Читать книгу Palaces - Simon Jacobs - Страница 9

II.

MANHATTOSI

A YEAR AND A HALF LATER, IN A CITY TO THE northeast, you catch me easing out the entrance of the museum with my arms wrapped around a human-sized, 17th-century Japanese vase painted in pink and white flowers. It’s early summer and the heat is already trippy and oppressive; we’re awash in sweat and the new thrill of finally having a home base to return to, a domestic excuse for acquiring this artifact.

I’m about to topple from the weight, but suddenly you’re on the stone steps in front of me, skimming your hands over the glossy surface and running through your knowledge of lotus petals and cherry blossoms, the most symbolic of all flowers. I’m staring at the blackening tips of your fingernails, your scalp—the feathery ridge in the center, its tips barely clinging to color, the uneven fuzziness creeping in around it—and thinking about haircuts, about matters of personal hygiene, about showering using a sink.

“This vase is super heady,” you say. You point to a cherry blossom. “Transience”—dragging your finger along a painted whorl toward a lotus—“to resurrection.”

I tell you, distractedly, in the manner of filling conversational space, that the pattern of flowers reminds me of a fourteen-year-old’s idea for a sleeve tattoo, and it takes a second for me to remember that’s basically the design your brother who died in Iraq a year ago had on his arm, and that I’d picked this vase out, specifically, as a sort of memorial to him. I’d stood examining it in the empty gallery, certain that it reminded me of someone close to you, of death experienced at a distance. I remembered, and then promptly forgot.

To divert you from my blunder, I motion with my foot at a passing fashion disaster on the sidewalk, a skulking guy with a massive hiker’s backpack and crooked horizontal stripes shaved across his head, whose remaining hair looks like “the world’s worst corn maze.” It’s enough, and your reaction is bigger than I expect—a full-bodied, guttural laugh and half-collapse, you actually slap your knee, while the vase slips beneath my sweaty fingers—such that it, too, feels like overcompensating to fill polluted space. The man rounds the corner with his spoils, and we negotiate the remaining stairs with ours.

It takes over two hours to get the vase back to our building, and a superhuman effort to haul it from the basement to the third floor, the sounds of our struggle magnified through the stairwell and across the spaces between neighboring buildings, but the whole way no one says anything to us, no one asks about its provenance. That night, when we always pose the most sensitive questions, when we’re wrapped in our individual sleeping bags on the dusty floor like two little cocoons in the big big city, staring up at the crumbling ceiling cast by borrowed light through the empty windows, you ask if I took the vase—out of everything else available and still intact—because it reminded me of something.

It’s the perfect time to mention your brother or, more broadly, willpower itself—the reason we’re lying on this floor, the way we arrived here in the city—to bring up what we’re both denying. Instead, I reach over and brush a swoop of stray hawk from your forehead and say something about our derelict space needing an “aspect of Japan,” but it’s a non-sequitur like my Mia Farrow tattoo is a non-sequitur—thematically distinct from the objects around it. I say pointlessly, reiterating, though I’ve never been there, “It reminds me of Japan.” I say nothing about your hair.

*

Our last year in college, just after we moved together as a couple into the only apartment for which we ever paid rent, back in Richmond, on our first night we sat face-to-face on the second-hand couch and screamed at each other, the taped-up boxes and garbage bags and implements of our moving arrayed around us: no words, just long, sustained howls, repeated at different pitches and escalating volume until we both went hoarse. Your voice gave first—before our new neighbors started banging on the wall—but not by much. Like many of the gestures we made during that time, it recalled an animal claim about ownership, served as a marker of something (a living situation, a pair-bond) that we thought of as potentially permanent, despite the month-to-month lease and translucent white paint on the walls that hid no history, all of seven months between us and rival human life on every side. When I decided where to position the Japanese vase (which ended up being directly in the center of the living room, or what had once been the living room), you eyed it from the doorway to the stairwell like the presence of any furniture at all was an imposition, then took a running start and slammed into it just to prove the vase wouldn’t topple, that it could take the weight we gave it.

In this new space, our aspiration is to the appearance of abandonment. To the police, the urban adventurer, anyone else who ignored the weathered surveillance placards and bolted door and made their way to the third floor of this building, the vase would register as a solitary, unwieldy piece of decoration left behind by the previous occupants when they moved on, a token bit of randomness, like the single pristine stuffed animal unearthed from a demolished office complex, a sign that some-one had once cared. It wouldn’t betray us.

