ANHEDONIA: THE MOTHERLAND OF DISBELIEF

A PARABLE OF THE BACCHAE

Like stepping out into early evening traffic and the smell of
street meats and rubbing alcohol, he flares his lighter

somewhere on a nearby
street a car alarm is going crazy and someone honks.

An inch of snow lay over a row of parked cars. He
dragged his finger through the powdered windshield, wrote
“Time was wasted” and
sucked the snow off his fingertip. At home
Netflix is downloading all sorts of weird
information into his brain and flickering psycho colors
the white cliffs of Dover 3D nightmare
In the mildewed doorframe he had shouted hello
but thought since he had so few belongings he might have left already. Then he found one of his black button-down shirts
near the sink and he picked it up, felt the cheap fabric,
weighed its fraying and thread-bleeding buttonholes
and put it down.

the psycho speed of crossing the country at 5
or 6am and stopping at a gas station for an egg sandwich
and Red Bull and the gas station attendants
have all been there since 10pm and reek
of cheap cigars. He buys
the best psycho breakfast.
He has at this point
an intimate memory based on lithograph and Daguerrotype
images of brain functions mapped across voltage diagrams — cerebral lines, neural overlay, etchings of the pineal gland. He stinks a little too, it’s been
a while since he showered. He says thanks so much
when the man hands him his three pennies
change and he is sure they are laughing at
him as he walks out. Breath pools
like mud over the hood of a gray Honda Civic. ‘Hey, heading east? Got room for one more? If we can invent God we can invent anything.’

The next gas station is in another state and there he is silent witness to an argument between the shoes belonging to a janitor and the shoes belonging to a restroom patron involving the handicap stall. He stays until long after they are gone and thinks about racehorses.

Already he is
reaching nerves through the television screen
and at every point they are
rebuffed in the most predictable ways imaginable.
I’ve seen the daguerrotypes
of the brain functioning in extraordinary circumstances.
Same deal. Sell your beater car, buy a bus ticket and sleep the whole way to Boston. Then you have arrived on frosty patriotic cobblestones.
Rub your fingers together, sniff and gape and wonder if
any of these other people are alive.
It is too cold to walk around so he goes into a diner,
orders coffee, and shares a table with a man
who is reading the first section of the Globe.

Is that fog lifting over the Museum of Science?
Is it a school day?
The world of school days and weekends and lunch, parking tickets, in-law’s, flashes like a

neat little hook.

Boston is more old Americana than he can deal with and it starts to make him sick. In the morning he coughs up gray phlegm and his lungs whistle like a fife. Before leaving he wants to see some Byzantine art. Buying a ticket for one at the museum is almost unspeakably depressing. The girl at the desk is about his age and when she asks if he is a student he says no and she rings him up with the discount anyway. He folds the ticket in half and slips in his pocket, where a week later it will come out of the laundry in a crumbling, felted wad.

In the gallery he stops by a painting of the Madonna whose skin is the same obscure, gilded color as the background. Her head tilts and her eyes in their fine arched lines look up as if to say, ‘Well didn’t I tell you?’ She has a tiny mouth like a candied violet.

A grandmother drags her grandson past the painting. The child’s hand waves behind him like a parachute and he wails ‘but Nick said I could’ again and again. ‘Nick didn’t know what trouble you’d cause,’ the grandmother says. Her ball of orange hair reaches just past the Madonna’s crooked knees on the wall. She doesn’t look to either side but the little boy catches Michael’s eye as they pass and his face changes shape, his mouth peeps open like he is taking in air to play the flute, and the air pressure builds, and builds, and then all that comes out with a despairing hiccough is ‘but Nick said I could.’

He spends $30 in singles on a bus to NYC. Co-op City pokes up from the horizon around sunset. He feels like a man who, having wrenched himself from a dragon’s jaws, has just shrugged and waltzed back in.

Derivative, shallow, and unforgivably benign. Time was wasted.

And in the mirror on sunday morning, all hollow eyes and ragged beard, he looked like a prophet down on his luck or a byzantine icon sent through the wash in someone’s careless pocket. And he splashed himself with water and minerals.

On the way out one evening he told this parable, which I will relate to you.

‘And when the traveler
he said- this was part of the story-

reaches that abandoned city he has two options: to walk through under a moonless sky or make camp under a red florist’s awning. From there he looks to and fro,

his can of beans sizzling over a weak fire that he has made. The city is full of trash. With its inhabitants gone their possessions took blowing to the streets, but there fell short, unwanted and unusable so far from their designated locations. The traveler again has two choices as regards the abandoned magazines and refrigerators: he can pick up one or two objects, put them precisely down with a reverent shake of his head, or pull a rotten daisy from the florist’s window display and pluck its leaves into the air.

‘The next city he comes to is only a trash city. Everything has blown away except the trash. No more buildings. Newspapers, bottles, used tape, broken shoes, all your typical litter of a lively city was left like dead coral, like an exoskeleton. The roads are marked out by salt and cigarette butts. The traveler doesn’t pause in this city, not even to read the date off a newspaper.

‘The third city he comes to is paradise under a glass dome. It is beautiful. He cries a little.

‘There’s a door propped open with a rock and an angel sits on a deck chair in front of it, smoking a pipe. The man says to the angel, “Can I go in?” The angel shrugs and blows a smoke ring. “Sure can,” it says. The man looks through the door and starts crying again. “Please let me in,” he says, “please, I’ll do anything. I’ll give anything.” The angel says, “Go on in, I won’t stop you.” The man falls to his knees and grasps the angel’s feet. “Please,” he begs, “you have to help me, I’ve got to get back in there.” The angel pushes the door. It swings wide open, and the man watches as it slowly closes to rest propped again on the rock. He coughs and sobs and walks away.

‘What do you take from that fable, brother Oliver?’

‘That heaven is missing an angel.’

This is an alternate thesis: If time is an illusion then

multiple quantum-versions
of ourselves could occasionally overlap, hence déjà vû
and truth in dreams
and psychosis

a future self is lodged in an earlier time and fucking everything up

You sleep the whole way to Boston
The bus stop is paved and purified with snow.
The early sun is warm with old Americana. You shrug your bag on your shoulder and shoulder to the curb.

It is a school day. It is
a school day and someone is ringing.

***

The door cracked open like the sleepy lids of a giant eye, or like the sky in Midtown where it ran vacant and white between the tops of buildings like another road parallel to the one he stood on and filled him with a grandeur and a despair he could not describe. Branches of
glue spread across the
ceiling, basked in a
wind tunnel through your
bedroom. He sighs and coughs. A low baritone is alive in the kitchen. It dirges in Latin or Italian, flat and no vibrato and entirely lacking in color. He sits up. The sound stops.

