living, and he was alone, very much alone. He slept in a twin bed under a giant poster of Ingrid Bergman in Stromboli, never went out at night, and he was rail thin. He kept to himself, but we had watered his plants (philodendron, ficus, Boston fern) and collected his mail (St. Jude’s, Pacific Gas and Electric, Time Warner cable) when he went out of town, and we’d taken the opportunity to snoop a little. We wondered about him. Was he mourning, was he celibate, was he infected? I couldn’t help thinking that if he’d been born a little later, just ten or fifteen years later, when gay couples were coming out of the shadows and beginning to celebrate their commitment ceremonies, he probably would have had a partner. Or maybe he’d had a partner who’d died; and maybe, if the men were a little older instead, they might have avoided the virus. He was born in a bad interval. It’s possible he was happy living by himself, but I thought he was lonely, and I felt sorry for him.

“I couldn’t live like that,” I’d said. “Like a monk.”

But to Carlos there was something appealing in Alan’s lifestyle. “The simplicity.”

He didn’t want to be monk, my husband told me, but as a young child and Jesuit educated in Montevideo, his career ambition was to be a martyr. “And I married you, so I got my wish,” Carlos said.

This made me laugh. He teased me and I liked it. Sometimes Carlos and the kids would whisper together in Spanish and make fun of me, but this was another of our games. They would pretend to make cutting remarks (I could somewhat follow the gist of what they were saying; mostly they were criticizing my cooking; I couldn’t really blame them, Carlos was much the better chef) and I would pretend to take great umbrage. I didn’t speak much Spanish, I’d studied German in college. Given that I ended up living in Southern California and married to a Uruguayan, Spanish would have been a wee bit more useful. Another of my mistakes.

After Silver Lake, we had moved to a cul-de-sac and there were two other gay families on our same block – what can I say, it was the Hollywood Hills – and then, when our kids were small, one of the couples split up. Daniel and Nathaniel (yes, the names rhymed) had been together for fifteen years, and the separation was hard on Matthew, their son. He was in Lily’s class, and he would break down crying in the schoolyard. Eventually Matthew adjusted, shuttling back and forth between his fathers’ households with great aplomb. I guess it was progress of a sort: gay divorce.

Now, at El Palacio, with Ryan as my neighbor, I had a front row seat for the Grindr age. Well, perhaps not front row. Perhaps a seat with partial view. I wanted to know what the experience was like: vicariously, let me be clear. My questions were basic. When someone came over, did they start having sex immediately? How much small talk did they engage in? Did Ryan see the guys again, or were these all one-night stands? Was it even called a one-night stand anymore? And did he ever feel the urge to reply to a ping: it’s Monday at 2am, what are you doing up? Don’t you have a job?

In the end, I asked him to show me his profile. I made a few editorial suggestions, I couldn’t resist. Although, as Carlos was quick to point out, it seemed like Ryan was doing just fine without my help. When I saw the photo of my neighbor’s abs, I understood why he was so popular.

There should be a word or expression in English for someone who’s between a friend and an acquaintance. German has it: gute Bekannte. Which means “close acquaintance,” but in English that sounds somewhat formal, whereas in German it’s, well, friendlier.

Ryan told me more about himself. His father was Armenian. His mother was Croatian and apparently crazy and had abandoned her children and moved back to Croatia when he was young. His father sounded difficult and judgmental. Ryan wasn’t close to either of his parents; he was raised mostly by his stepmother, whom he loved. He had a half-sister in Sacramento who had a young daughter. He loved his niece, too. There was sadness in him from his past, possibly some trauma. Although I don’t believe that’s why he arranged his Grindr dates, because of trauma. No, he slept around because he liked to have sex and it was convenient.

That’s what made me jealous, the convenience. Not to have to deduce if someone just wanted to be friends, not to agonize about making the first move: it was all clear cut. I would worry, however, about axe murderers showing up at my door and beheading me. Ryan said he didn’t worry, he got a feeling about a guy before inviting him over. But how much of a feeling could you get from someone’s text messages about penis length, preferred positions, and availability to hook up on Wednesday night? It was a whole new world.

###

Lily was adjusting to apartment life and had opened a dog walking business for tenants in the building. She had a captive audience of young people running around town without time to walk their dogs and she was making a killing. Now she was in the bedroom, counting her money, chortling like Scrooge McDuck. She was an operator, that one. Sophia was listening to David Bowie and The Who on Spotify – recommendations from Lucy Wang in 6L. Lucy worked at Bank of America and was engaged to an underwhelming actor-barista my daughter deeply respected. Any recommendation of mine, especially about classic rock, was suspect. But if Lucy suggested some music, well, then it must be good. And my daughters had been like this, one eager for autonomy and adulthood, one a go-getter and huckster, since they were toddlers. We’d adopted them as infants but sometimes I thought we’d had very little to do with how they turned out. They came the way they came.

I ran into Ryan at the mailboxes and invited him over for mojitos. He kept me company in the kitchen while I muddled the mint and prepared the drinks and crushed the ice. It was a Sunday afternoon and Carlos came back from his weekend shopping at Target, hauling his environmentally friendly canvas bags. He emptied the bags, and I could tell that he was annoyed to find that Ryan was there. Especially because the girls were out of earshot and we were talking about Grindr again. I’d already prepared a mojito for Carlos and handed it to him, but the drink didn’t seem to mollify him.

“The problem is, every date becomes disposable,” Ryan said. “There’s always someone lined up next. Yeah, it’s easy, but since it’s easy, nothing counts. Is that what it was like for you?”

“Uh – not exactly,” I said.

“You’d have to have dates for them to be disposable,” Carlos said.

This wasn’t his customary, good-natured ribbing. I didn’t know what he was upset about. The girls were home, it’s not like I was sneaking off to an assignation.

“I was particular,” I said.

“Particularly unpopular.”

Ryan laughed. “I don’t really believe that.”

I wasn’t sure I liked them laughing at me. Better to laugh with them. “I went on dates. Every few years.”

“I rescued him,” Carlos said. “He was locked away in his apartment. He sat on a folding chair and ate dinner at a card table. Pasta every night with canned tomato sauce.”

“Not true. Sometimes I had Progresso soup. I had no money,” I explained to Ryan. “I had no game, I couldn’t cook. And somehow I still ended up with a hot Latin lover.” I kissed Carlos in front of Ryan, to assuage my husband. “Even though I wasn’t much of a catch.”

Carlos softened. “Well, I thought you were.”

“Aww. Love at first sight?” Ryan asked.

“Not at all.” I told him how we’d got into a fight on our first official date after meeting at the bar – a fight about parking. Carlos always said if there hadn’t been a parking space on Sixth Street, as I’d insisted there would be, we wouldn’t be together now.

After Ryan left, I helped the girls with their homework. I didn’t have a chance to talk to Carlos until we got ready for bed. “I know you’re kidding, but can you not insult me in front of Ryan?”

“Okay.”

He’d agreed too readily. “Okay?”

“Yeah. And can you not throw yourself at Ryan in front of me?”

“This is stupid,” I said. “You’re mad about the mojitos?”

“Yes.”

“I knew you’d be home any minute. I wasn’t doing anything clandestine.”

“That’s not the point,” Carlos said.

“Then what is?”

“You’re embarrassing yourself.”

“I can’t have friends?”

“Oh, he’s a very good friend,” Carlos said. “You have a lot in common and have deep philosophical conversations. You know he’s closer in age to the girls than to you?”

###

In the late eighties I was in college in New York and sporadically, very sporadically, attending ACT UP meetings. My hero was Vito Russo, a writer and AIDS activist. I wanted to show his famous “Why We Fight” speech to Ryan. “If I’m dying from anything, I’m dying from homophobia. If I’m dying from anything, I’m dying from racism…” I had also found this quote from Russo online: “It is incorrect to say that leather is presently making a comeback. Like Ethel Merman, it has never been away. Also like Ethel Merman, it lasts forever and you don’t have to have it dry cleaned.” It was a mode of gay witticism that had died out – that died of AIDS, because the great wits had died. I wanted to show the quote to Ryan, too, but I worried he would ask me who Ethel Merman was.

Carlos came in while I was cueing up the “Why We Fight” speech on YouTube. “I’m not having drinks with him,” I said quickly. “I’m not talking to him about Grindr.”

“No, you’re preparing a lesson plan. Did he ask you for that?”

“I thought he’d find it interesting.”

“Does he strike you as the type who likes a history class?” Carlos sat down with me. “We’re going to move back home soon and you’re probably never going to see him again and you’re going to be hurt. You know that, right?”

 I took that in. “Probably. But at least it gives me something to do.”

“You’re bored?”

“My midlife crisis is wanting to have young friends and wanting to have a lot of sex with you.”

“Oh.” He feigned disappointment. “Can’t it be a nice car instead?”

But here he was, making me laugh again. Was there something masochistic in my liking the way he needled me? Was there something off or unbalanced in our relationship? Maybe. But there were worse dysfunctions. And did I really imagine that a friendship with Ryan would rescue me from myself? Maybe not. Maybe it’s just that he was hot and I liked looking at him. I think that was Carlos’s theory, and as I mentioned, he’s usually right.

Ryan had a big date, not a hook-up but an actual date, someone he’d met online but wanted to get to know better. When he knocked at our door at ten, we were surprised he was home already. He said the date hadn’t gone well. He was dejected and wanted to talk. I felt vindicated, not because the date had gone badly, but because Ryan had reached out to us, proving that this wasn’t a one-sided relationship. I hoped Carlos was taking note.

Ryan said he knew his date would start ghosting him, he could tell. He’d liked James but James wasn’t into him. Maybe James just liked the chase and he’d lost interest once Ryan was hooked. That was the problem with Grindr. It hardened people, desensitized them. Everything was transactional. And Scruff was even worse. Or maybe better: at least there was no ambiguity with Scruff.

I’d never heard of Scruff, that’s how out of it I was.

I asked him why he didn’t try the dating sites that were more relationship-oriented, like OkCupid or eHarmony or Match.com.

Ryan shrugged. “The guys aren’t as hot.”

Carlos gave me a look; now he felt vindicated.

“I’m never going to have what you have,” Ryan said.

“That’s ridiculous. You’ll meet someone,” I told him.

He said it wasn’t just that. He’d never be able to afford a house, he couldn’t even afford a down payment. And he didn’t think he’d be able to afford children either. Surrogacy and adoption were expensive. And who knew if his partner would want kids, if he even had a partner? Who knew if he’d have a job in a year?

We reminded Ryan that he was still very young. Carlos served him a glass of wine, bucked him up, told him he was a catch and assured him of a successful future. I realized that’s why Ryan had knocked on our door, he’d been looking for this ego stroking. Which was understandable, but I was getting irritated.

After Ryan left, I put my head in my hands. “I’m so lucky.”

Carlos kissed the back of my neck. “I’m the lucky one.”

He didn’t understand. “It makes me angry,” I said.

Yes, angry, I explained. Because it was all luck, all dumb luck. Our flood was dumb luck, and our life together was dumb luck. Meeting at the bar in West Hollywood was dumb luck, finding the parking space on our first date was dumb luck, raising two beautiful children was dumb luck. My crooked eyebrows were dumb luck and falling off a bunkbed was dumb luck. It was dumb luck that Carlos liked to tease me and that I liked to be teased, dumb luck that we bought a house when the market was soft, probably dumb luck that Daniel and Nathaniel got divorced and not us. And most of all, it was dumb luck to be born where and when we were born, spared from the self-loathing of the closet, spared from HIV if we were careful, spared from coming out under the magnifying glass of social media. We’d lost out on the opportunities and ease of Grindr, but we’d been spared the ghosting and coarseness. And while trans women of color were being murdered, we were spared from that, too. We were able to marry, to adopt children. People like Vito Russo had fought and died for those rights, and my generation got to enjoy them. It had nothing to do with our intelligence, our charm, our desires, our determination. It was all just dumb luck. What a terrible system.

“I don’t think of it like that,” Carlos said.