I’d looked forward to the anonymity of the city, its famous capacity for disappearance. The size really was beyond belief, and in the macro sense, true, I could die virtually without impact, but the promise felt unfulfilled—I hadn’t been able to vanish in the way that I wanted. The first time I rode the subway alone I’d felt noted and itemized, broken into parts; whenever I raised my eyes above my lap I’d seen the man across from me staring beneath his cap, and I sat there caught in a confused mess of acknowledgment, reading menace everywhere, wondering what the problem was, if I exhibited some kind of aberrance I didn’t recognize or had unknowingly breached a fundamental social contract between us, between me and this stranger, these strangers. I felt a tingling sensation pass from one extremity to the next, as if awaiting sudden blood flow, for a visible wound to re-open. I grew all at once more uncomfortable than I had with any cop. I crossed and uncrossed my legs. I watched his shoe—more of a workboot—but couldn’t raise myself any higher. He got off the train at the same stop I did, and I dawdled until he moved off ahead. A part of it was obvious and all too familiar—we’d been fashioning ourselves to look like outcasts since long before we knew each other—but this was supposed to be different.

There was something between us and the city that didn’t take. The facade of urban life was crumbling by the time we arrived, certain institutions had broken open for the taking, and as soon as we stepped off the bus, briefed in nothing, your empty car sitting in a lot X states away, we knew there was no way we were going to live according to someone else’s formula. The vase, an ancient object from a past entirely separate to ours, was as good a marker as a door. We entered and exited at will.

I’m someplace downtown, far from home, when I’m turned out again, sent blinking into the sunlight like someone who’s never seen it. I’m still learning to recognize the places that are patrolled versus those that are now left empty, but this one I entered on purpose, because the building positively bled luxury—stone beasts out front, deco columns into infinity, factory-level air conditioning you could feel from the street whenever the motion-activated doors slid open—and I was curious to see how deep I could go. In fact, I hadn’t even crossed to the bone-colored elevator bay when someone was following me, was communicating via earpiece, was putting his hand on my arm and leading me back to the street.

The stifling summer air hits me full-force, and a feverish dizziness rushes through my body at the sudden temperature shift. Behind me, the guard returns invisibly to his post. Before me, the rest of the day uncoils, filled with unspecified activity. We’ve been in the city for just over a month, the apartment for the last two weeks, and I still have no idea where anything is relative to anything else. I consider retreating to our building and waiting for you, but when I linger there for too long by myself the disrepair and lack of functionality starts to eat at me, as does my inability to address it, and our situation dissolves into an unstable mess of contradictory, half-assed morals, something we wrote too large too quickly, a ’90s squatter myth we were doing wrong. Our departure has felt like a given since before we arrived, since I reached into my backpack on the bus and realized I’d never owned a pocketknife.

A sickening wind blows across the city, and with it the unmistakable smell of baking garbage. The sidewalk is swarming. I watch the people dividing into pairs. A wasted kid in baggy tan clothes activates as a handsomely dressed young woman carrying black paper bags nears him. She pauses when he speaks to her and looks confused, tilting her head minutely, politely forward, like she can’t quite make out what he’s saying. I walk past them. After a minute she cuts him off and takes a few steps away in the other direction; he follows. She speeds up a little, quivering on her thick heels, and he matches her pace, continuing to talk while blocking her off, reaching one hand in front of her like, You haven’t decided where you’re going. I will them to separate, for the crowd to funnel in and redistribute them far apart, but they’re quickly lost in the traffic. I imagine how much our circumstances would have to change for us to switch positions, me with this kid, this woman.

Along the sidewalk, a placid stream of milky-colored water stagnates in the gutter—the summer must be the worst season. I pass a high-end lingerie store advertising scandalous underwear. A bare mattress lies discarded on the side of the street. I consider it theoretically, as a fixture in someone’s home somewhere in the past, sustaining their impact daily, now lobbed out among the populace. I’m amazed by how instantaneously everything can turn to funhouse-like squalor. I could close my eyes, open them, and everything would be different.

A spanging couple is camped under an awning with a sleeping dog and a cardboard sign offering hugs. The dog looks like a prop. I raise my hand to my face as I walk past, really my stretched earlobe, our visual match. I can’t tell if they acknowledge me.