‘Pasta? This early?’ Oliver is presiding over a pot on the stove, looking lanky and wrong in a t-shirt and sweatpants.

‘Coffee.’

‘Instant?’

‘You’re out of regular. And it isn’t that early.’

Michael sinks to the floor, holding his head in his hands. ‘Where’s my phone? And my cigarettes?’ he says, not expecting a response. The tile is cool against his bones and bruises.

‘How did you sleep?’

‘Like a shark on land. Could you put some almond milk in this?’

Behind glasses, Oliver’s antelope eyes stretch into vast dark olives. ‘I thought we might do some planning today.’

He snaps his thumb like bubble wrap. ‘Maybe look on the internet,’ Oliver continues, as if this in itself is a solution for anything.

‘I was thinking you might look into bus tickets today.’ Boy next door on leave from the seminary. Kid’s studying to be a priest but has terrible manners, showing up uninvited with a backpack and a mission from Mom. Michael’s mother had always loved Oliver, preferred him to her own son.

In high school they were friends or something adjacent to it, something where one day they would be making small cuts in their wrists to taste each other’s blood and the next day passing each other in the halls as if they didn’t know each other. Enough time had passed since then that every cell of their bodies had been replaced with new ones.

‘The way I see it,’ Oliver says, clinking a spoon around and around the mug, ‘I leave now, your mom will want a report, I’ll tell her your address and she will call the police on your, uh, supplementary income.’

‘You wouldn’t. No fucking way.’

‘What are those signs on the subway again? If you see something, say something?’

‘You haven’t seen shit.’

‘Ok.’

‘What do you want?’

‘I don’t want to be here,” he says quietly, ‘any more than you want me here. But, unlike you, I believe responsibility to family is more important than personal desires and whims.’

‘My family, Oliver, not yours.’

Michael’s phone buzzes. Clattering against the hard tabletop, it makes them both jump. It buzzes again. He answers. The white t-shirt that Oliver wore had a slight yellow stain near the bottom hem, so distracting that Michael has to leave the room to finish his phone conversation. Everything’s a wind tunnel.
Everyone’s in love.
Everyone’s a spy.

When he comes back Oliver is slowly wiping the area around the stove with a sponge. There is nothing familiar about him. He is a bipedal animal moving around in the same space as bipedal animal Michael. Our hearts are wired to beat for a while, that’s all.

***

The fact is — the truth is — that Michael dropped out of graduate school and was too embarrassed to admit why so he excised those years from his character and became instead Michael who had taken a few years ‘off’ after college and now, you know.

When he first moved back to the city he got a job at Starbucks. Three days later he quit and for the next six weeks charged packets of ramen to his credit card and stole laundry soap from his roommates and briefly panhandled in Union Square, at first reciting upon request choice portions from the Iliad and Odyssey but soon he found it more profitable to sit and keep quiet with a cardboard sign on his knees. One time one of his roommates saw him doing this and offered to cover his rent for that month but Michael asked if he could bum a cigarette instead, and a light.

A few days after that he got an interview at the bar he had been working at ever since, despite the fact that he was terrible at making drinks and took twice as long to count change as the other bartenders. When the owner asked him, ‘Where do you see yourself in five years?’ which they sometimes do even at those type of job interviews, he said, ‘I don’t even see myself now, sir.’ He grinned, toothily, and, he knew, winningly.

***

Oliver keeps bringing in brochures for law schools and graduate programs and they are building up in drifts around the apartment. The ones at the top collect dust, the ones below grow slowly colder.

It’s passive aggressive to the highest degree, and he struggles to believe that Oliver is really as tapped into whatever he claims to be tapped into as much as he claims to be. Honestly, not that it was any of his business, he never thought Oliver was that great a Catholic. He had zero interest in art or music or architecture, and his knowledge of the canon didn’t extend much beyond St. Augustine. Michael once had to identify Michelangelo’s Pietà for him. Holidays did little for him. He was probably colorblind. What’s the point of being Catholic if you’re colorblind?

Rolling up his sleeves, he drags a paper bag around the main room and sweeps every page into it. On the couch Oliver stares vacantly at the Times magazine.

‘Oh, I’ll be a good guest,’ says Michael, shoving the rest of the newspaper into the bag. ‘I won’t overstay my welcome. I won’t make a mess of your lovely home.’

‘Have you thought about law school?’ says Oliver.

‘My dad was a lawyer.’

‘I know.’

‘I thought we agreed we weren’t going to do this.’

‘Then there’s no point in my staying here.’

‘That’s exactly-’ Michael’s phone vibrates loudly on the coffee table. It pisses him off and he swings the paper bag to knock it away. A lone brochure, touting the value of doctoral degrees from the University of Washington with a scene of spring tree blossoms, drips from the bag along with it. ‘My thoughts exactly.’

He picks up his phone from the floor. The notification was that someone he didn’t know had liked his most recent photo on Instagram, which was of an abandoned shoe on the floor of the Brooklyn-bound J, in an obnoxious Toaster filter.

‘I don’t know how to convince you I only want the best for you.’

He takes a picture of Oliver. Flips it upside down, puts it in Inkwell, deletes without posting.

You have to believe that there’s good house music somewhere in this city. He turned the light off on the desperate way they would cling to each other as if afraid the other might escape.
He gave it the old college try.

‘Listen, I don’t want to kick you out onto the streets, but I think you’ve been here long enough.’

‘I don’t have anywhere to go.’

‘You can go back to your seminary.’

‘I can’t go back to the seminary.’

‘What do you mean.’

‘Until I’ve convinced you to put your life in order.’

‘I pay the bills, Oliver. I pay rent and electric and wifi, usually on time, and I eat lunch, and I haven’t hurt anyone today. That’s having your life in order.’ He takes a picture of himself, flips it upside down, puts it in Lo-fi, captions it #passiveaggressiveselfie and posts it. By the time he is done with this Oliver has gone back to the magazine.

***

Some time in the night he awoke to Oliver standing over him in priestly attire. And he lifted Michael from the bed and clasped his head, and felt his brow for fever, and held open his eyes as they rolled back, and checked his teeth and anointed his hair with oil and gilded his arched horns and pulled out his liver and held it up to the light.

And the space inside is filled with revelation and noise.

Then the sky is white and his alarm clock is going off and there is drool on his pillow and he has never felt so alone.