“No?”

“I moved here because I wanted to come out. I made a decision. I learned English, I studied engineering. Those were decisions.”

“They were good decisions,” I said. “Lucky decisions.”

“I took a chance on a Jewish boy who didn’t have a steady job but had a nice smile. Maybe that’s luck, maybe that’s good judgment.”

“But that’s just it, you don’t know,” I said.

“You try your best with what you have. What else can you do?”

Here we were at El Palacio, some of us raising kids and some of us getting married and some of us on PrEP, with no way to express gratitude to the people who came before us, no way to greet the people who came after. I wish I could live in different time periods, or at least sample them, witness those lives in the past that were heroic or warped, share confidences and music as contemporaries with Ryan Safaryan and Lucy Wang in 6L. But it didn’t work like that, we were all locked in the cage of our respective generations, locked in our narrow lives, in the narrow present. These thoughts were painful to me.

“I want to go home,” I said.

“I know.”

We were still fighting with our insurance company, but the house would be ready in another month – if we were lucky. We’d move back in, and I’m sure, as Carlos predicted, I’d gradually lose touch with Ryan. Occasionally I’d check out his updates and his abs on Instagram. We’d raise our girls and we’d grill on the weekends, Carlos would make his Milanesa and I’d make my mojitos, and Peggy would race around the backyard, barking at squirrels she could never quite catch.

“My Generation” was a runner-up for the Brooklyn Review’s 2023 Short Story Contest.

About the Author

Eugene Stein lives in Los Angeles with his husband and children. His short stories have been published in Iowa Review, North American Review, Colorado Review, Witness, Catamaran, and Michigan Quarterly Review. His story in Iowa Review won a Pushcart Prize, and his story in Michigan Quarterly Review was reprinted in Harper’s. He is currently working on a novel.

About the Artist

Paul Anagnostopoulos is an artist whose paintings explore mythological desire and melancholy through contemporary queer narratives. He graduated with his MFA in Studio Art from CUNY Hunter College in 2023 and earned his BFA in Studio Art and Art History from New York University in 2013. Anagnostopoulos presented solo exhibitions at Dinner Gallery (New York, NY), Leslie-Lohman Project Space (New York, NY), and GoggleWorks Center for the Arts (Reading, Pennsylvania). His work is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art Archives and Library, the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, and Yale University. Anagnostopoulos participated in 10 acclaimed artist residencies in the states and abroad, most notably the Vermont Studio Center (Johnson, VT), the Wassaic Project (Wassaic, NY), and the Association of Icelandic Visual Artists (Reykjavík, Iceland). His work has been featured in Hyperallergic, New American Paintings, Artnet News, and VICE. Anagnostopoulos is based in New York, NY and his work is visible at www.panagnos.com.

A girl, a fax machine, a dog, another planet. This is how Marie-Helene Bertino explains the focus of her new novel, Beautyland, which came out last week with Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Like all of Bertino’s writing, Beautyland teeters on the knife’s edge of fantasy. The book follows an alien’s quest to gather information about the human race. It is also a bildungsroman of a lonely girl looking for her place on Earth. 

But Beautyland is more than it appears. In its pages, Bertino performs a sleight of hand. I opened the book anticipating an alien story, but I closed it with a deeper understanding of what it means to be human. Only an outsider, it seems, can elucidate to us the beautiful weirdness that is humanity. 

In our conversation, Bertino and I spoke about this, as well as how speculative fiction can reveal the sublime in the mundane and how humor factors into her process.

Shelby Heitner: Beautyland is an expansion of your short story Sometimes You Break Their Hearts, Sometimes They Break Yours, which you published in your 2012 story collection Safe As Houses. Can you talk to me about your process for turning a short story into a novel? 

Marie-Helene Bertino: After I wrote that story—where an unnamed alien girl faxes notes on human beings to her superiors—I discovered that the alien girl at its helm would not let me go. This is most likely because the fascination I have with so-called typical human customs did not abate. So, I began to keep a folder on my desktop called “Notes on Human Beings.” In it, I collected things like, People demand to try on each other’s glasses then seem oddly upset if they find the glasses are too strong or too weak. Or, People love fried eggs on everything. Or, why do the words “thaw” and “dethaw” mean the same thing? After a while as the folder grew, I wondered if I could turn the story into a novel. But I’d have to give the unnamed alien a name, location, family, history, etc. That’s when the real fun began. By fun, I mean hard work that took years.

Shelby Heitner: In a 2013 interview with The Paris Review, you said you prefer to describe your genre as Enhanced Realism. What does that term mean to you?

Marie-Helene Bertino: I’m happy with any term that allows the term-giver to understand work that contains speculative elements. I do like terms that weigh the real equally with the unreal. Rebecca Makkai called Beautyland “hyperreal,” and I agree with that. Perhaps some realities can gather into sharper focus when placed in opposition/relation to the supernatural if you can get the levels right. It reminds me of the photography work of Gregory Crewdson, which I used to study.

Shelby Heitner: Your last two novels were both told over a very compressed timeframe  — 2 A.M. in the Cat’s Pajamas took place over the course of one day and Parakeet over about one week. Beautyland is the complete opposite— an expansive novel tracking your alien protagonist Adina from Earth Birth to Earth Death. How did you decide to tell Adina’s story in this way? Was it challenging to write on such a different scale? Did you have to change your writing process? 

Marie-Helene Bertino: So far, each story I’ve written has been not only a creative but a diagnostic exercise, enabling me to gather new tools to write the next project. Beautyland is an entire lifespan and this structure allowed me to have callbacks over a longer stretch of time, portray how lifelong relationships bend and change, how a human woman’s body and mind changes as she ages—how resentment can increase while other naiveties recede (or vice versa), and how, sometimes, people can grow and invest in themselves over time, as Adina’s mother does. I was delighted to discover there are five developmental stages of a star, and I borrowed them as section headings to tell the story of Adina’s life.

Shelby Heitner: Beautyland has been described by some reviewers as a semi-autobiographical novel. Like you, Adina and her friend Antoinette-Maria (aka Toni) are Italian-American writers who grew up in Philadelphia. How did the lens of speculative fiction enhance or complicate your ability to write about a character who shares similar life experiences to you?

Marie-Helene Bertino: Beautyland is deliberately a simple concept—a girl, a fax machine, a dog, another planet. It seems sometimes that skewing one element of the world allows one to comment more directly on it. It’s like when you bring a friend home to your parent’s house and your parents are more honest with that friend than they’ve ever been with you. Sometimes that slight variance—the friend who represents you but is also not you—can create opportunities for vivid candor.

Shelby Heitner: In Beautyland, Adina, as an alien, sees the world in a very similar way to how many conceptualize a writer’s perspective. Adina occupies her life, but is also positioned above it, since she analyzes human behavior in missives that she sends to her superiors. There’s a similar sense of distance granted to writers; people seem to always say any hardship is “good material” for a story. What ways does having an alien perspective speak to how you view yourself as a writer? Do you feel as though you need to exist both within and without your daily experience in order to make art?

Marie-Helene Bertino: Adina’s particular positioning as “extra” to the terrain is necessary for her to be able to see and notate on her subjects. This echoes the distance writers, reporters, journalists, artists usually must have to notice and process. Personally, attempting to integrate the noticing instead of having it be separate has allowed me to live a writer’s life in which I can also be good to my people.

Shelby Heitner: I find it funny that in the many (glowing) reviews of your new book, reviewers seem to be split on whether Adina is actually an alien. This almost directly parallels what happens in the novel itself:  when Adina publishes a memoir that effectively outs her as an alien, she ignites an internet firestorm of people questioning whether or not she’s actually extraterrestrial. In your mind, is Adina an alien? Does it matter?

Marie-Helene Bertino: Beautyland’s ultimate meaning will change from reader to reader, depending on what the reader believes about Adina. It is either a speculative piece about an extraterrestrial or a piece about a troubled girl suffering from delusion. It can be read in two different ways, maybe more. If as they are reading the reader begins to suspect that I am directly asking for their participation to decide the shape of the narrative, as if I have engineered these words to turn and look at them, they are correct. My job was to order the words and scenes so that they created a space for this kind of participation, and to let go of any desire to control the outcome.

Shelby Heitner: You deal with a lot of serious themes in Beautyland – grief, loneliness, and otherness – though your novel is far from depressing. You beautifully balance moments of narrative darkness with Adina’s sense of humor and wonder. How do you approach humor in your work?

Marie-Helene Bertino: Humor has been an act of survival. Like Adina, my childhood was marked by violence and not fitting in. By using humor about those who were responsible for those violences—by making light of some pretty bleak things—I was not only able to mentally survive but exercise a bit of control over some pretty uncontrollable circumstances. I think there’s a reason that rigid dictators can’t stand being made fun of—they know they’re being bested in ways they’re not human or smart enough to understand. There’s a Catholic saying I used to hear when I went to Church as a kid: “Singing is praying twice.” For me, humor is living twice.

Shelby Heitner: In the last third of your novel, Adina’s otherness takes on a new dimension when she experiences extreme grief for the first time. I couldn’t help but notice that in your acknowledgements you mention an Adina who was meaningful in your life. Did you find it challenging to write about your loss? I, too, have been struggling a lot lately about how to write about an episode of grief in my life. Do you have any advice for writers who are working through similar themes?

Marie-Helene Bertino: This is an important question, thank you. Sometimes, the answer is to wait until a certain interior structure has grown back that can help you write without collapsing. Sometimes the answer is to write through it—even if it’s “nonsense,” write that, write everything. In fiction, one tip is to write around the grief—to write the effects of the grief, the byproducts instead of the grief, straight on. I ask my students to write how emotions land on the body. As a hasty and inelegant example, instead of writing, I am inconsolable, writing, My arms are leaden with sorrow; I can no longer carry my child.

Shelby Heitner: Last question! Since you’re a former editor of the Brooklyn Review, I have to ask: did your time at Brooklyn College impact who you are as a writer?

Marie-Helene Bertino: I waited a long time before applying to MFA programs because I didn’t think I could afford it or that it would make me a better writer. Finding Brooklyn College was a life miracle—the first time I was in a room with other writers. I felt like I was set on fire (in a good way). A dream come true. I studied with epic teachers like Michael Cunningham, Susan Choi, Lou Asekoff, and Josh Henkin in a program whose tuition I could afford while working. I’m married to a Brooklyn College grad, the poet Ted Dodson. For many years I had a writer’s group of BC grads like Tom Grattan, Anne Ray, Helen Phillips, Elliott Holt, Amelia Kahaney, Elizabeth Harris, Dave Ellis. Robert Jones Jr. was in the class ahead of us. It felt like a wildly exciting place that balanced my two favorite things—creative brattiness and art geniuses who were lowkey. I’ve now taught at MFA programs all over and feel most at home in atmospheres where the emphasis is on the work and respectful camaraderie, like we enjoyed during our time at BC.

Cynthia was waiting for him at the baggage claim, carousel five, which as always made Jared think of painted horses. Walking toward her, he felt like he was riding one. There was a candy-striped pole running down through his middle, through his stomach, rising with excitement then falling with dread. When their eyes met, he walked toward her faster, not quite jogging but wondering if he should. It seemed the proper thing to do, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Neither could his suitcase, whose left wheel got caught on a ragged seam of airport carpet. He had to pause briefly to dislodge it, and in that short space of time Cynthia had closed the gap between them, no theatrical running necessary.

“Yass, bitch! You made it!” She stood by while Jared fixed his suitcase. “Jesus, Jear-Bear, leave that thing alone and come here.”

The hug that followed was awkward and sincere. Smiles and bumped joints. When they pulled apart, Jared saw her for the first time in years. She was a blonde now, platinum. But that was to be expected; gay men in her shoes bleached their hair all the time. What surprised him was the red flannel she wore tied around her waist. He recognized it instantly as one of Peter’s. The white deodorant rings under the armholes. Cynthia must have noticed him staring, because she smiled forcefully and said:

“It’s mine, don’t worry. I’m not that crazy ex. Hell, I’m barely an ex at all. Still getting used to it, actually.”