When they’re out of sight, I close my eyes, and take eight steps in the dark. The experience is extremely disorienting, but in a pleasantly weightless way, especially when I don’t immediately collide with anyone. It’s liberating to think that, if I make myself willfully blind, people will make the effort to steer clear. I open my eyes, and voila, it’s you, ten feet ahead, walking with your back to me.

You’re dressed in the type of outfit I haven’t seen since the months just after we met, clothes I didn’t even realize you’d brought to the city: Converse, skinny jeans, a studded belt, and patched leather jacket (ridiculous in the heat), hair combed off to one side, glared by the shaved parts in the sun (mohawk at rest). It strikes me as gratuitous, this ensemble and its impeccable presentation, like a tailored denial of where I thought we stood, of the austerity to which we aspired. A kernel of resentment forms. A cop passes by my left shoulder, spares you a long look. I wonder why you chose today to trot it out—that’s the phrase I use in my head, “trot it out,” like goods on display—and from this distance, the whole of you, your posture looks different: I notice the way you take each step with just an instant of deliberation, a crackling bounce, as if the shoes are brand new and you’re still settling into them, as if this is the first day out in your new disguise. It’s strange to assess under these conditions, like you’re the subject of some basic surveillance, like I’m just one among the many, but, apart and unnoticed, this is what I do. Perversely, I feel like I’m the one being checked up on, like I couldn’t be trusted to take this neighborhood on my own, to reliably pass on the data. I follow you at a distance; I get caught up in it, crouch a little like the caricature of a detective, turn it into a game between me and your obliviousness to my presence.

It’s unclear how long I keep following after I realize the woman ahead isn’t you. Surely, we draw parallel long after I understand that the bearing, the accessories aren’t yours at all. I pick up my pace on the sidewalk, crossing against a light ahead of her, now making directly for the subway but without a specific destination in mind. Just in front of me, a couple approximately our age walks holding hands. As I pass them, I lightly squeeze her free hand and then let it go—a glancing touch, noticeable but unmentioned. It’s a small betrayal, an act of revenge for your absence, for my own misplaced recognition.

Underground, the train is packed enough that I’m still sweating like crazy, despite the air conditioning. I collapse into an empty space on the bench. The people to either side of me shift, and I worry that I’m starting to get that smell, the smell of days spent sweating through the same clothes. At the next stop, the center of the car clears out and I notice that the family sitting across from me—an entire family! mother, father, little boy and girl—are wearing surgical face masks, and all I can think to myself is Finally.

Three stops later—the family gone now, the car emptying—the train stalls at the station. The doors hang open. After a few minutes, I notice there’s commotion in the car behind us. I hear shouting. I look through the window behind me and see people spilling out of the train onto the platform. The conductor comes on over the speakers: “Ladies and gentlemen, we apologize for the delay. A child has been left on the train.”

I stand abruptly and exit the car, an odd ache in my chest. I walk up the platform beside the train, past a ring of onlookers and transit officials with their hands at their hips, clustered around this narrative of abandonment, guilt passing from face to face as the responsibility is shifted from one person to the next, as their humanity is tested. I’m surprised to find myself walking again beside the woman from the street above, who looks like old you. Other than the concerned crowd at one end, the station isn’t busy, and I walk approximately behind her for most of the length of the train, still paused. Inside, at every car, every open door, there’s a man standing: one by one, I watch each of them turn their heads to watch her, as if connected on a series of tripwires or pulled by something beyond their control, each taking a piece. The doors slide closed at last, and a final face rotates in the window, observing from a tank. The train barrels out of the station. Far behind me, the gathered crowd disperses, nothing at its center. I imagine the tunnel filled with water, the eyes drowned and blank. We walk up the stairs, the tiled walls punctuated with posters of missing people.

A mild panic of disorientation takes me at the corner on the street above, having exited at a stop I don’t recognize, the traffic insistent in all four directions. The past version of you moves off with authority, and for a second—for the moment where I see just the top of her hair in the crowd—an old impulse nudges me to intervene. She disappears, and my recognition spreads to the rest of the street, skewed younger, toward my generation. Shifting from one face to another, I make inadvertent eye contact with a blonde girl, broadly familiar. I break it; the way I let my eyes fall to the ground, skittering over her body, makes it feel as though I’ve regressed by years, like I’ll have to start all the way over, to re-teach myself how not to make these judgments. I blur my eyes until they—her and everyone—become teeming, indistinct shapes, straining as hard as possible to black out my gaze.