***

omens and graffiti like
hot solitary conductors of electricity. ‘It is a serious issue for our day. Much

of the world which once was saved is now in a state of threatened
grace. It was not that
we could not save them.
We did not want to.

There is a rat on the tracks. It is young and sleek and cunning. It raises its pinprick nose at the lights and earthquake rumble approaching from within the tunnel. It pauses. Michael checks his pockets for something to throw at it and make it move because he doesn’t want to see it destroyed by the rogue planet belly of the train. Move, dammit, move, dumb rat. At the last minute it scampers under the iron rail.

And there in the orange light of necessity you begin to understand. To wonder about the neighbors, and if necessity is the same as disappointment. An old acquaintance gets on at 23rd St. and strikes up a conversation. He has gained a little weight and grown an ugly beard since the last time Michael saw him.

‘Are you still with that girl?’

‘Which one?’

‘The one from the Knitting Factory? You know, what’s her name, blonde, you said you wanted to marry her while you were throwing up outside my building.’

‘Oh, Kayla. Dead to me.’

‘Woah.’

‘Not that exciting. I just got sick of her calling me all the time.’

‘Maybe she was doing that because you said you wanted to marry her?’ One hair from his straggly mustache vibrates as he speaks.

‘But why couldn’t she text like a non-crazy person? And I never told her I wanted to marry her.’

‘Jesus, Michael.’

‘Please don’t take the Lord’s name in vain.’

‘You literally are the worst.’

‘Whatever. This is my stop, see you round.’

‘Come to my set on Thursday?’

‘I’ll see.’

‘What better thing could you possibly have to do on a Thursday night?’

‘I said I’ll see.’

The train departs in a kaleidoscope roar. Michael stops to admire the stairs in their tunnel up to the main Union Square concourse, a huge ugly painting pumping humans up and down to their own ugly paintings. He stays there, a stick in the mud as the crowd nudges and flows around him, until the loudspeaker announces the next Brooklyn-bound L train will depart in approximately… four minutes… the following Brooklyn-bound… It is so loud and annoying that he has to move.

Crossing under the river his ears pop. Walking home under the JMZ. Every time a train passes above he lets his mind dip into placid psychosis and then pulls it back up, like a parent holding a child over a pool so the child can dip its toes and laugh.

Back in his apartment, he throws his headphones aside and tears with greedy vigor into the Old Testament pages of Oliver’s RSV bible for rolling paper for a spliff, pinching the end just as Oliver walks in. He stamps the snow off his boots and Michael lights the spliff. A long banner of smoke tumbles sullenly from his lips. He offers the spliff to Oliver.

Coughing, ‘I think we should get an animal,’ says Oliver.

‘What do you mean?’

‘A dog, or maybe a cat.’

‘I thought you meant like a zoo animal, like some sort of wild beast.’

‘No, a pet. Obviously.’

‘The way you said “an animal” made it sound like you wanted some sort of wild beast.’

‘No-one wants a wild beast.’

‘Maybe I want a wild beast. Did you ever consider that?’

Michael shrugged. ‘Just kidding. We could get a cat, I guess.’

peeks yellow through the underbrush

and, humid, presses humid life into the earth and chews crawling vines

rattles in time with

a living continent on its nightly tracks

‘But you would have to feed it and take it with you when you leave.’

After a while, ‘I’ve been wondering a lot… about whales. The largest animals in the world eat the smallest animals in the world.’

‘There’s definitely something smaller than plankton,’ said Michael.

‘Is plankton the same as krill?’

‘I don’t know, man.’

‘They’re carnivores but they graze like herbivores. That’s evolution.’

A few last words of the prophets crumpled into ash and dropped on the couch. You and shalt and number. The neighbors upstairs are fighting again, and their baby, or the baby across the hall, starts to cry.

‘For the longest time I couldn’t tell if that was a baby or a really annoying tea kettle.’

***

Describe

in endless circular variation the cult of vertigo

and electric

light EVOE EVOE EVOE

have flesh in the
dark bone of wokenness

see the rot of life, the sharpness of machinery

and when your mind is soft and serious

your dreams are turning inside out and

HOW

UNEARTHLY LAMPS

INTERACT WITH THE

CROSS-LACED

SENSES

INSIDE THE

FRAGILE

ECHO CHAMBER

OF YOUR

SKULL

It is loud.
It comes in roaring.

Giving up on sleep, he pulls his laptop onto the mattress with him and scrolls down Netflix for a while until a harsh light stabs into him and he snaps the laptop shut.

‘Are you ok?’

‘Turn the light down.’

Oliver is kneeling next to his bed. ‘I brought you some water.’

‘Thanks.’ He sits up and rubs his temples, where the pulse is throbbing like a broken bone. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘I don’t know, I felt like something was wrong.’

‘That’s… creepy. But thanks for the water.’

‘Really though, are you alright?’

‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘I’ve just been thinking. About Greek tragedy.’

‘Ok,’ says Oliver. If he is confused he doesn’t show it. He presses his fingers, pleasantly cool, to the sides of Michael’s brow and smooths back his curls.

‘Not all tragic characters are created equal,’ says Michael, leaning into the touch. ‘Human beings work at cross purposes, against each other and against themselves, constantly bending around events and their own flaws like comets caught in a planet’s orbit. And then a god shows up and cuts straight through the lacework. He does what he does, the action of the play doesn’t affect him at all.’

He cups his hands over Michael’s eyes. ‘What do you see?’

‘Sun spots. Static.’

‘What else?’

‘I see myself or the shadow of myself against a wall, like a puppet show. And the shadow of bull’s horns.’

‘What else?’

‘Nothing else. I don’t see anything. Get your hands off me.’

‘Michael, I’m neither a faith healer nor an exorcist.’

‘Don’t need you to be. I just need an audience.’

‘Ok, I’m listening.’ He sits back on his heels and Michael settles into half lotus.

‘Let’s say it’s like three centuries before the birth of Christ. And let’s say you’re a student at the Library of Alexandria, and your teacher is a librarian and a poet and a geographer of human knowledge, and he calls you into his office one night and the window is open. It’s hot. The window isn’t helping much. It just lets in the smell of jasmine and mud and frankincense, and roasting meats, and camel shit, and distant shouting in a language you don’t understand because you are Greek. Your teacher has a beard and watery eyes, God, he probably hasn’t been outside since he was your age, and you’ve read everything he’s written. You wonder if his cock has the same papery skin. “The age of grandeur is gone, my dear,” he says to you, “and it won’t come again. We live in a world where goodness and greatness hold no currency at all, and in this new world-” He steps closer and you wonder if it’s true what they say about the ontology of souls. “In this new world.” he says, “it is the clever who shall cut their way as if with a knife through the webs of empire.” “Do you believe that?” you say. “You’re a clever boy,” he says.