Jared wanted to hug her again, but he worried something would be lost in the repetition. Authenticity, mainly, though he wondered how much of that there was between them now, how much could be communicated over text. He wasn’t always the best at responding. Still, he was genuinely appreciative for their bi-monthly-ish check-ins, the ones that fizzled out with a string of pink hearts and a corporate-sounding pledge to FaceTime someday soon. They might not talk often, but what was frequency compared to history? Compared to midnight drives through open desert, shuttling him away from his secrets? And so when Cynthia called him the other night, not pre-arranged but out of the blue, Jared thrilled at the fact that they could still do this sort of thing, call each other in a crisis at 11:43 on a Thursday. Yes, they could still drop everything to support each other. And yes, he had to remind himself, crawling out of bed at six o’clock that morning, he still wanted to.

“Hey,” he said. “Look at me. You don’t have to get used to anything. You’re still the same person you were before. You’re still the baddest bitch in the West—or at least West Phoenix.”

There was a shy laugh on both sides, tentative yet warm. It was good to see her laugh, but it was even better to see his bag on the carousel, steadily lurching toward them. He stepped past her so he could grab it. Only after the Velcro straps were perfectly creased did he turn around, determined to shake his nerves.

“Let’s go get drunk.” Cynthia looked at him in surprise. “Tonight,” he added. “In Tucson. It’ll be just like old times. Only this time you’ll be single.”

Jared felt a clutch in his throat as he said it. He braced himself for the impact, but as it turned out, there was none. Cynthia answered with a shriek, giddy and exultant. He felt a rush of relief, cool and quiet as the A/C blowing through her hunter-green 4Runner, his bags nestled comfortably in the backseat. 

###

Jared met Cynthia in college. A frat house. Sigma Sigma Something. A warm night in October, probably Homecoming, but he’d never cared much for sports. They were standing on the peeling front porch, breathing heavy. Jared because he’d missed the bus by four minutes and had to walk, then run, then walk again when he reached Greek row, knowing too well how his hips tended to swing, how his arms crimped effeminately at his sides. Cynthia because she’d been arguing with a drunk frat dude in the doorway, and he was wearing one of those tank tops with deep slits down the sides, musk streaming freely from his armpits. He kept demanding that she give him a kiss. Price of admission, or so he claimed. “Tell me that one more time,” Jared overheard her saying, “and I’ll have you admitted to the hospital, how about that?” Jared knew immediately that he wanted to be her friend. If he hadn’t, he wouldn’t have had the courage to do what he did next. He stepped forward, slipping his arm around her waist, and explained that Cynthia was already taken, but she had two single friends on the way who would have no problem paying.

The lie worked. The frat dude, either stepping aside or swaying drunkenly out of their way, let them pass. Cynthia turned to look at Jared. At first she looked repulsed, but something in her quickly softened. It happened like that often with straight women, once they registered his gayness. It sometimes scared him how quickly they could tell. Especially back then, before his parents knew. But in that moment Jared was simply grateful to have an ally.

They tumbled into the party, bumping breasts and chests and sugary rims of plastic cups. In the silence before the bass drop, Cynthia shouted thank you, and Jared waved goodbye. They forged their separate ways through the crowd, only to run into each other again in the hallway, the one that led to the frat boys’ bedrooms. “Wait, are you here for—” Cynthia started to ask, and Jared said, “Are you?” They both laughed, but Jared laughed the loudest, from discomfort. Cynthia handed him her phone.

“Let me get your number.” When Jared said nothing, she nudged him playfully on the shoulder. “Hoes before bros, am I right?”

She knocked loudly on the door in front of them, and suddenly there was no time for hesitation. Jared typed in his number. Not ten seconds later she was gone, barging abruptly into the room. That was what Jared loved most about her: where others would wait in the hallway, Cynthia walked right in. Being around her made Jared feel brave. Sometimes in a way that bordered on stupid, like that time they walked out of QuikTrip with six hot dogs stuffed in her purse. But it felt nice to take a break from thinking, from calculating. To stop standing outside his own life.

###

They got out of the airport ahead of rush hour, speeding efficiently down the I-10.

“Sure you don’t want to stop by your parents’?” Cynthia said. “We’re coming up on their exit.”

“I’ve got a better idea. Why don’t you drive into that ditch over there? It’ll be twice as deep and half as dusty.”

“You’re horrible,” she said, grinning widely over the steering wheel. “They can’t be that bad. Did you even tell them you were here?”

As a matter of fact, he hadn’t. He’d booked his flight from New York last minute, while Cynthia was crying on the phone. He simply hadn’t had the time. But if he was being honest, he hadn’t had the inclination either, felt a sense of dread even thinking of it now.

“No, I didn’t tell them. Must have slipped my mind.”

They took the exit anyway. Jared shot Cynthia a look.

“Total Wine,” she said. “Relax.”

She parked the car and got out. Jared froze with his hand on his seatbelt.

“Shit, my ID’s still with my luggage. Do you mind?” he said. “I’ll Venmo you.”

“Fine with me, but just know I charge extra for shipping and handling.”

Jared laughed and watched her leave. She grabbed a basket at the entrance, only to swap it for a cart seconds later. As the automatic doors shut behind her, she looked over her shoulder and shrugged. Jared shook his head, smiling. Before Cynthia, all his friends had been the type to go in with a list and leave with everything on it. Nothing less, nothing more. Cynthia was the first friend who made him dare to want more, to take risks. To be himself, even if that meant being a disappointment to others. That was why Jared couldn’t understand her decision to stay in Arizona, to stay with Peter, to opt for the simple suburban life his parents had. Even now he could picture them sitting at home, his mom at her craft table, his dad at his computer, and the both of them suddenly raising their heads, alert to his proximity. There was something instinctual, almost canine about the way they related to him. A wag of the tail, a call on the phone, all friendliness and no substance. The only way to be truly good. He wanted to show them he could be bad, to call them and say he was in town but he wouldn’t be coming to visit. His reason? He just didn’t feel like it. His agenda? The gay one, the one they didn’t care to understand.

When he felt his face getting hot, he had to remind himself that none of this mattered. This trip was about Cynthia, and Peter, or the absence of Peter, and no matter how he felt he had to honor that. He had to because they were friends, because she was walking out of the store, because now she was back in the car, telling him all the things she had bought. By four p.m. they were on the road, the trunk jangling with booze. “Music to my ears,” said Jared. “A symphony,” said Cynthia. And for a while after that there was nothing more to say.

###

When Jared came out to his parents, he came out to roaring silence. Later he would learn that this wasn’t unusual, that it was a common response in these situations. But at the time he had been expecting something more. When he didn’t get it—whatever it was—he wondered if he’d made a mistake. He’d been on the fence about telling them to begin with, but Cynthia had encouraged it. She was shopping for lingerie on Instagram, adding tidbits of advice as she added items to her shopping cart.

“How will they ever really know you if you don’t? If they love you, they’ll accept you, and if they don’t, they won’t. Obviously that will totally suck, but at least you’ll know the truth. And you know what they say—knowledge is power.”

They were hanging out in Peter’s room, Cynthia perched on his unmade bed, Jared sitting cross-legged on the floor. They were just down the hall from where they’d met a few months ago. “Can you believe it?” said Cynthia, whenever she told people the story. “If I hadn’t gone to that stupid party, I never would have met Peter’s Big, and he never would have introduced us. And obviously I wouldn’t have met this queer. Two boys, one stone.” Jared used to cringe every time she said that, the word “queer” skipping a little too lightly off her lips, but gradually he’d begun to warm to it; it felt nice to be included. Bizarrely, now that she and Peter were officially dating, he was included more than ever.

“Mi casa es su casa,” Peter had told them the first time Cynthia brought Jared over. He was running late to Spanish class, stuffing loose papers into his empty backpack. On his way out the door, he looked back at Jared and smiled. “Just don’t throw any fiestas without me.” Initially Jared was hesitant, unsure whether Peter was really comfortable with him being there, but Cynthia reassured him.

“It’s fine, he knows you’re gay. And before you freak out, no, I didn’t tell him. He figured it out by himself. You know, for a straight guy, Peter is really perceptive.”

She started listing all the little things Peter had noticed lately: the new bra she bought, her astrology-themed notebook, the way she’d started parting her hair. Talking about Peter was her new favorite pastime, especially on the long drives back from Phoenix. Midway through breaks and holiday weekends, Cynthia was the one Jared could call for a ride, for a lifeline, an escape from the charade he had to play at home. If that meant listening to her talk about her and Peter’s sex life, so be it. It made him happy to see her so excited, if also a little jealous. He wondered if he would ever fall in love like that, if he would ever find someone to drone on about for hours. Cynthia must have noticed his thoughts wandering, because she put down her phone and reached for his hand. “I know you’re scared, but it’s gonna be fine, trust me. I’ve had other gay friends.”

Jared had wanted to ask what happened to them, the way she spoke of them like they were dolls. Old ones she used to play with, got tired of, and threw away. He hoped he would never become one of them. And he hoped telling his parents wouldn’t be a mistake. But at the end of the day, he trusted her, and by the end of the night his parents knew.

When he told them they had simply stared. His father looked up from his plate. His mother set down her wine. On their faces was a particular look of surprise, of recognition pulled back like a tent flap in the woods, reluctant to admit the small-bladdered camper gone to relieve himself in the night. It was a look that said, why couldn’t you wait till morning? It was a look that said, how much did you have to drink? And underneath the mess of things it said, the hard tidy center of what it didn’t: why do you have needs at all? It was a question written in the lines around their mouths, faint tracery of wind through dry taupe grass. A flat scrubland of a question, some unkind corner of Texas or Wyoming, places Jared had never visited, didn’t need to. He was used to the quiet of those landscapes. Back then it was all he craved: the reluctance of relatives to ask about girlfriends, the brief eye contact with handsome strangers, the seconds of static at the end of the porno, when shame would have its way with him in the darkness of his room. He saved up that quiet like money, compounding disinterest over time, becoming flatter and dryer, but also safer and broader, a slow, strategic terraforming of self. Until one day he ran out of mountains to level, valleys to fill, inner seas to shore up against themselves. Alone in that not-quite desert of his not-quite own making, a strange wind had rattled through him. It rattled then it whistled then it shrieked. To muffle the sound, he’d started telling people. A couple friends at first, then a few more, but no one he was too scared to lose. Pretty soon the only ones left were the two people sitting in front of him, saying nothing, just steadily working their jaws.

In Jared’s memory, that night had ended there. It couldn’t have, of course. There must have been questions, and tears, and brittle well-meaning hugs. Cynthia had been right; the night wasn’t a catastrophe. To celebrate, she and Peter threw him a party—no, a fiesta, Peter insisted—in his room the following weekend. They had Taco Bell chalupas and Jose Cuervo margaritas, and when they were too full and drunk to function, they passed out on Peter’s bed. Normally Jared didn’t dream when he was drunk, but that night he woke up in a sweat between them, ears ringing with the sound of chewing mouths. Unable to fall back asleep, he slipped out of bed and walked home.

###

About a half-hour from Tucson, Jared booked them a room. The Saguaro Motel, on the outskirts of town, one queen bed and no sleeper sofa, so she’d better find a guy to go home with. Cynthia laughed when he said this, but he was dead serious. Tonight was for her, after all. “A night to remember,” he said, “but also a night to forget.” Jared checked them in with his arms full of liquor, ignoring the desk clerk’s judging looks. If he thought they were going to trash their room, there was no need; the room was ugly enough on its own. The walls were the color of manilla file folders, tinging their pregame with a weirdly business-like aura. Every sip felt like a punch in his timecard, every shot a promotion: buzzed to tipsy, tipsy to drunk, and drunk to the beige-and-white tiled bathroom, where he stood hunched over the sink, trying his best to hold it all in. He splashed cold water on his face. The tiles ceased to swim, became stable and boring once more. He would be all right, he decided, and walked out to Cynthia calling an Uber.