When I described my first subway encounter to you later, the staring man, you looked at me incredulously, like I knew nothing: these experiences had been your whole life. “What decade do you live in? Are you an ascetic?” you said. “It’s a body. We’re all being watched. Have you ever considered the use of lipstick? It’s basically a bullseye for your cock.” It was declarations like these—combative, associatively broad but unequivocal—that had drawn us together, had tonally linked us, and around us had built a wall against the world.

Three hours after someone’s child disappears underground we reconnoiter at the apartment, new and disparate parts of the city poorly configured in our heads: today, you’ve been to the west, to slaughterhouses converted in recent decades to boutiques and gourmet dining. We fuck against the vase, our hands on its sides like a third party, a coolant wherever we touch it. Your breath fogs up the porcelain. I watch your fingers clench on its surface, tensing and unbending, the wrinkles flexed open at each joint, like bright wounds among the encroaching dirt gray. I’ve been to the library downtown, making use of the public bathrooms and reading up on the vase’s origins and those of its kind, trying to put together what I didn’t take from the plaque on the gallery wall. I whisper “Satsuma” in your ear, like an exhalation, a new word that’s not your name but is actually a Japanese pottery style tailor-made for export, for Western consumption. The vase is probably not as old as I originally thought. In the end, the ways we each spend our days reduce down to the same thing, making maps of places we’ll never visit again; a product of Japan is the same as a product of America. You wear the dirt like it’s something you earned, but we didn’t fall into this, we didn’t end up here by accident. We jumped.

*

Our first week in the apartment, before we turn off our phones and find the vase, you read online—a link to the Richmond newspaper via a wayward text from someone you haven’t heard from in a year—that Casey, the grinning, perpetually buzzed, hoop-eared kid from the old crowd, the kid we’d shot fireworks at the night we met, has died in a car wreck. The article is non-committal, but the shape of the thing is obvious: he and a friend, whose name you don’t recognize, in a parent’s borrowed car on eastbound 70 and fully blazed, sailed obliviously off the road and across the grassy divide between highway lanes, directly into oncoming traffic. Needless to say, both of them were creamed. There’s a picture of each accompanying the article, an old high school yearbook photo from a familiar era: Casey, with his four-bar Black Flag cap and his preposterous ears, smiling as always over a neutral-cloudy backdrop. He was nineteen. It’s hard to pinpoint the last time you’d seen him on purpose, though until a month ago, until we left, you’d both been in the same town your whole lives.

There’s an immediate flurry of activity as you start texting people back, finally, after months of unanswered silence, in the wake of this tragedy re-establishing lines of communication previously cut or abandoned with a place we decided we would never return to, relationships that had ended long before we came here, before we met, even. You double over your phone and type ceaselessly into the screen, your multi-armed condolences and empathy reaching across borders and back into Richmond. The pattern, the technique of your virtual reappearance is familiar, and I watch you resurrect yourself, piece by piece, word by word, assuming the position of someone who left—as a lot of people left—but always remained connected, who has been a part of it all along. Every so often you speak a name, share a marginal anecdote like an incantation; the room, briefly, is populated with another.

An hour or two later—a time I’m meant to believe you’ve spent deliberating, that you hadn’t made your decision the instant you saw the name in the Palladium-Item article—you look up from your spot against the wall and tell me: “I want to go back for the funeral.”

“Back to Indiana?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I think I should be there.”

“For who?”

“Are you kidding? He called me Mom, John. We’ve known each other since middle school.”

I answer immediately, I go broad where I shouldn’t. “This isn’t something you want to be a part of,” I say.

“They’re my friends.”

“You’re not the grieving parent, Joey.”

“Fuck you—I don’t have to justify my relationships to you.”

You don’t, but nonetheless I’m moralizing before I know it, some stupid manifesto based on the train, an unrelated, arbitrary tragedy from those shared college years, which had already crystallized before we met my junior year. In the days immediately after that accident—equally fatal and conceptually the same, kids in the path of a speeding object—the tiny campus was reduced to fearful paralysis with the loss of two of its students. A girl told me how horrible she felt for “not crying enough”—one of the girls who’d died had lived in her co-op and been familiar to her, they had shared a kitchen. Eventually, this not-weeping girl would join the caravan of mourners to attend the funeral in the other girl’s hometown, three hundred miles away. I was skeptical of the instantly formed grief, of her commitment to its totality. I remember thinking at the time that I felt too young for my life to be defined by significant deaths, and at the same moment that I couldn’t have picked from a small crowd the faces of the two people killed.