‘Later he tells you that you have something of the holy morning about you. You think that’s a phrase from Homer but you don’t ask. You walk from the Botany room to the shelves of New Comedy and there is ink on your hands and the library swims in disconsolate blue. You pass a window and through it you see the underworld glow of the lighthouse and you hear the cooing of a bird, not an owl, some sort of nocturnal dove, and though they are fading into dawn, when you press your hand to the windowsill you feel the tremor of the stars and planets moving onwards in their ceaseless geometry. “I am always looking for the beginnings of things,” he says. “I’ve found many already and they seem like history but really they are hope. We have nothing left but history and that is our greatest strength. That and our knowledge that we have been lied to.”’

He asks Oliver to go get him an ibuprofen. He complies and Michael opens his mouth, and Oliver sets the round wine-colored pill on his tongue and pinches his lips closed until he swallows.

***

‘A penny saved is a penny stuck in this interminable boho hell… Jesus, I’ve got to get out of this city.’

‘Why do you live here? All you and your friends ever talk about is how much you hate it here. If it’s so hard, why don’t you move somewhere else?’

‘Literally impossible. I’m one of those annoying concepts that doesn’t exist outside the five boroughs.’

‘Just wondering.’

Across the street, a little girl is drawing on her window in marker. She draws a thicket of purple spirals, and a stick figure with fluffy blue hair, smiling and tugging on the bottom of her shirt. Over the stick figure’s face, she draws a tic tac toe grid and starts filling it with blue x’s. A woman appears in the room behind her and offers the girl a green marker. She takes it and finishes the grid with green o’s.

‘Michael, your phone’s blowing up.’ At the same time the buzzer rings.

‘Will you go down and let him in? The thing’s broken.’

‘Who is it?’

‘No-one, just go let him in.’

While he is gone, Michael hangs up his coat and Oliver’s next to the door, throws a stack of newspapers into the paper Whole Foods bag he keeps for recycling, dumps the contents of a glass ashtray into the trash, and retrieves his stash box, spoon, and scale from under the bed. A little spills. He pinches it up off the floor and sniffs it in, and feels like a king whose feet are sinking through rotten wood.

Oliver comes back with Luke Franklin, a handsome, kind of dumb guy who Michael had met at a house party a few months ago and hooked up with in the bathroom while someone outside banged on the door. They became sort of friends after that even though (or because) Luke was apparently too drunk to remember them hooking up.

‘Hey, I did something really stupid,’ he says. ‘Can I tell you?’

‘Please do, you know I wait on bated breath to hear your latest antics.’

‘I overdrafted my account at Whole Foods-’

‘You have an account at Whole Foods? I didn’t know you could do that.’

‘What? No, I mean my bank account. I bought this giant thing of chia seeds and it put me over the edge and now I have no money until I get paid on Tuesday.’

‘Couldn’t you have just, like, returned the chia seeds?’

‘Dude,’ he said. ‘That seriously never occurred to me.’

‘Of course not.’

‘Anyway, I was hoping you could throw me an eight-ball or two for the weekend? I swear I’m good for it. On Tuesday.’

‘Are you serious? No way.’

‘Come on, man!’

‘No way. Do you know how lucky you are to have me, that you can even walk into my home and ask me something like that? Have you even watched The Wire?’

‘I’m sorry, I’m just like, in a really tight spot. And you know I could-’

‘If you say you’ll trade chia seeds for cocaine, I am actually going to throw myself out the window.’

‘Ok but I’ll pay you on Tuesday, promise.’

‘One gram. That’s it.’

‘He’s just bitter because he has two first names,’ Michael tells Oliver after Luke leaves.

Across the street the little girl is gone and the tic tac toe board is lost in a blue scribble. ‘Did you know,’ he says, ‘that the Greeks had no word for the color blue? The wine-dark sea, the bronze sky, it’s so poetic, we say, and it is poetic but it was also all they had to describe it. They didn’t have a lot of color words, actually.’

‘You know it will be on your head if something happens to that boy.’

‘Luke? What are you talking about, he’s fine.’

‘You fed him poison. It’s your responsibility if he hurts himself with it.’

Michael snaps the box shot, picks up the spoon and licks the white residue off it, his face giving no indication of the stark bitter taste. ‘Luke’s a grown-up, he does his own thing.’

***

Fucking lame party. He would never be there if it weren’t for the chance of making a few bucks. Mariana lets him in and they go straight to the bathroom, where he gives her two tabs of molly and an 8-ball of coke, and she gives him a wad of twenties.

‘Don’t go yet,’ she says, tapping out a thumbprint-sized patch of coke onto the back of her phone and chopping it with a Just Salads gift card. ‘I’ve had the worst fucking week. I need to quit my job, my boss is a crazy bitch. She’s on some sort of power trip, I swear.’

‘Are you still working for that photo lady?’

‘No, that lasted all of ten minutes. This is a different photo lady, the studio’s over in Chelsea and I swear to God, if I have to pick up her antidepressants from the creepy pharmacy on Avenue A — which is, for some reason-’ Mariana pulls her flattened, faux salt-and-pepper bob out of the way and snorts. ‘-for whatever reason is the only one she’ll use, and her fucking customized order from Liquiteria. I did not make it all the way through Oberlin for this bee-ess.’

Michael takes his line. Immediately he never wants to talk to Mariana again, but she’s a good customer and they have been friends for a couple years.

‘That and I caught Matt cheating again. Walked into my own apartment and he was fucking this anorexic bitch from my yoga class. I’m like, “What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ and he’s like, “You gave me the keys.”’

‘Who’s Matt?’

Her lip pops open like a heart valve. ‘My boyfriend, Matt. What other Matt would I be talking about?’

‘I thought you were dating someone else, I don’t know.’

‘My own apartment, for fuck’s sake.’

Mariana seems upset and leaves in a hurry. The couple that comes into the bathroom next, before Michael can get out, are also friends of his. They greet him very warmly, with many Heeeey’s and H’ohhhhh’s like drunk sailors on shore leave. The guy and girl are very drunk, and overpay him by five bucks.