“Two minutes,” she said. “Let’s fucking go!”

She catapulted another shot of peach vodka. When she pushed the glass toward Jared, he waved it away.

“Oof, no thanks. That last one almost killed me.”

“Oh my God. We’ve got to get you out of New York ASAP. Being that close to Broadway is turning you into a drama queen.” Laughing, Cynthia tossed her hair over one shoulder. “I can do regular gays, but theater gays is where I draw the line.”

She took back her glass and refilled it, downing it like it was water. Jared’s head began to swim again, but this time not from the liquor. His tolerance for jokes like that was lower than it used to be, and so, he was starting to think, was his tolerance for her. He took another shot to banish the feeling. Shivering, he waited for the warmth to return to his body. When it didn’t, he pulled Cynthia close and hugged her.

“You’re a messy bitch, you know that?” he said.

“You’re my best friend.”

Suddenly it was she who was hugging him, though neither one of them had moved. Through the shallows of his drunkenness, a deep-sea trench of sobriety: she wasn’t his. He was hers, but she wasn’t his. He heard a ding on Cynthia’s phone. Their Uber was waiting outside. Cynthia grabbed her purse and headed for the door. Jared lingered behind.

“I think I’d better go to the bathroom again. But I’ll meet you downstairs.”

“Damn, since when were you such a lightweight? Kidding, kidding! Honestly, good call. It says our driver’s in a Beemer, so please, no accidents.”

This helpful advice dispensed with, Cynthia ducked outside, leaving Jared standing there alone. It was a classic Cynthia exit; the same one she’d used at the party where they met years ago.

###

When Cynthia had shut the door the night, Jared was left in an empty hallway, with nowhere to turn but his phone. He swiped to the frat guy’s most recent DM, the guy he had come there to see in the first place. Last door on the right, there’d be a BMW sticker by the doorknob. At first he thought that was a typo. Where did one even get a BMW sticker? But before he could ponder it further, he was there—it was there—a paper shield defending what? “Party Saturday,” the text read, “u can come then, no one will kno.” How original, thought Jared. Hiding in plain sight. But annoyed as he was, he was here, at the door, no more or less hidden than the man on the other side. No more or less powerless to say no.

When Jared turned the knob, the sticker bubbled in the middle, the blue and white quadrants folding in and out like one of those paper fortune tellers. He stood still for a moment, noticing. It felt important to do that in a stranger’s room. Everything felt important, consequential: the distance he kept between his body and the door, the force with which he exhaled, how fast he turned around, and how did his butt look doing it? Probably not like much; the room was painfully dim, a hangnail of light through bent blinds.

As Jared’s eyes adjusted, several green spots danced across his vision. He moved slowly toward the center of the room. The green spots stayed where they were. Secretly he wished they would stay, wished there was more light to see them by. Then suddenly there was—a quick slash of it in the corner, on the bed. A man was lying there. He must have been there the whole time, under the covers, and now that he threw them back he glowed, naked and pale and rather good looking, but still not the source of the light. For that, Jared had to look down, under the bed. Amid piles of clothes and shoes lying sideways he saw a ten-gallon fish tank filled with shattered glass. Beer glass, chunky and green. In some places it was broken into shards, in others crushed nearly to dust, but the feeble light from the window passed through it all, illuminating the tank from within.

As the man beckoned him toward the bed, Jared hesitated. He wanted so badly to ask about the glass. It felt like a necessary foreplay, less grueling than the kind these things usually involved. He wanted to ask if they could just sit, right there on the floor. Maybe they could fuck there too. And after—there was always an after, no matter how hastily he tried to leave, or was asked to—maybe after they could keep sitting there, saying nothing, and because the party outside was so loud and the room was so dim, somehow it wouldn’t be awkward. It would all fit together, for once.

They fucked. Not on the floor but the bed, not beside the tank but directly above it. Jared found this extremely erotic. He came fast, much sooner than the guy did, which worked out fine because it left him free to just lie there, imagining the glass below. He’d never seen anything like it. Was it some kind of art project? Something clever and post-modern? Maybe it was environmental, an illustration of the countless years it takes glass to decompose in the landfill. Or maybe the guy was just a slob, too lazy to take out the trash. Either way, any way, Jared didn’t really want to know. Somehow it was enough that all these things were possible. It was enough, Jared thought as the guy finished and rolled over. It was enough.

###

In the line outside the club, Cynthia was already dancing. She was half-crouched against the red velvet ropes, bumping both fists to the music. Jared tried to shield her with his body. The two bouncers up front were staring, whispering to each other. Too drunk to let in, they seemed to be asking, or just another white girl on a Friday night? Jared held his breath as they checked her ID. After a pause, bouncer number one waved her through, smirking at bouncer number two as she passed. Just another white girl, apparently.

The main floor of the club was packed, people flowing between islands of bars and a long, raised reef of black leather couches: the VIP section. As they headed toward the dance floor, Cynthia kept craning her neck to look back. Annoyed, Jared followed her gaze to the last table on the left, where a tall, handsome man was staring down at her. He had a floral silk shirt with two buttons undone and a jawline that could cut cocaine.

“We can try to get a table if you want,” Jared said. Cynthia’s face was blank when she turned to look at him, then suddenly comprehending.

“Nah, not worth it. Come on!”

She pulled him onto the dance floor, into the marsh of heat and sweat and swaying reed-like bodies. The music was bad but they danced to it anyway, Cynthia throwing her ass with no regard for the people behind her, Jared gingerly jerking his arms, looking to others for inspiration, or salvation. There was always a little of that while dancing, but tonight he felt acutely self-conscious. And soon he realized why: someone was watching. The guy from VIP.

His shirt was open by one button lower, revealing a lean, hairless stomach with a suggestion of abs in the purple-tinted light. He was dancing a few feet behind Cynthia, moving closer and closer, one lazy hip lean at a time. Now he was directly behind her. As far as Jared could tell, they hadn’t touched, but Cynthia suddenly became aware of him. Her eyes flicked open, her hair fell back from her face, and her hips began to churn with more rhythm than she’d shown all night. Jared felt like a third wheel again, the way he’d often felt when she was with Peter. He knew he ought to move over, but a sharp gravity in his gut made him stay. He twisted his hips to escape it, but he ended up dancing like she was, grazing the guy’s phone, keys, zipper against his ass. He could feel Cynthia’s too, the side of it, pressed tight against her black tube dress. But soon even that fell away, or he pushed it—really he couldn’t tell. And soon the phone and keys were gone too, and there was nothing but Cynthia’s elbow shoving him backward.

“What the fuck, Jared? What do you think you’re doing?”

Jared’s vision wobbled and then refocused. The dancers around them were staring. But the guy from VIP was nowhere in sight.

“I was dancing,” said Jared, “to the beat.” Something in his forehead throbbed. “But I guess you wouldn’t know much about that. If you did, maybe your little boyfriend wouldn’t have run away.”

He realized he was shouting. But only because he had to, in order to be heard. Not because he was angry. No, not angry, just a little upset. But when he saw Cynthia’s face, he knew his shouts had carried more than volume. She grabbed him by the elbow.

“Outside. Now. Before they kick us out.”

She took him into the alley on the side of the club, broken glass crunching beneath their shoes. There was a slight breeze, and when it hit Jared’s skin he felt relief and panic, one right after the other. Relief because the air was cool, panic because it cleared his head, revealing how drunk he really was. Jared let his head fall back against the bricks.

“I’m sorry, OK? I was just trying to protect you. Don’t look at me like that—” he said, even though his eyes were closed. “I don’t mean in some macho straight dude way. I mean, like, emotionally.” Jared swallowed thickly. “That guy looked a lot like Peter.”

The lie was flimsy—and he knew it. But it still felt more solid than the ribbon of nausea threading through his stomach.

“I don’t give a fuck what he looked like. I don’t know why you do either. Were you trying to fuck him, Jared? Should I have asked him to whip out his dick for you to measure, see if it’s good enough for me? You’re sick.”

“I think I am.”

“What?”

“I think I’m gonna be sick—”

Jared’s stomach did a corkscrew, drilling down through him until he fell to his knees. At the last second, he caught himself, one hand planted on the littered pavement. Not two inches away, in the gap between his fingers, was a rash of broken glass. It could have come from anywhere—any number of broken bottles, any number of parties or people. But in Jared’s head, now churning faster and faster with each moment, he felt certain it was the same glass from the fish tank.

As he vomited onto the pavement, Jared aimed for the cracks. It seemed less disgusting that way, having some kind of a target. When the cracks overflowed, he took a second to breathe. Then he vomited three more times. The orange-pink froth slid down the handicapped ramp slowly, finally merging with the orange-pink rubber pad. Hunched over and gasping, he felt Cynthia’s hand on his shoulder.

“All right?” She thrust something squishy and cold into his hand. “Here. I grabbed a water from the bar.”

Jared unscrewed the cap, took a single flavorless sip.

“Thanks,” he said, “I feel better.”

“Me too.”

Jared tilted his head to look at her.

“About earlier, I mean. I know you were just trying to help. You didn’t—” a bitter laugh shot out of her, “let’s be clear. But I know you were trying,” she said, her voice softening, “to help.”

Jared took another sip of water, hoping it would cool the heat that was rising to his face. How could she claim to know what he was trying to do, when he didn’t even know the answer himself? Why he’d ruined her shot at sex, at healing, at making stupid, necessary mistakes? It wasn’t fair. All those times she’d been there for him, and he couldn’t let her have one moment for herself. All those times they’d sat on the floor in Peter’s room, and Jared’s eyes had stayed glued to the door, the one with that stupid sticker by the handle, remembering the way it bubbled the first night he entered. All those times he’d sat with his back against the bed, because he couldn’t bear to look behind him and see the tank of glass underneath it. All those times he could have told Cynthia what had happened that night. Deep down, he wondered if a part of her already knew. The same part of her that kept reaching out to him, desperate for a companion in her own relationship, in that desert of her own making. She expected Jared to drive her through it, the same way she’d done for him, all the unspoken truths passing them by in a blur. Yes, a part of her must have known, but that didn’t mean she knew the whole thing. She didn’t know that for Jared there was more to that hookup than sex. She may have known about the glass under the bed, may have complained about it to Peter a hundred times over. But she didn’t know about the way each shard twisted the light’s perfect spectrum, remaking it in its own broken image, its own sickly color. How it was all the more beautiful because of it. She didn’t know because Jared never told her, and he realized then that he never would.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “I’m so sorry.” He kept repeating it until tears cut his eyes, until she hugged him and told him to stop. “Come on now, you’re dehydrated enough already.” Jared did as he was told. He did the only thing left to do: drink his water that tasted like nothing while Cynthia booked them an Uber back to the motel.

###

At the front door the following day, Jared’s mother held him at arm’s length.

“You look good!” She ran her eyes over him again, as if to make sure. “Like you haven’t changed.”

She hugged him right there in the doorway. The top of her head smelled like lilacs and hairspray, vaguely sweet and flammable.“I wish you would have told us you were coming. Oh shoot, where’s Dad? I think I saw him putting some bratwurst on the grill. I just hope it’s enough for three.”

“It’ll be fine,” said Jared, more to himself than to her. On the two-hour drive back from Tucson, he and Cynthia had said almost nothing. Unspoken was her invitation to spend the rest of his trip with her, and equally unspoken was Jared’s resolve to do anything but. He thought briefly of booking a hotel, but aside from the needless expense, he knew that would only remind him of Tucson. What he needed was a place with no connection to the present, a place where he existed only in the past. And so this time, when they came up on his parents’ exit, Jared told Cynthia to pull off. When she dropped him off in their driveway, he told her he’d let her know about hanging out later. No pressure, she said, I understand. And for the first time since he arrived, it seemed like she actually did.

The back door slid open. Jared’s dad wandered in from outside.

“Hey, who let him in here? What is this, some kind of halfway house?”

Jared smiled obligingly while his dad pulled him in for a hug.