“You can’t just suddenly care again,” I say now, equal in my resolve, deep in my moral hole, a code I’ve decided heedlessly to cling to, about consistency and friendship, like Casey’s death was a ploy to coax us back. “You don’t get reattached just because there’s a disaster or someone dies. We said we wouldn’t be those kinds of people. You don’t reappear at a fucking funeral.”

You motion at the empty vacant room around us, which for an indefinite amount of time before we arrived was explicitly ignored, condemned. “And that’s why it’s just the two of us?”

The silence through the empty doorway turns our domestic space into something else. There are times when I can’t remember how long I’ve been this way, this absolute. Occasionally it’s felt like we were locked in an unspoken battle for who could be more extreme, who could experience abjection most completely, but now I am the extreme one, the one pledging isolation—out of what, jealousy? spite?—and I answer, without really responding, “We left to get away from all that shit.”

Your phone vibrates again. “I’ve always cared. I didn’t leave because I stopped caring.”

“Then why did you leave?”

You flick your finger down the screen of your phone, shooting one of your text conversations back in time. I’m distracted by this gesture—maybe that we’re still grabbing internet from somewhere in this derelict building, that the technologies seem mismatched—and I only hear your answer, or think I hear your answer, quiet, a second after it clears the air: “For fucking you!”

It catches me, because I’m already losing track of how this argument began and the part I’m playing in it, the scope of our conversation escalating with every word, and because this idea, that I was the reason for our departure, that I instigated it, this is nothing that I’ve ever considered or conceptualized, such that I feel it’s been slipped into the discussion like venom to disorient me, a trick you’ve been saving, subtly deployed.

And so my next point is even more opaque, when I feel that I’ve absolutely lost control of what I’m saying, having swerved from a line of reasoning grounded in actual life into pure abstraction. “I thought we”—the phone vibrates again, on the table whose origins, too, are unclear (no, the floor, on the floor, vibrating beneath me), and my eyes flick toward it, the proof I seek—“I thought we agreed on these things.”

These things—by turns, everything becomes more and more vague. I feel myself, in my embodied half of the conversation, growing more horrible with every passing moment, becoming this monstrous, unanswerable thing. Your brother flickers back into my consciousness as an entity I should be aware of, that I should be cautious to remember when I speak.

“I’m still connected with the people there,” you say, “whether it’s against your fucking moral imperatives or not.”

“Still connected? Are you gonna stop by your parents’ too, then? Tell them where you’ve been since the last funeral you dropped in on?”

You let out a startled breath, as if from a blow. I feel evil. I knit my fingers together and flex them, struggling to find something to say next, to soften what I’ve said. My dry hands slide audibly in and out of each other, and I try to transmit the demonstrative angst of this sound over to your dark corner of the room while, to others, you re-solidify from afar. They poise for your reappearance.

Reading this memory after the fact, our bodies are difficult to orient—their relative positions, in what room of the apartment—because there’s no furniture to base them around, just walls at intervals. In my memory, I’m sitting on the couch and you’re in a chair by the window, though there wasn’t a couch or reasonable chair left in the whole building. The light, the tonal makeup of the room built into the memory—they’re all familiar elements, but not from the city. In the memory, it’s as if we’re in the apartment in Indiana, a different living space, as if we’ve made this decision already, to not engage, and this is a conversation we’ve had many times before.

The funeral comes and goes. We stay in the city, but I’m convinced that it has nothing to do with me—if you really wanted to go back, there’s nothing I could do to stop you. Neither of us says anything, but within the same night that we hear of Casey’s death, you stop texting people back, and once again, disappear. A while after that, we ditch our cellphones for good—it’s not directed, we just do it, the way you sometimes abandon a habit. We take the vase. A son is lowered into the ground.