When he comes out the music is louder, some sort of squelchy acid house, and more people have arrived. He can’t figure out which way he came from, so he takes a beer from a stray table and drifts into what turns out to be the kitchen. Ryan is there, one of those LA kids. He is just back from a trip to Spain with his boss, though it isn’t clear whether it was a work trip or he’s having a crazy affair with his boss. Michael also can’t hear half of what he’s saying. With a series of awkward hand gestures he conveys this to Ryan and they go out into the hall. There he goes through the whole story again. Work trip, no affair, to Michael’s disappointment.

‘But it’s been ages!’ he says. His ear gauges flash in the dim light like the wet noses of small hungry beasts. ‘What have you been up to? Look, I’ve been talking for like twenty minutes straight.’

‘Same old, you know, broke and increasingly disillusioned with the Jazz Age.’

‘Are you still in business?’

‘Yeah, want something?’

‘I want everything, Michael. Just let me run to the ATM. Is there one on Myrtle? Are we on Myrtle? And then we’re going to have a cigarette and you can tell me everything about your life.’

And that, and related events, is how Michael finds himself pockets lined and coked to the gills in a stranger’s apartment matching Ryan and two of his pastel-haired LA friends shot for shot with Ariel Zetina throbbing over the smoky tableau. He is a jittery wheel of arms. If he could draw a self-caricature right now it would be mostly white teeth and sweaty eyelids, toothy white laugh.

Gross. He pours his last shot down his throat and leaves the room. Again he can’t figure out the layout of this apartment. It seems to go on forever. Not only can’t he find the door, he can’t find his coat and he can’t find the bathroom, and he has to pee like a motherfucker. He walks around for what seems like, if not hours, a really long time to be walking around a single apartment, before finally he recognizes a print on the door. He knocks and enters.

Closing the door behind him he paws the wall for the light switch but when he turns it on it isn’t the bathroom. He is on the roof.

Manhattan glows in the distance over a flat, dark expanse of roofs. He sucks in the cold smell of laundromat chemicals. Someone says his name and he notices three girls sitting in a circle on tipped over milk crates. The girls look exactly the same, even though they have different colored hair and different faces and one of them is kind of fat. One pats the top of a fourth milk crate and he goes and sits on it.

He always knew it would happen like this.

‘We’re extended cousins,’ she says. ‘I mean extended family, distant cousins, us three. We just found out.’

‘Do you tell fortunes?’ he says. He smiles.

They all laugh. ‘We do,’ says the kind of fat one. ‘Give me your palm.’ He offers his left hand. ‘Are you a leftie?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Ok. You will build a fortune based on cattle but you will never again eat beef.’

‘That’s cool, I’m vegan.’

The next girl takes his hand. ‘Later in life you will travel to an island where everyone is born standing up.’

‘Like, the mothers give birth standing, or the babies?’

‘Both. The babies come out feet first and land and walk away. You marry one of the local women and have three children with her and they’re all born standing up.’

The third girl takes his hand. ‘Oh, you drown your children. I’m sorry. You’re going to get sick of them and throw them in the sea.’

‘Fuck you!” He pulls away his hand and they laugh again.

‘You’re part of the family now,’ one of them says. ‘I think it’s time we took this to the next level, the fun powder level.’ She takes out her wallet and from it a small plastic bag.

‘I love fun powder level. What powder?’ It’s already up his nose, burning a little. He passes the bag along.

‘Ket, I think? No, this is the combo bag.’ They pass it around like a shared eyeball.

‘I didn’t like that kid who came up here earlier,’ one girl says. ‘The other one was ok, but he had a thumb for a face.’

‘Guys,’ he says very slowly. ‘I have to pee.’

‘Go off the edge. It’s right there. Like literally, right there. Literally right there.’

‘That’s disgusting, I’m not going to-’

They groan, they throw back their heads, they screech like crows.

‘Ok. I’m going. Then I’m coming back.’

‘It the-opposite-of-sucks to be a boy,’ he hears someone say as he leaves.

He goes to the edge of the roof and pees off it. Footsteps behind him as he zips up. It’s one of the three girls. She taps his elbow and points to a cluster of stars. He has never seen so many and so bright, except deep in the wilderness. ‘That’s the Pleiades,’ she says. ‘Only constellation I know.’

‘Me too. That and the Big Dipper. Or maybe the Little Dipper. I’m not sure.’

‘The Big Dipper’s really big.’

‘Really fucking big.’

The Pleiades glimmer in their purple flare like a distant wad of spit.

At some point he becomes aware of classical music. The violin is clear beyond all belief, until a window slams shut and the sound is muffled. He paws for the light switch but when he finds it it’s all a nightmarish yellow and when he reaches to the doorknob the door has flipped upside and he stumbles out onto the ceiling through crowds of human stalactites. A Tchaikovsky piano solo kicks loud through the pedals of his ears.

Something under his feet is punctured and the floor sinks back to its normal alignment below the ceiling. Shivering off a chill sweat, he dabs at his nostrils, expecting blood. There’s only a thin, clear liquid on his knuckle.

Luke Franklin is there, fussing with the iPhone plugged into the speakers. He sees Michael and, smiling wide, gives him a genial thump on the shoulder. ‘Hey man, how’s it going?’

‘I’m ok, I’m ok,’ says Michael.

‘Hey, thanks so much for the yayo, totally saved this weekend. Do you want a line?’

‘You know, I think I’m good. Thanks though.’

‘Right, obviously. But for real, you rock.’

‘Anytime. I mean, just this once and really, just this once. But you’re welcome.’ Michael can’t tell if Luke, with his big grin like a handsome, tripped-out labrador, is going for a hug or a high-five so they end up shaking hands.

Luke disappears into the panorama. He stays, caught up in the history of purple curtains

that have hung themselves where there were no purple curtains before — curtains over the windows and between the windows — he hadn’t noticed before that the whole room was draped in purple velvet. Rich, saturated. Is this Twin Peaks? Without thinking much of it he picks up the iPhone plugged into the speakers and changes the song.

As he moves from room to room he has the sensation of sinking into a dark cave or tunnel. Sometimes he emerges to a pinpoint below the open sky, the Milky Way in its circular perfection spinning above him, and compass marks directing the twitchy course of clouds. Then he comes to himself digging nails into the wallpaper. He watches the moon in its flickering circle around the sun, like the hands of the Vitruvian man. He realizes then that he is still standing where Luke left him.

There he wipes a bead of clear fluid tinged with blood from his nose.

He moves from room to room, holding his hands out in front of him, pale like the hands of ghosts, with the sensation of sinking into a dark cave or tunnel. He can’t make out what anyone is saying but they all look at him out of the corners of their eyes. His feet stick, his knees snap back, he is moving in some ritual pattern in the uncanny valley between walking and running. He sees a girl in a black dress with a red band around the tits. She glances at him and turns back to her date; her cigarette and his beer can lean close towards each other. He thinks she might be one of the girls from the roof but he can’t be sure. Another girl has red shoes. Her dark hair reaches toward them as she leans her head back and laughs.