“He still hasn’t told us why he’s here.” Jared’s mom squeezed his shoulders. “Not that we aren’t thrilled to see you, of course.”

“What’s there to tell? He missed his old man, that’s all. Flew clear across the country to see me—who else?”

Indulging smiles all around, a moment of silence for the joke to dissipate.

“Actually, I came to visit Cynthia. Peter just broke up with her.”

“Wait. He dumped her?” said his dad. “That’s crazy. Beautiful girl like that. I wonder if he’s, you know—”

“Greg!”

Jared’s mother looked piercingly at his father. Jared waited a beat, then laughed.

“Maybe he is, maybe he isn’t. Doesn’t really matter anymore.”

Jared’s dad nodded emphatically, like he was trying to shake something loose.

“Well, either way, we’re glad to see you.” His dad squinted at something just above Jared’s head. “And just so you know, if you ever want to bring a guy around, we’d love to see him too. As long as he’s better than what’s-his-name. Than Peter.”

Now it was Jared’s turn to nod. He felt a ghost of the old wind again, howling and hollowing him through. But somewhere in the midst of all that, a rustling of love. Next: a scuffling of chairs, his parents rising—singly, haltingly—to take him by the shoulders. They had hugged him that night, he remembered, and he had hugged them back, and their interlocked arms had formed a sweet and tentative structure, the wood frame of a house under construction. A house he wondered if they would ever finish.

“Hungry?” said his dad. Before Jared could answer, his mom was pulling him toward the back door. “You’d better hurry and get out there,” she said. “You’re going to miss the sunset.”

While she went back in for plates, Jared sat with his dad on the patio, their chairs angled resolutely toward the mountains.

“See many sunsets like this in New York?”

“No, not like this.” Jared smiled sadly. “Not with all the tall buildings.”

Jared’s dad nodded his head thoughtfully, as if this were a profound observation.

“I wonder if there’s a way to get on one of the rooftops.”

Jared thought of all the brick lofts in Williamsburg, the string lights and expensive drinks. Places Cynthia would die to go to, places his parents would die before they ever went to see. He thought of all the mountains and mountains in between, how their hard outlines were already turning fuzzy.

Jared shrugged.

“Got to know somebody.”

The year I started junior high, I played ringette on Wednesday nights. One of those nights my father told me we had a stop to make before going home. He said he was painting the guest room of Madame Lavoie, a friend of one of my father’s colleagues at the credit union. The painter she’d hired had torn his shoulder and she’d been asking around for recommendations. My father’s colleague did not recommend my father. My father was not a painter. But, the forty-minute detour across town to Madame Lavoie’s house, where I waited in the car as he measured the walls and determined how many paint cans she’d need, didn’t surprise me. My father had started offering his help to others, not the poor and destitute, more like Madame Lavoie or the cashier at Mr. Grocer, whose brother needed someone with a minivan to pick up a headboard, or our neighbour Arthur, whose unkillable yew shrubs my father took it upon himself to wrap in burlap for winter. I heard my parents one evening discussing these after-work “jobs,” the mystification in my mother’s voice, my father’s stilted answers.

“You’ve never so much as painted a bowl,” my mother said.

“That is true.”

“But you’re painting other people’s houses?”

“It seems so.”

Then, there was the time my father’s hulking presence filled my bedroom doorway one Saturday morning before we left for my piano lesson. He suggested I bring a book because we were stopping by the hospital first, to visit my grandfather.  We circled the hospital parking lot for twenty minutes looking for a free spot, but my father didn’t get irritated. Normally, he’d have tensed up in his shoulders and cursed into the rearview mirror. Instead, he drove around and chuckled when a parking space appeared that he’d missed, before he wiped away tears. He’d started doing this, laughing quietly at unfunny things, then crying, presumably from joy. 

Looking back at that time, I see now that there were other subtle changes. He gave up hot sauce and cheese fries. He fit into the Brooks Brothers suit that he’d worn to his school graduation; my mother sighed and said it wasn’t fair. He no longer wore the same shirt three days in a row, rubbing his stick of deodorant directly on the fabric to buy him another day. He took public transit to work and changed up the route, preferring to walk unfamiliar roads. He started saying, though not often or intensely, that we were all universal energy.

After a nurse let us into the cancer ward, I tried to keep up with my father’s long strides. He wanted to be present when my grandfather died, so he could guide him into the next realm. I didn’t ask how my father knew how to do this. He had with him the little book he kept in his shirt pocket.

In the shadowy inside of the hospital room, I could make out my grandfather in the bed, his face hollowed at the cheeks and yellow from jaundice, made an even more garish colour by the contrast with the white sheet pulled to his chin. I sat on a chair on one side of the bed. My father, who had visited every day for weeks, took the seat on the other side. I didn’t know how long we were going to be staying, but it seemed inappropriate to start reading my Sweet Valley High book. My father began to breathe deeply and slowly as if trying to set a communal pace in the room, like we were all breathing toward death. He read a few words from his pocket book. When he paused between the words, he looked at the opposite wall, as if my grandfather’s spirit might waft across it. 

I don’t remember exactly what my father read from the pocket book. I remember feeling shivers up my neck from the soft way he said, “human consciousness.” Although it was possible that energy could find its way back into another life, the central point I remembered was that my grandfather wouldn’t come back. There seemed to be no mention of an afterlife or ghosts or “we’ll see you again” in the pocket book.

When my grandfather turned onto his side, toward me, my father laid down his book and stood up. He reached over and placed his hand an inch over my grandfather’s mouth to feel his breath. After that, my father sat down and resumed reading.

There was a mirror on the table next to my grandfather’s bed. I saw my attempt at French braids and the necklace I’d chosen that morning, a thin gold chain with my birthstone. On the table were photos. My grandmother Penny who’d died before I was born, photos of my father with his brother Ted, a recent photo from Thanksgiving of all the grandchildren squished together on an apple cart. It was inside a frame shaped like a heart that my mother had sent to all of the family.

After about half an hour, my father left to get us something to drink from the cafeteria. While he was gone, a nurse came in and removed my grandfather’s diaper and wiped his privates on both sides with a wet towel. She didn’t notice me until she was halfway done and when she did, she said, “This one can get spritely.” Because the urine had leaked into the bedsheet, the nurse rolled my grandfather all the way up to the bedrail and tucked the dirty sheet underneath him and slid in a new one. The nurse left him there on his side facing me and left.

It was silent in the room, so quiet I could hear my grandfather’s watch ticking on the side table.

“Cherub,” he whispered.

I wasn’t sure if I’d heard correctly. He used to call me that but maybe he meant something else. I considered running out and looking for my father, but my grandfather spoke again and this time with his eyes open.

 “It’s a lot of pressure,” he whispered.

“Is something hurting?” I looked around his bed for the button to call in a nurse.

He tried to shake his head. “It’s too much.”

“Are you in pain?” 

He swallowed hard. “I’m not going anytime soon.”

“Yes,” I said, encouragingly, to which he closed his eyes and seemed to scrunch them tightly.

  “He’s always here,” he said opening his eyes again.

I didn’t pass on the information to my father, who continued to sit at my grandfather’s bedside most afternoons.  My father, who didn’t ask for anything. Who didn’t complain, even when my ringette game was two hours away and I lost my contact lens on the dressing room floor and couldn’t play. My father, who said he was trying to better himself on the road to enlightenment. Looking back, I see how it was strange that he talked to me about the road to enlightenment, planes of consciousness and karmic payloads. I didn’t doubt that there was such a road. I took it literally; he was on it and because I was with him so much in the car, so was I.

That Christmas we waited for my father to join us for breakfast.

“Bryce, the pancakes are ready!” my mother called down to the basement.

My older brother Daniel and I were already sitting at the table.

“Bryce!”

My father didn’t call back. We knew he wouldn’t. By then he didn’t yell, not for anything.

“Can one of you tell him we’re ready to eat?” she said.

I walked downstairs to the laundry nook where my brother kept the bench press my mother had spotted at a garage sale. My father sat on it when he read his pocket book, meditated or waited for his pants to dry.

 He was sitting there, in his underwear, eyes closed.

“Are you coming up for breakfast?” I said.

“I’ve decided this is where I’ll be today,” he said, opening his eyes.

 “Do you still want your presents?”

It looked like he was thinking it over. “You can bring them down here if you want.”

“Uncle Patrick and Aunt Rose are coming later. Will you be upstairs when they get here?”

There was a time when my father looked like he was following along with Uncle Pat’s stories about Pat’s boss who Pat wanted to strangle. My father even joined Pat with a beer or two. They went golfing once, which made my mother ecstatic. One time when my mother asked them to pick up bags of ice for a make-your-own sushi lunch, my father was forced to intervene to stop Pat from brawling with a customer in the same line-up. He wasn’t happy to be put in that situation. As a teenager, my father had fought in one brawl, during which he’d broken a boy’s eye socket without trying and for hardly any provocation. After that, he stayed away from any more scuffles. I learned this years later from my father’s younger brother, my Uncle Ted. My father had a quick fuse, like his father, who took it out on everyone around him, including his wife and two sons, but mostly on my father.  After I heard that I understood why he stayed in the background at family gatherings.  It also made sense why he’d found the pocket book. By the time my father gave up Christmas, there was more to be angry about; my mother’s early-onset arthritis, Daniel’s persisting rebellious streak, the patchy roof we couldn’t afford to replace. 

“I’ll be down here today,” my father said.

 “Even for dinner when Mom serves her hot apple crumble?” I could go on and he wouldn’t tell me to stop.

 “You can come down and talk if you want.”

I knew he’d listen to whatever I said without interrupting me; even if I made deliberate pauses, he wouldn’t speak. 

We spent Christmas dinner listening to my uncle Pat complain about my father.

“Why can’t my brother-in-law show his face? Is it so hard to come up here and wish us a Merry Christmas?”

“He’s not angry with you,” my mother whispered, trying to bring down the volume. “He’s detached.”

“Detached?” yelled Uncle Pat.

“He tried to explain it to me,” my mother said, her eyes clouding over in confusion. “There’s a book.”

“A book?”

 “I want someone to tell me what it means,” my mother said, standing to clear the dishes. “Bryce says it’s not up to him.”

“What the hell?” said Pat, his voice rising even louder. “Where am I right now?”

“He thinks I’m angry,” my mother yelled back, seeming to have thrown in the towel on staying calm, in the hope that two people yelling along with the darkening sky and the end of Christmas descending would bring my father upstairs.

My father sometimes went to a place called the Polaris Centre to hear talks given by healers and spiritualists passing through town. He went by himself, but always came home with something from the gift shop: a beaded bookmark, a “Choose Joy” penguin fridge magnet. I have to think he was trying to make the Polaris Centre more normal for my mother. I must’ve wondered how they were going to stay together when my father did everything asked of him without complaint, when there was no way for my mother to justify the frustration she felt. I became used to the confusion in her face and no longer looked to her to make sense of what was happening to him. His dog-eared pocket book, I avoided. I imagined his little book had the power to convince anyone of anything. If my father could give up Christmas, what might I abandon? 

One Saturday morning early in the new year, my father took me to the Polaris Centre to help him set up an event. My mother had left to take Daniel to get his broken retainer repaired at a dental clinic and I wasn’t allowed to stay at home alone. When I seemed less than thrilled, my father told me it wouldn’t be for long and I might enjoy perusing the gift shop. I brought what was left of my Christmas money and sat in the front seat of our minivan looking out the window at the world that I knew. Every two blocks was a stop sign or a faded crosswalk. A park with a dog run lay to the north of the neighborhood and a concrete wall ran alongside the southern edge, hiding the expressway downtown. My father no longer heard the screeching brakes near Dead Man’s Curve, or sniffed the orange smog that collected over the ravine. We drove for a while under highway bridges. A long stretch of snow-covered fields followed before we pulled up to a plaza. 

We walked to the back of the gift shop where a black curtain revealed a small studio space. I could see tables pushed together through the opening. On an easel was a sign, “Meet and greet with Mr. David Wallington.”