*

Like Casey, your brother is dead. He’s been dead for over a year, but I often forget this, randomly, at terrible times. He died, or was killed, in the worst possible way, too, as a soldier in Iraq, years after combat ended, in a freak transport accident. The first time that I notably forgot—four months after the funeral, which I’d attended—when I asked if he was taking any leave to come back to the States for the holidays (feeling, at the time, vaguely proud that I’d remembered he was serving overseas, that you had a brother at all), you didn’t seem to mind, and told me that if it were my own brother who’d died I would probably care more, which seemed harsh but, ultimately, true. As an only child, the absence of a sibling in my development was passive, innate, while yours had happened upon you after growing into it the opposite way. The worst time, however, was at a house party six months after that, the semester we graduated and did death-drive things like go to house parties, when some kid I didn’t recognize saw your hair (spiked high at that point, like mine, or mine like yours—visually, it was more obvious than anything that we were partners) and tried to strike up an awkward conversation while I was standing nearby. “Do you have any brothers or sisters?” he asked, as his fourth question.

“I had a brother,” you said.

“Had? What happened to him?”

“He died.”

There’s nothing I can say in my defense: he’d died during the time that we’d known each other, and I’d been sitting right there when your mother called to give you the news. Still, maybe there was something in your delivery, or maybe I was proximity-drunk or just too dissociated at that point to care about anything, but I actually laughed, as if it was a joke you used frequently to end conversations you didn’t want to have. The kid looked over at me because he obviously believed this to be the case, that this kind of dialogue happened often enough to be considered classic: this was how the lie spread.

You stormed out—difficult to pull off given how packed the room was—while holding your middle finger up above the crowd, which made it obvious.

By the time I saw you again a week and a half later, I’d done something else irreversible: this time, the frightening blue head of Yama, the Hindu god of death, to join the collection of famous faces on my leg. You didn’t notice until it had healed enough for me to blur the timeline.

Later on, at another party where neither of us were drinking, just before we left for good, I casually introduced you to some-one as my wife, equally without thinking, at a college party for fuck’s sake, but as if I’d been doing so for years, and in some way, by this forgetting where things stood, these two gestures—the gone brother, the taking of one family for the other—were the same reversal of history.

*

We go to a show, one show. It’s farther downtown, at one of those venues that claim the origins of punk in this city, a place that by virtue of the pedigree graffitied onto the basement walls is supposedly different than the others, than its regional variants like the Hoosier Dome or Villa Scum in Indiana. It isn’t any different. From the instant we descend the stairs, it’s copies of people we’ve known before—Crass vests, hairstyles like wilting plants, street kids and their giant backpacks, someone’s dog, figures huddled in the corner, smell of yeast and rot; every once in a while, a spiked leather jacket out of 1977. As we walk in, I tilt my head toward the crowd abutting the stage, maybe sixty strong, all frantic movement. The show is two or three bands in. I shout at you: “Do you see the poison?”

“I see it.”

I always keep a wall to one side of me, and at first we hang back in the corner, straddling the line of backpacks shoved against the wall, but there’s a particular hum to the atmosphere tonight, a frictive pull to the center, and when the next band comes on we’re drawn forward, and are quickly separated. The room is densely packed enough for me to lose sight of you almost instantly, and the narrow walls cause all sound to bend inward, filling the air above us and quaking the bodies below, making of everyone rooted to the ground a bell, a conduit for vibration. The music is indiscriminate noise—I have the sense that the band onstage isn’t actually playing their instruments, but just thwacking at them beneath some louder, all-encompassing sound. Unhooked from that sensory anchor, the experience suddenly feels alien from what I remember: a scrum of bodies pressed together, compacted but still full of frantic movement, digging into me at every angle, ceaseless contact like always, but this time it feels purposeful rather than casual, I feel surrounded, like the blows are directed specifically against me, shoulders, elbows, heads, and hands, a mix of camaraderie and revenge. The air is thick, particulate warmth; it coats my skin like a spray. I am insanely hot. I feel a pair of hands—an actual pair of hands, with serious fingernails, the act of identifying them is strangely enraging—push me forward. I stagger in the crush, an elbow hits me squarely in the ear, and my head rockets to one side—my falling body clears a few feet of space, I leave an after-image of me behind. As I steady myself—which I have to do by using someone’s naked shoulder as an anchor (the flesh is warm and sweaty beneath, like it’s just come from a shower)—my left ear is ringing like the filmic equivalent of bad news. I turn to find you, but it’s impossible in the flurry of movement and the physical smell and the smoke and the awful lights, which have started, or have always been, or merely appear to be strobing. My arm is still stretched out in front of me, hasn’t been there for more than a few seconds, but as I draw my hand back from the human shoulder, with the ringing, I have consciously forgotten that I put it there, that it’s even my arm at all rather than some hackable limb in a forest that’s standing in my way, and from there, everything goes to shit.