A playing card flips through the air, slow-motion like a shot from a movie about Las Vegas. It’s just a trick of the light. He hears his pulse and wonders why it too is so freaking slow.

At some point Oliver received two text messages from Michael. The first: “help I don’t know who I am.” The second one an address.

An old homeless man gets on the L with Oliver, takes off his hat and announces that he has fallen on hard times. He walks the length of the car twice. Oliver gives him change both times. The man stops and leans against a pole, counts the change in his hat and then pours it into a black plastic bag. Since the car is almost empty, Oliver tries to strike up a conversation, but the old man stares at him with a look of blank disgust.

He gets off at Morgan, where he trudges through deep snow and the wind whistles through his clenched teeth. The door to the building is propped with a dustpan and he goes upstairs until he finds an apartment where he can hear music behind the door. He knocks and it opens. It is dark inside and crowded. He searches through several narrow, smoke-filled rooms. No-one speaks to him or acknowledges his presence, even when he bumps into a girl and causes her drink to spill. The music is very loud and it seems to be coming from all around, piped through hidden speakers in the walls.

By this time Michael is holding court in the main room, a dozen eyes lit with the old methylamphetamine glow tracking his every move. ‘the most insidious thing about advertising is that it trains us to brace against art: see something pretty, assume it’s trying to sell you something.
Nevertheless — we could, I think, make beautiful synesthetic love.

matching the impossible beat like a rubber band

You are turning
around on sand — you are thirteen years old, very large
knees. You squint. Saltwater drips from your bangs.
Your friend is a child like you. You walk hot-
footed on the gritty bar between the road and the grass along
the side of the road. The other beach glimmers like the end
of a tunnel. A doe and fawn appear
blurrylegged in the road crossing. They twitch their tails, bend
their knees. You swat
a mosquito on your arm. He falls behind
to take a picture with a disposable camera.
You go out late at night to look at the stars but it’s cloudy and he shivers under a sleeping bag. Ten years later go there again. You take a ferry and lean out
over the rail over the blurry back of Leviathan.

So pretty much all I know about safety in the kitchen is:
use a big enough knife, use a sharp knife, and don’t burn yourself.’

Oliver comes to him and shakes him. ‘Time to go,’ he says.

‘Leave me alone,’ says Michael and pushes him away, and when he does he sees his own shadow splayed on the wall as two huge, ravenous wings spread from his shoulders and shake open and prick each side of the room with their pinions. ‘Leave me alone,’ he says.

‘Yeah,’ says one of the kids. ‘Who the fuck are you?’

‘I’m his friend,’ said Oliver.

‘Stop this nonsense!’ says Michael, dashing his cigarette on the ground. He gets up and lurches towards the stereo. ‘Show some goddamned respect! The lot of you! What is this? You’re sick! You’re all sick! Look at all this mess, my God, how long has this been going on? Who’s allowed this?’

The impressionable fools who have been listening all mutter and shift nervously, unsure how to react. He stops the music and puts on a set of forlorn karaoke guitar chords. Improbable but a simple search will turn them up. Stepping up on a box of 32 beer cans, he begins to sing, “O say can you see…”

Just the sort of perverse logic he’s always warned himself against. He’s really belting it out now, a fine tenor if he drank a few more raw eggs, maybe. It’s too late to stop, he’s gathering momentum towards the final high G which will make or break his career. The audience glazey and blurred on a tipping floor. A gong, drowning him out. Oliver pulls him off the box, and he chokes.

They watch him take Michael away, all these beautiful kids, in their spikes and gauges and gentle tattoos, their drooping lips, crosslegged and bowing and passing a joint and smacking on gum. You are all terrible, Michael tries to say on the way out. He is having trouble walking. After one flight of stairs he tries to go back, protesting that he has forgotten his keys, but he can’t stand without leaning on Oliver. His dark Caravaggio hair is unkempt, greasy. This is what Oliver says when they got outside:

‘You should be ashamed.’ And this is what Michael says:

‘I tasted blood. It was red. It came to earth long before we did.’ And what he actually says was:

‘Ok, cool, but I’m not. Cool story though, just keep on, just keep on doing you.’ And he comes close to Oliver and leans in and touches him in the chest: ‘They would have picked you for a work of art.’

***

Late night, almost dawn.

Far from sleep, he shivers, even with Oliver’s body wrapped around him. Friends don’t let strung-out friends freeze to death, in under-heated apartments in winter.

He had allowed Oliver to peel off his snow-soaked coat and sweat-soaked clothes, down to the damp socks, and accepted the dry t-shirt and sweatpants laid in his arms, the toothbrush and glass of water thrust into his hands. He hadn’t even complained about Oliver’s fluoride toothpaste, blue like nothing made by mother Earth.

Now his mouth is full of chemicals and chemicals drip bitter down his throat and his mind reaches wires into the air, shorting out here and there in static bursts.

‘Hey Alyosha, are you awake?’ Nibbles on Oliver’s ear. He shifts and groans. ‘I was just thinking-’

A sudden collision. Oliver is kissing him. A hand rough on the back of his head. He is pinned down, shakes open, lies flat on the cutting board.

‘Do you ever stop?’

Something very old is moving and the pregnant moon rises, full of wine. Fill your cups, close your eyes.

***

The new cat is round and orange. He has round eyes and goofy round jowls. When Michael scratches the tender spine above his floating ribs, he rolls on his back and stares his orange and white owl face up at Michael and Oliver.

‘Look at this little piece of carbon,’ says Michael. ‘Just think, he was created by a chemical reaction within two other animals who didn’t want him. His parents just wanted to get laid. Then his mother realizes in whatever cat way cats realize these things that she needs to nest up, and she puts so much energy into this little guy and his little brothers and sisters, and she protects them because even though they’re all the same to the world, they’re her genetic material and if her ancestors didn’t have the instinct to defend their genetic material, she wouldn’t be around to defend hers. And then they go off to propagate their own genetic material. Look for more organic matter to consume for energy. This guy was picked up off the street or dumped onto it, just another hungry animal trying to take care of himself. No-one’s ever wanted him before in his life.’

‘I wonder where his brothers and sisters are now,’ says Oliver.

‘I know, right?’

He scratches the cat on the bridge of his nose, the third-eye point where the hairs change direction. His front feet paddle the air like drowning fins.