The walls and floor were black.  Rows of subdued track lighting hung from the ceilings. Dust rose in columns toward the lights, and I thought of the children’s theatre, where I’d refused to pretend I was walking over clouds. 

A bald man about the same age as my father was quietly stacking chairs. A woman, who looked like my math teacher Ms. Dumontet, unfolded a tablecloth like it was gold leaf. In the middle of the room stood a second, very tall man. He wore an ochre shirt and a brown tie and brown pants. His hair lifted as he turned toward my father with an appreciative nod. He was the man whose picture was on the back of my father’s pocket book.

I helped the woman spread the tablecloth over the table. She told me her name was Nancy, and I told her my name was Amanda, and that was all we said. The only sound was the squeaking of the Styrofoam cups my father was removing from their column. He covered the table in cups, far more than the number of people entering the studio. Then, he reached under and pulled out a round plastic container. It held a black forest cake with syrupy cherries that stuck to the lid.

  “Is he giving a talk?” I asked, looking over at the tall man. I was worried I’d have to stay and listen now that we’d almost finished setting up.

“People come to ask him questions,” my father said, appraising the table, as Nancy tried to find a place to fit the plates. “There are no stupid questions.”

I nodded because that’s what Ms. Dumontet said at the start of the year, but my father must’ve mistaken my nod for interest. He took my arm and walked me over to the group gathered around Mr. Wallington. Among the adults was a boy, age eleven or twelve. I thought it was better to listen rather than play with the boy as my father might suggest.

The bald man was in the middle of speaking. His voice was hushed, but no one seemed to need to lean in. “Is the struggle ever over?” 

My father closed his eyes in agreement, while others nodded. 

Emboldened, the man continued, “I must ask you Mr. Wallington because I’m curious. What is the hardest challenge left in your life?”

Mr. Wallington answered without pause, as if he was used to the question. “When I am overwhelmed by despair.”

His voice was a deep, even timbre, despite the dramatic nature of his words.  He had a slight Newfoundland accent like my neighbor Arthur, who grew tomatoes and squash on the roof of his carport. Mr. Wallington turned next to my father.

My father said, “If others want to go next, I can wait.”

I didn’t want to hear my father’s question. I was growing dizzy in the half dark of the studio. Someone asked a question about the law of harmonics. I looked for a bathroom sign or an exit but the curtain was pulled so tightly shut that I couldn’t make out the opening. 

 “Anyone else?” said Mr. Wallington.

 The boy raised his hand. He wore grey cotton pants with belt loops, like from a school uniform.  

 “Please go ahead,” said Mr. Wallington, unfazed by the boy’s presence.

 “How many chances are you supposed to give a person?” the boy asked. 

 I peered at him to check if he was older than he’d seemed at first glance. He didn’t appear to be with anyone. Most of the others had wandered off to the refreshment table.

 “Can you say more?”

“My dad makes me feel bad. He makes me suffer. Should I stop seeing him?” 

I wondered why the boy used the word “suffer” and not “mad” or “sad.” I thought he was trying to sound older so he’d be taken seriously.

Mr. Wallington turned from the boy and looked at the people gathered around, which by this time was just me, my father, and the woman who looked like my math teacher. 

“Look more deeply,” he said. 

The boy stared hard at Mr. Wallington’s mouth. “What should I do?”

“You cannot remove your father from you.” Mr. Wallington pointed to his chest. “Help him transform inside of you.”

The boy shifted in his boots. My math teacher look-alike was fidgeting too, fumbling around in her purse. My father alone stood tall and poised. I tried to take in his composure, his serene smile, as if the boy’s unlikely presence at the Polaris Centre and what his father did to him were not enormous questions.

As my father turned to Mr. Wallington, ready to ask his question, the boy walked away, his pants bunched up over the rim of his boots. I watched as he picked his winter coat off the ground and a knapsack that seemed to hold nothing. Before he reached the curtain, he turned around, as if checking that he hadn’t left anything behind. I wanted to think his mother was waiting for him in the parking lot, letting him be brave.

My father appeared with a tray of cake slices cut too big to manage without a plate, or fork. He sauntered around holding the tray in front. I stayed close to him, feeling the light polyester of his shirt graze my arm and his slow, even saunter. In my confusion, I tried to smile peacefully like my father was doing, what he said was useful, especially on planes and in long elevator rides and during office blackouts, to rebalance the negativity. He strode out of the studio, beyond the curtain, to offer a piece of cake to the sales clerk and the boy, who was approaching the door. The boy didn’t take it right away. I could tell he didn’t want to. My father continued to hold out the tray until the boy made a small, high-pitched sound like he was grateful or surprised, and rolled the slice onto his mitten.

Not long after that, from inside our parked car, I saw the boy standing in the bus stop shelter. He looked so serious, despite the fact that his wool hat covered half his eyes. As we drove out of the parking lot, my father commentated on the lightness of the snowflakes, the lightest he’d seen. I told myself there was a good reason he didn’t stop the car and ask the boy if he was alright, or if he needed a drive. It would’ve been difficult to see the boy inside the bus shelter, especially at dusk. My father would’ve been busy with his questions, his journey; what the pocketbook called “the prominence of the highly personal path.” We drove on, toward the city limits. The streets were empty except for a few cars. I looked outside at the snow, not swirling in a frenzy, but tumbling across the sky, each piece slow and distinct, folding back into the dark. 

My father, who is now sixty-five, looks closer to my age. I can’t remember when, if ever, he was sick. He calls me once a month, or I call him. Often, when I call, he says that he was just about to call me. 

He tells me about Uncle Ted, who has ALS and whom my father drives to medical appointments. He doesn’t know that Uncle Ted calls him “goddam Jesus.” His second cousin Hilda, who’s obese, needs regular help getting around her house. He’s replaced her hot water tank and half of her main stack with the help of YouTube videos. When I tell him it must be tough for Hilda to be immobile, he pauses and says, “Life is beautiful,” and I want to tell him, “Fuck off.” 

He asks about my six-year-old son Anthony and my husband Ryan. I no longer tell him about Anthony’s epilepsy, which is basically all I think about. I don’t tell him how I hide in my office in the evenings once Anthony is asleep, avoiding Ryan and any other sign of human life, my nerves shot and resources drained. Language has dried up between me and my father on an increasing number of subjects. I tell him I try and go on a morning walk. 

“What else?” he says, and I can hear disinterest in his voice.

I tell him about a yoga retreat I went on with some women from work, how I managed to go a full day without speaking. “It’s harder than you think,” I say.

My father laughs, as I expected, as if he knows only too well. “Keep trying,” he says. 

I don’t know what else to say. I know I won’t keep trying. 

“There is much to gain by reaching a higher plane.” 

I tell myself he gave my mother the house and all the furniture. He took for himself a Japanese roll-up bed. He helped move my stuff to university and stayed at the hospital in Saint Jerome trying to speak French with the nurse when I broke my collarbone on a ski trip. I tell myself he isn’t violent. He never hurt anybody. He didn’t put back in the world the violence he experienced from his father. I remind myself it could’ve been much worse. 

I no longer have the copy of the pocket book he gave me when I turned sixteen. On Mr. Wallington’s dust-jacket photo, I made him cross-eyed and doodled a scratchy black moustache on his upper lip. Back then, I thought the words in the book gelled together into a clump. So many adjectives and abstract nouns. I still think this, which is why it’s strange that when I’m at a loss, or in a stretch of melancholy, I get out the pocket book. It’s the fourth edition hardcover my father gave me after Anthony was born. I find I’m looking at it more than usual lately. Maybe it’s like the Bible in other homes, a family reference offering the possibility of relief despite my skepticism. I open the book to a random page. I close my eyes and touch down and read the line closest to my fingertip. Maybe, I’m hoping the words will reveal something to me, something clarifying; what that is, I’m not sure. 

One night last week, my father called to tell me that the Polaris Centre was closing. I was sitting in my office, the pocket book on the shelf near my desk. He talked about his years of service there; the group meditation where he drifted asleep and fell off his chair, the American woman who led a workshop on singing bowls. He spoke about the events he’d worked, the craft and embroidery sales, the book readings. 

 I told him I remembered the boy from the time we helped set up a meet-and-greet. “Why didn’t someone call his mother?”

My father paused. “If I remember correctly, Mr. Wallington helped. He talked to the boy with respect.” 

“That boy was the same age as me,” I said, reaching for the pocket book and flipping it over to Mr. Wallington’s photograph, his hair now a thick silver crop. “He took the bus all the way out there.”

“Yes, I remember,” my father said.

 “He had to be desperate for help to do that.” 

My father paused, and when he next spoke, his voice was gentle and unrushed. “You can’t care too much,” he said, quoting a line from the pocket book. 

My father slept better than I did. He never said an unkind word about anybody. 

 “You gave him a slice of cake,” I said, drawing a small tear under Mr. Wallington’s eye. 

“That’s right,” he said. “He liked that didn’t he?”

The boy had cupped the cake with his wool mittens. As he grasped at the piece, causing it to crumble, my father turned back toward the curtain. He didn’t see the cake fall to the floor, or the boy reach out, as if trying to catch the air.

_____________________

Natalie Southworth is a UK-born writer now living in Montreal. Her fiction has appeared in The Moth Magazine, Canadian Notes & Queries, The New Quarterly, Grain Magazine, Prairie Fire, The Dalhousie Review and elsewhere. Her stories were finalists for several prominent international literary awards and winners of The Moth Magazine short story contest and the Brighton Short Story Prize.  Natalie holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of British Columbia. She is at work on a novel with support from the Canada Council for the Arts.

Irwin Freeman is a US-based artist who has exhibited reclamation-themed sculpture at museums in Phoenix, Santa Barbara, Providence, Hattiesburg.

Nothing like sadness or anger set in right away when M sat me down one afternoon last February and told me he was moving out of our apartment. The conversation we had after felt relaxed and almost warm—it seemed perfectly normal when he paused after twenty minutes or so and remarked on the way the light was falling on the house across the street, making its chimney look tinselled with silver. I found myself agreeing when he said that some part of him had always known that our relationship was temporary—that, despite his love for me, he’d sensed from the beginning that what we had to give each other was meaningful but finite. We’d never had the sort of intensity that was destined to grow and so he felt, after two years of each other, that we’d both taken what had been offered us and reached a predetermined ending. 

I spent the rest of February drinking coffee on my sofa with my computer on my lap, trying to finish three editing jobs that I disliked and couldn’t focus on. I felt a little more miserable every day. The long walks I normally took to clear my head and get some exercise got increasingly shorter, and I turned down every friend who suggested a movie or a drink. Eventually, I wasn’t leaving the apartment except to buy groceries at the meagrely stocked convenience store at the foot of my street or red wine at the liquor store.

During these emptied hours, consumed with missing M, I wondered why I hadn’t protested the breakup. Sometimes, I could convince myself that I’d agreed with him: I’d known all along that we were incompatible in a long-term, happy-ending sort of way and had done my best to repress this knowledge throughout the ups and downs of our two years. But the more persuasive part of me knew that it hadn’t been repression at all—I’d seen all the red flags and sensed our deep-seated unsuitability and had knowingly and earnestly risen against them. I’d defied what had seemed to be the most inevitable conclusion; I’d pictured us as a beautiful exception.

*

I wasn’t feeling much better about anything when I started to think about texting R. The idea didn’t occur to me so much as remind me of its presence, as though the possibility of texting him had been standing in the corner of my living room all this time, all these years, and—out of exhaustion, frustration, curiosity, or defeat—I’d finally turned my head to look at it directly. It might have been that there was so little doubt I would eventually text him that keeping my eye off this corner was more a matter of procrastination than anything else, so that when I actually found myself typing What are you doing? into my phone, I felt little of the guilt I might have felt at falling back into our pattern and more just plain relief.