***

Michael loads Spotify and puts on Nicola Cruz and then he and Oliver fuck for the next half hour and then he smokes a cigarette.

And remember that Pentheus was a slim young lad who could pass for a girl in a good dress. Yet he too was thunderstruck.

Oliver rolls over and says something about how the new term has started two weeks ago and he would be in deep shit even if he goes back today. Michael says he doesn’t really care, which he thought would piss him off, but he just mutters something about needing a new Metrocard. It is late afternoon and the room feels like a collapsed lung. Tossing the covers off, Michael goes to the bathroom and splashes himself with cold water. When he gets back Oliver is at the window, wrapped in sheets, staring out like a cat pining for a bird. ‘I’ve got to go,’ he says.

‘Ok,’ says Michael.

***

how beautiful you
are in the morning when you
are cold and thirsty!
how you bought apples and crushed them –
how you woke me crunching seeds in your teeth, as you nod back and forth between the ideas of the night before –
you whistle and tap your chair against the wall.

***

They wind up arguing all along the glossy aisles of the Whole Foods in Union Square. It’s crowded as ever at 8 in the evening, and the basket knocks shamefully against his hip as they weave through. He picks through mangoes and avocados, the ones with skin like alligators, the others with skin like dry frogs.

‘Every religion preaches peace, Michael, you know that. They don’t all carry through.’

When the genome formed by the creative recombination of the genes of Oliver’s mother and father, and Michael’s too, started growing its protein vehicle it provided certain instructions. It was the most successful genome of all its line since the beginning of life on earth. So far as it knew the instructions it was passing down were the instructions for growing the perfect human. Each piece grew exactly to the size, shape, and texture that it requested. These, as far as it knew, were the best possible options for those parts. It would be proud, insofar as genomes can feel pride, every minutes of the body’s continued existence, right up until the moment when it become clear that the body it built, that lovingly instructed body, would die without children. It would probably feel, insofar as genomes can feel, a sensation that was equal parts surprise and embarrassment, and disappointment.

Michael is frustrated and the yellow lighting is ugly. He tells Oliver to take his time while he waits outside.

If he had thought about how cold it was he would have stayed in Whole Foods. Smoking makes him sick. He sits down, goes for a sip of coffee but the cup is empty. His back is to the Metronome but it ticks in his second sight and the same old Animal Collective song is stuck in his head. Men and women hurry past to places they want to be, trying to keep their feet from slipping and their throats from freezing. Deep below the cement shakes with trains filled with bodies like veins swarming with red blood cells and white blood cells and platelets and viruses.

When he was a child he thought that freight trains and quicksand were going to be much more a part of his life than they turned out to be.

‘See on the globe,’ he says, checking if he remembers a poem he had to memorize in the sixth grade, ‘the bread of America
tracing the shape of continents
at the arcade
Rediscovering Charlemagne
popular in French high schools
Remember to tell her you had a temporal lobe seizure at the pencil factory.
That’s a building in Greenpoint,’ he remembered, ‘across from where
they’re always filming TV shows.’

He looks up and a middle-aged woman is standing in front of him. She is all bundled up like a fat package against the weather except for her feet, which are set in dainty black kitten heels with pointed toes. Silently, she bends over and slips a dollar bill into the paper cup. Then she swings her purse around, takes out a Cliff bar and slips that into the cup too.

‘Thank you, ma’am,’ he says.

Just then Oliver shows up. He looks in confusion between Michael and the lady. ‘Good evening, father,’ she says.

‘Good evening, ma’am,’ he says. She goes off towards the subway entrance, kitten heels making a high-pitched clip-clop against the sidewalk. Michael puts the dollar bill and Cliff bar in his pocket and winks at Oliver.

It turns out that he has to run uptown before going home. Oliver grumbles about it, saying they don’t have to, and Michael saying he does have to, and needing to swipe his card twice and accidentally slinging the Whole Foods bag into the turnstile bar when he doesn’t yield the first time.

He realizes then that he is not where he thought he was.

Squinting, lying on his back, he opens his eyes. Oliver leaning over him. ‘Keep looking at the light, Michael,’ he says. ‘Don’t look away.’
But just then, with sandalwood, and wood from the Holy Land,

It is very bright, white light above him. He tries to hold onto it, but he slips, then falls, and he is back in Union Square.

‘I’m not where I thought I was,’ he says. ‘What?’ says Oliver.

‘It’s not…’

‘Uptown 6, I thought you said.’

‘What? No, I mean… never mind. Uptown 6.’

They trudge on through the accumulated debris of hundreds and thousands of commuting shoes. There is snow from the banks of the sidewalks and icy grit from the sidewalks and water from the two combined and melted underfoot, and salt from the streets, and mud from wherever mud comes from in a city with not that much dirt, and bits of sticks, again, from wherever bits of sticks come from, and cigarette butts and gum wrappers and, near the police area, a garishly orange condom, things like that. Things that everyone carries around with them without thinking, and constantly exchanges as things fall out and other things fall in. It’s like the bottom of your shoe is a world eternally taking in bits of energy as lifeforms are born and spitting them back out as the die.

Michael takes a deep breath and focuses on how cold and miserable he is. They wait three minutes for the train in bitter silence.

***

All up and down Second Avenue women’s high heels clip clop like the hooves of an aristocratic draught animal. Men’s shoes hit the pavement like wallets. He stops to talk to an NYU student who is back for his sixth year. ‘Honestly I have like zero incentive to graduate,’ he says.

‘It’s the worst,’ says Michael.

‘What would I even do with myself? Law school?’

He has been in California all winter and shows Michael a tattoo on his arm that he had gotten on the spur of the drunken moment. It is a little pink around the edges, which he explained was because he had gone out to the beach too soon after getting it, but that would fade before long.

Luke Franklin’s sister is working in a bar off St. Mark’s where he stops for a shot of whiskey. He is the only customer, at 2 in the afternoon on a Wednesday, and she takes a shot with him. The heating is broken. She says the dentist’s office upstairs is a sauna but down in the bar the ice cubes never melted. She also says that Luke had overdosed on molly and gone to the hospital last weekend. He is ok now, though.

***

Snow drifts from the ceiling and gathers in scaly tufts along the floor. Michael kicks at it. ‘This is the work of God,’ says Oliver. ‘This is the work of man,’ says Michael.

***

‘I’m writing myself into the grave,’ he complains bitterly. There is frost on the window and he tips his knee against it. Oliver is sorting bills. They still get many directed towards the people who lived here before Michael moved in, though it has been almost a year. ‘This month is very pale pink, like birthday cake, don’t you see?’