We agreed to meet the following evening at the bar near his apartment where he often went for dinner. I worked hard at looking pretty without making it seem as though I had, blow-drying my hair, putting on a bit of makeup and finding a flattering T-shirt that could’ve been picked up off the bedroom floor. I’d been to this bar with R many times before—it was dimly lit and under-heated, with battered wood furniture and a strange saltwater fish tank mounted into its back wall, but R liked it for the home-cooked style meal they served every evening, which cost ten dollars and meant he rarely had to cook himself. I saw him as soon as I stepped inside, sitting at a table along the wall with his long smooth arms stretched out in front of him, a paperback upright in one hand. When he saw me, he placed his book down and leaned back in his chair. We stared at each other without saying anything, then we both started to laugh.

I asked, “How are you?”

“Oh, I’m just the same as ever.”

R was very attached to the motif that his life did not change or evolve the way that other people’s lives did, and he’d answered with the mock wistfulness he typically used whenever someone asked him how he was. His appearance corroborated the routine—tall and boyishly slim, he had a creaseless face that would age all at once when he turned sixty.

“What’s the book?” I pointed at the one on the table.

“It’s trash.”

“Trashy?”

“No. Trash. I knew the author in grad school. He’s terrible.”

“A terrible writer?”

“That, too. But the writing might be less offensive than the indirect access to his personality.”

I smiled. “I’m happy to see you.”

R smiled back at me. “Me too, Stamps.”

R called me Stamps after a character on a Finnish detective series that we’d binge-watched together a few years ago, a time we were both stuck in jobs that depressed us and must have believed that staying up until two or three in the morning watching Netflix, thereby ensuring we were exhausted and unfocused at work the next morning, was a small gesture of professional resistance. Stamps was a junior policeman who sucked up to his supervisors and spilled coffee on other people’s desks, but the camera would reveal him tucked away in the corner of a crime scene, crying quietly and tenderly whenever somebody was killed. His soft, servile face spoke to me deeply for reasons I couldn’t find words for, as did his tendency to make a mess of things, a flaw I might not have presented outwardly, but that seemed to literalize what was clumsy and childlike in my heart. So it felt as though R understood the bottom of me when, after a few episodes, he was inspired to call me this man’s name.

I went to the bar and ordered a beer. When I came back to the table, I started to tell him everything I’d wanted to tell him for so long: how the crooked tree outside the Lebanese church on Queen Street had started to lean so much that, out of prudence or superstition, I now crossed the street to avoid it; how the barista at our local café, a woman whom we were certain despised us, had suddenly started to smile at me and make breezy small talk about the weather; how I’d accosted a stranger on the subway who was wearing a jacket identical to the beloved one I’d lost at a restaurant the year before; how my four-year-old niece had started to use the expression “What the what?” when she was confused or overwhelmed. R listened carefully, fascinated by each of these developments, interrupting me occasionally with a clarifying question about context or what happened next. When I was finished, he shared his own backlog of thoughts and experiences. I listened eagerly and attentively, curious about every detail, all the while growing increasingly conscious of how happy I was to be sitting with him, of how much I was enjoying myself, of how good and right and fated our reunion felt. And my awareness of these feelings amounted to a minor distraction as he spoke, which can probably account for why I wasn’t able to control myself and blurted out, “M and I broke up.”

I watched R make the face I could’ve predicted he’d make—and clearly a face that some part of me longed to see. It seemed insufficient to describe this face as I-told-you-so because it was lazier but also more triumphant.

“He moved out about a month ago,” I continued. “I haven’t been all that great.”

R sat back in his seat with a sigh.

“Are you dating anyone these days?” I asked. “Chloe?”

“No, I’m not dating Chloe.”

“That’s too bad,” I said, and some large part of me meant it, because I liked Chloe—or I liked the idea of her with R. She was a modern dancer with soulful grey eyes and graceful androgynous clothes. I might have been jealous of their relationship if R hadn’t once struggled to explain to me why they couldn’t talk about interesting things. He called it a personality clash, but I knew this masked a more annihilating verdict.

“How’s your writing?” I asked.

“Is that what you wanted to talk about?”

“Not exclusively.”

“Why did you text?”

“Aren’t you having a nice time?”

“That’s an unrelated question.”

“I wanted to see you.”

“Why?”

“Because I miss you and I worry about you.”

He forced a laugh. “I think you need to think harder about what that means.”

“I know what it means.”

“I don’t think you do. I think the context of that sentence assumes certain self-serving priorities.”

“Huh?”

“You need to think harder about why you worry about me before getting me involved.”

He was worked up in a familiar way, his face red and thickened by muscle. It was a mood of his that I’d always found a bit embarrassing to witness—he looked like a teenager who couldn’t rein himself in. I faced the window to avoid him and observed the gloomy fact of our reflected selves, framed by polygons of light from the street outside.

“Okay,” I said finally. “I’ll give it some thought.”

*

Long before I met M, I met R. It was at the launch for my first novel—a book I felt insecure about—which my publisher hosted at a bar in the city’s west end. As I stood in front of the small crowd, and thanked those who needed to be thanked, my attention was drawn to R’s face, which seemed better lit than the faces around him. Right away, I had the sense that something would happen between us, though this wasn’t on account of anything he did. In fact, when I tried to catch his eye, he returned my gaze with a fogginess that made it unclear whether he was even really looking at me.

Shortly after that, I read his book. It was written in the first-person but it addressed a “you”— an ex-girlfriend whom the narrator can’t forget. Whatever the narrator said or did or thought was conditioned by his longing for “you,” which meant that he lived his life as an avatar of that longing. I knew I was meant to be impressed by the ideas in the book, but I loved it for a simpler reason: The way it made longing seem like a noble activity. I got R’s email from a friend of a friend and asked if he wanted to have dinner with me.

Our first date took place at a Spanish restaurant that served a single house wine and inexpensive tapas. R was standing outside the restaurant when I arrived. He greeted me with a sagging hug and a warm, unfocussed smile. He’d put his name on the waiting list for a patio table and we joked about butting in front of the couple before us, who were immersed in some kind of app or game on the woman’s phone.

“I liked your book,” R said as soon as we’d sat down at our table. “The sense of dread—how that was a direct function of her psychology—I thought that was really well done.”

R looked at me directly after saying this. It was the first time we’d really made eye contact and it gave me the urge to be honest with him.

“I actually sort of have mixed feelings about it. There are parts I like, but I feel…ambivalent on the whole.”

“You shouldn’t.”

“That’s nice of you to say.”

“I’m not trying to be nice.”

 “Oh?”

 “I’ve been trying to be my true self lately.”

“I feel very underprepared.”

“I probably should have sent a text or something. Anyway, I thought your book was really good.”

The day’s heat hovered moodily around us as we talked. I hardly noticed the sky deepening into marine blues, or the patio thinning out until we were the only table left. Despite how much we drank, I didn’t feel particularly tipsy when the waitress came over and did last call. Standing on the sidewalk out front, R pulled me close to him and asked in a tone that sounded just a little ironic if I wanted to come over.

He lived farther north than most people in our circle did, in a neighbourhood full of old Italian bars and hair salons. Our Uber stopped in front of a small dark building with a long, paved path up to its front door. His apartment was on the second floor—it opened onto a tiny kitchen and then a virtually unfurnished room, with a tattered loveseat adrift in its centre and books piled all over the floor. Some of these paperbacks rose in towers nearly to the ceiling, while others formed little half-sized clusters by their sides. There were no drapes on the windows and nothing hanging on the walls. It looked as though he’d just moved in, though I suspected that he hadn’t.

“Where do you write?” I asked.

He nodded toward the bedroom, which existed on the other side of a doorframe without a door. Then he took a whiskey bottle down from the top of the fridge and poured us both a glass. We drank quickly and proceeded to take off our clothes.

I woke up in his bed at some point in the night, thinking that the street outside seemed very bright. From where I lay, the light looked peaceful and deliberate, as though shining down from something divine. I left the bedroom and sat with my legs tucked up on his loveseat. I felt very calm sitting there by myself, surrounded by his lack of stuff. It was an emptiness that seemed purposeful just then, like a form of concentration. Other than the books, his only real possession seemed to be the laptop charging on the floor. I wondered whether he’d resolved, at some point in his life, to disencumber himself of material distractions or whether he’d never bothered with them in the first place. I put my head down on the loveseat’s cushion, feeling relaxed and ready to fall asleep.

*

In those early days, we went for walks in the cemetery near his apartment. We kept returning to a conversation about mood—we agreed that mood was a good metric for assessing how much we’d been affected by a work of art. R said that when he thought of a book after reading it, what he could recall, more than anything, was whether it had changed his mood. But he worried that he couldn’t remember whether his mood had changed in some very serious way in real life. He worried that he’d been in a bad mood for so long that he’d forgotten whether the mood was different from who he was, or different from who he thought he was, or maybe just different from who he used to be. I told him that the worry indicated that he had some distance from the mood, some autonomy over it, but this didn’t seem to comfort him.

We went to see a play about a poet who becomes so poor that she takes her two self-published books of poems to the bank and asks if she can use them as collateral for a loan. When the bank teller laughs at her and sends her away, she goes to a pawn shop. The pawn shop owner doesn’t balk when she places the slim books on his counter. He picks up the first one and considers the cover carefully. He reads one poem, then another, then a third. He offers the poet two-hundred dollars.

When the houselights came up, R remained very still. The music from the curtain call was playing softly. I was going to ask where he wanted to go for a drink, but his stillness gave me pause. I hadn’t thought the play was very good but, sitting there so deliberatively after the fact, I became aware that my mood had changed. I realized that a familiar feeling had taken hold of me, a feeling that I associated with my own writing. If I had to name this feeling I might call it sadness, but the sort of sadness that I found desirable, even necessary. I probably depended on this sadness to write in the first place at all. I could feel this sadness very clearly as I sat there beside R, who seemed caught up in feelings of his own. My sadness seemed more meaningful than it ever had, but also, with him next to me, more oppressive.

Soon after, I said to R, “I care about you, but I don’t think this is going to work as a relationship.”

He nodded. “I don’t want you to think of a relationship as the only option for us.”

“I won’t think that.”

“Let’s cover other options.”

“Like hypothetically?” I asked.

“We don’t have to make any decisions tonight.”

*

In the days after reconnecting with R, I did my best to reflect honestly on why I’d texted him. It didn’t take very long for me to admit to myself that he’d been right, if he’d been accusing me of what I felt accused of. M’s departure had left me idle and lonely. While I’d never really stopped thinking about R, the loss of M had made those thoughts more immediate, and I’d let myself follow through on that thinking without considering R’s feelings or point of view.

But as I started to punish myself with certain names—needy, selfish, manipulative—I wondered whether I was being an objective judge or taking the whole story into account. I’d never wanted my friendship with R to be set on pause in the first place. It was he who had stopped returning my texts on account of M’s presence in my life. And it was hardly the first time that we’d cycled in and out of speaking and not speaking. He was happy with our friendship so long as there was no one serious in my life and no one promising in his own. He’d stopped speaking to me several years ago when he started dating a very beautiful woman who, according to LinkedIn, worked in brand design and storytelling. I let him walk away from me without putting up a fight and, with the exception of one weepy phone call after a story of mine was rejected from a mediocre magazine, I gave him the time and space he had tacitly requested.

When he texted a few months after that phone call suggesting we meet for drinks that very night, I accepted without hesitation. Sitting across from him at an intimate wine bar, sharing a bottle of Syrah neither of us could really afford, I repressed the urge to ask what had happened with the beautiful brand designer, knowing it might set him off. Instead, we talked about everything else we’d missed in each other’s lives. Gratitude had never been a feeling I was comfortable with, always striking me as faintly mawkish or religious, but I knew it was a large part of what I felt that evening. And this thankfulness seemed capable of simplifying, even purifying, all the things that were messy and unconventional between us. What did the complications of our friendship amount to when they could engender such uncomplicated happiness? Why did we need to fuss over the occasional bout of jealousy or resentment when we were rewarded with feeling so accurately understood?