***

The door stays closed. He wants to keep the weird, smoky air far away from the cool normal air in the other room.

It’s just one of those days, he’s getting bad vibes from the outside, all very sharp and mechanical.

He pokes at the buds in his pipe, like tiny brussels sprouts. The lighter husks, the sprouts cave in, he draws deep into his lung their dreams of flame, and savors the gasoline aftertaste as the smoke changes its mind and goes back out into the world. He pulls up images of Brussels on his phone.

There’s something magic about these little European countries. Nineteenth-century fairy tale imperialist. Zurich looks the same way, and Luxembourg, the capital of which is apparently also called Luxembourg.

‘God,’ he mutters at Spotify, ‘You have such a complex.’ The music continues.

The cat jumps up on the bed, surprising because he had forgotten it was in there with him. It steps foot over foot towards him. Someone is knocking. He doesn’t really care, turning up the music a bit, though he wishes he had brought snacks in with him. The knocking continues and he shouts who is it.

Oliver comes in coughing, and the cat bolts off with its tail hoisted.

‘Did you hotbox this room?’

‘I’m really close to the window,’ he says.

Watch the little tongue of flame climb up the burning coral. The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog. Inhale, enjoy the gasoline, exhale.

‘I just wanted to say I — what is this music?’

‘It’s, like, reverbing, which is pretty cool.’

‘The wifi bill arrived.’

Michael grabs his chin and kisses him full on, with fear and tongue. He tries to press the incense and tasteless communion wafers back into him, tries to flood him with quiet places carved from old stone. The blue and white envelope falls to the floor. After Oliver has left he picks it up, and it isn’t the bill, just one of those spammy letters Time Warner sends out every so often to try and make you buy a landline.

***

He has a dream about galloping horses. Slick bay horses twisting and diving across a smooth green field. Riders in white and red bent off their backs and waved arms that rippled in a watercolor sky. He remembers speed and the sensation of being carried upside down a few feet above the earth.

He asks to read Oliver’s palms. Oliver says no. He doesn’t mind, he is late for work anyway. ‘Is it weird to like geocentricism? As a secular humanist?’ he says. ‘From a larger mathematical perspective, that of the galaxy, it doesn’t really which orbits the other. If things had gone slightly differently in the 16th century, we would have a slightly alternate history. But nothing else would be affected. A history in which everything is exactly the same except for this one small detail of astro-geometry.’ The Metrocard sticks in the reader and he slams into the toll bar.

Birds gotta swim, fish gotta fly. He wishes he could tell Spotify he always mutes their advertisements.

***

In the first light of the new year, Michael raises his nose to the smell of smoke in the low east 80’s. A siren cuts through the eerie quiet, and a firetruck blazes past him heading towards the river. He kicks at pebbles, night’s work over. Two avenue blocks later and he comes to four or five firetrucks parked around a sleek highrise. Smoke is pouring out of an upper window but there is no sound.

He keeps walking, to where the whoosh of cars on FDR Drive swells and subsides like waves over rocks, and past the ASPCA. A big tabby cat with one eye, curled up in the window, sits up and watches him go.

Long, slim clouds are drawn over the eggy blue sky like scratches from a much larger cat. Michael curls into the frostbitten core of himself, plying for warmth as Savonarola did one morning in February, stretching his thick, flat-tipped fingers towards the flames. Kids mill around and throw rocks and sticks into the fire. Heavy black and white Dominican robes snap like torn sails as a blast of wind runs through the piazza. The young friar holding up a makeshift processional cross hunches and clutches the thing tighter, splintery as it is. He had hewn it out of a young beech the night before.

Savonarola sways from side to side and belches. The children, boys mostly between the ages of eight and twelve, and a few dressed in colorless habit-like sacks, have started a lively game of tag around the pyre. The slaps of their bare feet echo around the piazza like the trotting of soft, velvet-covered hooves. One of them laughs, which stops Savonarola in his swaying, and at the same time a boy trips and falls right into the base where the big logs have not quite caught yet, at Savonarola’s feet.

The boys scream and scatter. Without missing a beat, the friar grabs the boy out of the ashes, lifting him into the air by the hood. He drops him. ‘Brush yourself off,’ he says. He brushes himself off. ‘That’s what you get for making light of piety,’ the friar addresses the prepubescent flock. A few smoldering pages drift down from the top of the pyre, and he kicks at them. An ember leaves a black burn on the strap of his sandal.

Sold dry, Michael has one more house call to make, for Luke Franklin. Luke lives on the fourth floor of a ratty walk-up, a building that crouches like a stubborn old man clenching his teeth among the flashy new co-ops and condos. Along the way Michael stops at a bodega to buy a pack of mints, and sucks on one while texting Luke that he’s on Luke’s block and is he around. Not having received an answer, he waits for a minute on the stoop and then presses the buzzer for the apartment that he thinks is Luke’s. The cold is really horrible and he wishes he was headed home already. After the whole night out, it seems his body can no longer provide any inner heat.

He texts Luke again: ‘Hey let me in’

This time it only takes a few seconds for Luke to reply, ‘what I’m sleeping’

‘Just checking are you doing better?’

‘yeah see you later’

Before putting his phone away, he notices it’s 7:24am. It hadn’t occurred to him that Luke might not be awake.

He hails a taxi going home, because the train could take forever on a holiday schedule, and fuck it. Speeding down the FDR, pastel sky colors reflected in unreal towers of glass, marveling at how windows, the undoing of buildings, were the most expensive, the most desired, highrises that turn to projects as the meter runs and Michael picks thoughtlessly at his seatbelt. He is penning a letter or a text message in his mind.

Mother, I’m in Rockland and I don’t know how I got here.
Mother, I’m dying.
Mother, I stole some things no-one will miss.
Tell them I love them, bodhisattvas of the world.

He rarely sees the apartment this close to sunrise. The windows all face east, and now the plain walls glow with a warm, loving white light, like someone had slightly overexposed and oversaturated a photo of his home. The exposed brick, normally a crumbling, embarrassing excuse for exposed brick, is ruddy and inviting. The place is misty-eyed.

‘Oliver?’ he shouts, letting his coat and keys fall. He stomps vigorously and pulls off his boots. ‘I’m back. You up?’

He is not. Yawning, dismantled, overgrown and upside-down Oliver moves wearily in a fuzzy Old Masters sunbeam. Michael flips the sheet off and flops down on the bed the wrong way. ‘Your feet smell,’ he says.

‘So do yours,’ says Oliver.