When I thought of the time I spent with R over the course of our friendship, or whatever you might call it, I thought of the quality of our conversations. We enjoyed talking about the world together because there was no need for preamble; we could take our common perspective for granted and dig in our heels at exactly the same spot. Our discussions were thorough without the threat of argument. And maybe it was this context of consensus that allowed them to feel as though they truly ran their course, lending them the sense of reaching an ending, in a way that little in my life did. Elsewhere, there was just repetition, the same sort of things happening over and over again. In fact, sometimes I could only distinguish small developments in my life by comparing myself to R, whose life was truly unmarked by conventional signs of progress. He hadn’t published anything since his novel came out a decade ago. He’d lived in the same apartment and worked in the same health-food store for twelve years, spending his small income on ephemeral things: rent, alcohol, his monthly phone bill, and going to new restaurants with younger women. When we met, the women were all of five or six years younger than him. Now, they were more like fifteen. I’d teased him about this a few times, but stopped when it became clear how much it bothered him. What had once signified his sexual prowess, was now just evidence that his life was stalled, and that he was falling increasingly out of sync with his peers, who had partners, children, mortgages, and advancing careers. But maybe worse was that dating women from a different generation put him in a strange, political tension with women his own age, who felt both superior and insulted, and proceeded to write him off as a curiosity they could neither like nor respect.

*

R agreed to go for a walk with me a few days later in the cemetery near his apartment. It was his day off from the health-food store, but he asked if we could meet early, when the grounds would be free of people and cars. He was by the entrance gate when I arrived, standing under a row of iron spikes that looked bluish in the morning light. He appeared to be full of energy, and held a takeaway coffee in each hand, one of which he passed to me.

“You’re right,” I said as we started to walk up the path towards the first cluster of crooked tombstones, sipping our coffees. “I worry about you for complicated reasons that have a lot to do with my own uncertainties.”

He seemed uninterested in my apology. “I want you to read something.”

“Now?”

He gestured toward a bench a few yards off. Once we’d sat down, he gave me something to read off his phone. It was written in the first person and seemed halfway between an essay and a work of fiction. It described a narrator visiting an exhibition at an art gallery and trying to account for how it felt to observe the art. At some point, the narrator decides to leave the gallery and walk home, despite a distance of many miles. Using the map function on his phone, he watches himself make progress through the indicated streets. He begins to feel an affinity for the icon that represents his position, as though the little red circle on his screen actually bears a resemblance to who he is.

“It’s beautiful,” I said, still holding his phone. “I love it.”

“You think it’s good?”

“I do.”

“Really good?”

Like most R’s writing, it felt incredibly smart. He had a way of measuring perceptions against each other that created striking equations out of words. But I suspected it wasn’t as good as R hoped it was. Once, a few years earlier, when we were having a conversation about the nature of intelligence, R had confided in me that he thought he was a literary genius. The comment came the same week that he’d been asked to interview a controversial French novelist for an online publication. The publication’s editor sent back the draft of the interview, complaining that he couldn’t understand the introduction, which should have been an entirely straightforward thing to write. I started to wonder whether R thought his genius began exactly where everyone else thought his writing stopped making sense.

“You should keep working on it,” I said.

“You think it needs work?”

“Well, it needs… elaboration? You need to figure out what it means.”

He stared at me blankly, then snatched back his phone. I needed to say something that would diffuse the situation.

“I have to do laundry today.”

R didn’t have a washing machine in his building either, and we’d frequently commiserated on this shared misfortune, finding ourselves well into adulthood and consigned to leave our apartments to wash our clothes. He dealt with this inconvenience by using a laundry pick-up and delivery service, whereas I didn’t like the idea of a stranger washing the few nice things I had, and so dragged a collapsible wagon stuffed with dirty clothes to my local laundromat every two or three weeks, a chore that was especially tedious in the snow.

“What are you up to later?” I asked.

“I have some plans.”

“Plans? Like a date?”

“I have lunch plans.”

“Who are you having lunch with?”

“You don’t know her.” He drained what remained of his coffee. “She isn’t someone you would know.”

“How are we supposed to be friends if you’re so cagey about this stuff?”

“Don’t oversimplify,” he said angrily. “It’s not important.”

*

When I got to the laundromat later that morning, all the machines were in use. I sat down on one of the folding chairs and scrolled through my phone, looking up every so often at the only other person in the laundromat, a young woman pulling clothes out of a hamper. She was wearing an oversized cropped sweater and, when she leaned away from me, I could see the white T-shirt she had tucked into her sweatpants underneath. With a shiver, it brought to mind something R had told me ages ago, when he’d decided he was finally going to pay someone else to wash his clothes. He said he’d miss seeing girls in their sexiest underwear on laundry day. I asked what he meant by seeing, and he’d insisted that, as women he didn’t know heaved their bundles of clothes in and out of the machines, he’d frequently seen lace and satin peeking out from the waistbands of their pants. Apparently, it was a well-known fact that women wore their sexiest underwear on laundry day, when they were inevitably down to their last few pairs. When I said this was an affront to my understanding of reality—laundromats weren’t crawling with women in gorgeous underclothes, there was no way he’d regularly seen so many thong straps par hazard—he conceded that maybe it was the idea that he was attached to. He loved imagining, as he completed this most banal of tasks, that the women around him were wearing their loveliest, scantiest stuff.

I’d known instantly that I would never forgive him for this. Nothing about this fantasy seemed sexy or refined, and I didn’t doubt for a second that he knew that. He’d said it to remind me of our uneven status in the world. He was rubbing my face in the fact that he was a man and I was a woman, and as my purchase on sexual power diminished a little every year, his remained steady and uncompromised. I could never escape this basic biological fact, even when doing something as insipid as my laundry. Maybe the worst part of this casual cruelness was that I had no rebuttal, no conceivable way of making him feel as demeaned and resentful as he’d made me feel. At that moment, I actually wished him ill. I wanted him to have the kind of life that lonely, eccentric, half-employed men who preyed on twenty-five-year-olds were given.

The young woman turned around just then. She seemed to recognize me and, as she lifted a hand to wave, I realized it was Chloe. She stopped folding the shirt in her hand and remained awkwardly still for a moment, before coming towards me and saying hello.

“I didn’t know you lived around here,” she said.

“I didn’t know you did.”

“Oh, I don’t.” She unclasped the clip that was holding half her hair up—hair so thick and stiff it took a moment to react, hovering like a cloud of steel wool before falling slowly to her shoulders. “My company is renting a new rehearsal space around the corner.”

She had a very direct stare, a natural elegance. We’d only met a handful of times before, and I was always struck by the accidental quality of her beauty, which felt thrown into relief by her mass of hair and formless clothes. I suddenly felt the urge to ask her about R, to learn something of her experience of him. But when I opened my mouth to speak, she was already saying something.

“I was just going to ask if you’d seen … I don’t know if you guys are in touch, but he…”

I smiled. “I saw him this morning, actually.”

“Oh.” She looked both pleased and a bit uneasy. “How’s he doing?”

“He’s the same as always.”

“He’s ok?

She’d been oblivious to my wryness, or simply uninterested in it. I told her he was fine.

“There haven’t been any more… incidents?”

“Incidents of what?”

“Anything. Has there been anything since he was in the hospital?”

I wondered if I’d misunderstood her. I made a face that conveyed as much.

She said, “I guess you guys weren’t talking then.”

“When was he in the hospital?”

She looked around the room. “Do you have time to talk?”

We sat down on the bench by the front window, which was flooded with white sun. She pulled her leg up onto the wood so that her sneaker rested high on her opposite thigh and told me it had begun a couple of years ago, right when they started seeing each other again. “He started to text me a lot in the middle of the night. At first, it was just to share ideas for things he wanted to write, but then it got weirder. Stuff about feeling suffocated and frightened.” She paused. “It stopped for a little while and I thought maybe he was over it. But then one night he called and asked me to meet him at the hospital because he was checking himself in.”

As Chloe told me that this behaviour became cyclical, with R spending a week or so in hospital, leaving, and then checking himself back in, I became unable to look at her directly. Outside, ice on the sidewalk was mottled by shallow ruts of snow. I found myself picturing R’s face under the kind of distress she described. The image came with disconcerting ease, as though some part of my mind had already imagined it.

“I don’t know how things got better,” Chloe said. “Maybe it was his new psychiatrist, but I noticed a month had gone by, then two, and there were no middle of the night texts anymore. He told me that he was feeling less terrible and wanted to fix things in his life.” She turned away from me abruptly and stretched out both her legs so that they made a long, powerful line parallel to the floor. It took me a second to realize that this stiffening served a purpose. “I don’t really know what happened after that, because I broke up with him. If that sounds heartless, I don’t know. Maybe it was.”

“It doesn’t sound heartless,” I said.

“I didn’t know how to help any more. But I still worry about him.” She rested her face in her hands for a moment. “You think he’s ok now?”

“Yeah.”

“He isn’t behaving weirdly?”

I shook my head and found, again, that I couldn’t meet her gaze. We sat with our backs to the sun for a while.

*

I walked home a couple of hours later with my wagon of clean towels and clothes. The sun had been out for some time and I did my best to avoid the slush on the sidewalk. When I got to the steps of my building, my phone buzzed with a message. It was an email from M. I tried to click on it, but when my gloved finger failed to open the app, I just dropped the phone back into my pocket.

Instead of unpacking my laundry, I sat down at my kitchen table and looked out the window. A wispy cloud, low in the sky, was fading into the surrounding light. The street seemed quieter than usual, with no people walking by and few cars. Things seemed quieter in my apartment, too, as though an indeterminate white noise had been turned off. Insulated by all this quiet, I found myself picturing Chloe woken by R’s phone call in the middle of the night, throwing a coat over her pajamas and running out to meet him at the hospital. I imagined them sitting together in the waiting room, R haggard with anxiety, Chloe looking at him with her lovely grey eyes. I wondered whether she’d slept in his room once he’d been admitted, curling up on the chair beside his bed, her head on her folded coat.

I got up then and poured myself a glass of red wine, suddenly exhausted by the prospect of having to go about the rest of my day. I carried my wine to the sofa and turned on the TV. Out of habit or a lack of inspiration, I clicked on the Finnish detective series that R and I used to watch together. I selected the first episode of season one. After the opening sequence played, which featured the chief investigator running down a street, a corridor, a back alley, a tunnel, and an airport runway, there was darkness and flashing lights, followed by the materialization of an underground garage. Policemen were in the process of using yellow tape to cordon off a section of it, where metal wreckage and detritus were strewn across the concrete. Distressed people blurred into the foreground as we zoomed in on a woman sitting in the back of an ambulance with a blanket over her shoulders. When the woman lifted her head, we caught a glimpse of her face and knew instantly that something terrible had happened to her.

Then our focus was pulled towards a man standing in front of a parked car, some distance from the commotion. He was about thirty, balding, but not unattractive, with a strong protruding brow bone that gave him a certain intensity. He wore a long winter coat and held a cardboard tray of coffees in his hand, which he extended out with a stiff arm, as though offering it to someone who wasn’t there.

As this man, Stamps, watched what was happening around him, his eyes grew glassy, he wiped his nose with a tissue. He tried to rest the tray on the roof of the car in front of him, but misjudged the distance and spilled the coffees all over himself. A frazzled colleague appeared and asked if he could help her with some note taking, but seeing what a mess he was and how apparently paralyzed he was by it, she told him to forget it and walked away.

Martha Schabas is the author of two novels: My Face in the Light and Various Positions. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in numerous publications. She was The Globe and Mail’s dance critic from 2014-2020, where she also wrote about theatre and books. Martha lives in Toronto with her husband and three kids.

Jason Bentsman is a writer and fine art photographer. Works have appeared or are forthcoming in Litro Magazine UK, Mercurius, the Offing, Tiny Molecules, The American Bystander, The Amsterdam Quarterly, The Ilanot Review, The Weekly Humorist, LensCulture Online, F-STOP Magazine, and other art and literary publications worldwide. His poetic environmental book The Orgastic Future has been called “A 21st-century HOWL” (A. Shoumatoff, New Yorker & Vanity Fair).