It was another show like this on a different scale, watching from the middle distance and shouting along, to which I traced back the planting of this idea: that we could leave Indiana, Ohio—not just leave, but sever completely, our world and everything in it replaced with something new and unfamiliar, people without history, without our history. This show was later on, outside Richmond (after the Richmond scene had splintered apart), somewhere indisputably Business where you could buy tickets online; the band didn’t matter. Initially I’d thought it was us both mishearing the lyrics, shouting the wrong thing at the same time, until I realized that in fact we were addressing each other through the noise, screaming from opposite ends of the couch: we were claiming space, we were testing how loud we could be without assigning the words meaning. We didn’t know the lyrics but pretended we did, and our worst assumption was that they mattered at all. The music, or the energy behind it, or the fact that this kind of sound existed, however it was brought into being, this was the primal motivation: one of us was suggesting something, and the other was agreeing, the other agreeing. We were already making plans. We’d been together ten months at that point.

A pit breaks open in the front of the crowd, close to where I’ve moved up, its circumference dictated by about twenty people slamming into each other and repelling, a radius constantly re-defined, its outliers shoved away from the stage, forming an arced human barricade. I’m hit with a sudden swoop of nausea, sharp and overwhelming, as if I’ve just inhaled something foul. My vision pitches to the left like a mishandled reel of film, jumping abruptly forward, unaccountably shifting its elements. A guy at the center of the pit, naked except for his oversized sneakers and comically tall, like someone took his torso and just stretched it as far as they could, windmills across the open space thrashing people out of the way like he’s felling trees. His face reads like an anthropomorphized slur, cartoonishly real. To my right, someone slips and goes down, and I don’t see them pulled back up. I shove my fists into my pockets—which is how I always stabilize in moments like this—reassuring myself that there’s nothing in them, nothing at all, but this negatively affects my balance, and when I’m hit again I do fall forward (everyone falls forward) and my face cracks into someone else’s shoulder. My hands shoot out as a reflex—independent, still—and I feel leather beneath them, stupid leather, in this heat. I’m transfixed for a moment, as if I’ve stumbled upon something for which I’ve been desperately searching, and then the guy wearing it throws himself backward to get me off. The back of his jacket sports the white face of a playing card, ace of hearts. I shove back. He loses his footing, and slips into the ring. The instigator behind me has the same idea, and there I go, too. The guy in the jacket stumbles about three feet before he’s rammed by the sweating naked tree-man, cock flapping, who knocks him aside like it’s nothing. A girl about half as tall comes loping across the pit, head down, dancing in huge, hopping strides as if she’s repeatedly trying to vault a parking meter, and it strikes me as hilarious, the absurdity of this flailing and dexterous figure, like the untouchable fiddler in a mob scene as the city burns in outline. I’m jostled forward again, or move forward in some way, and my hands graze the tree-man’s hips like we’re tender dancing partners and I’m thinking that I seem so relatively short and he is so awkwardly tall and unclothed and half-hard that it would be just so convenient to suck him off right here, that I’m close enough to detect the sweating fruit smell from the deep crevices of his body, even over everything else, and this, too, is hilarious, so I am probably cackling when he punches me in the face, probably cackling.

I don’t go all the way down—doubled over, I raise my arms like a luxurious bird and taste copper while my feet do an unintended grape-vine to keep upright. When I finally drag myself back to eye-level, absurdly weighty, I see the moshing crowd again through some kind of tint, from the perspective of the stage, and every single one of them looks like Casey, dead Casey, or Candace (dead Candace, for all I know), or predatory August with his scribbled-on arms, or you, the version of you I mistakenly followed, like another self I’m drawn back to in counter-point to current you, somewhere beyond. I grab the guy in the leather done up with band patches that stop strictly at 1988, who I notice is wearing giant safety pins as earrings, symbols that no longer mean anything, I seize his studded lapels and scream “WHAT YEAR IS IT?” into his face. I throw him away, I spit blood on the tree-man’s flawless burnished chest, and I fall away. I have no idea what the band is doing.

*

When the show ends, the violence spills out of the building and into the street. On my way to the basement steps, behind it, I pick up an olive-colored backpack from where it rests against the wall, one that feels hefty but doesn’t clank with bottleweight when I lift it, like it could still have something useful inside. In the anonymity and rush of the aftermath, I see no consequences in taking it.

A few minutes pass before we find each other outside, and when I spot you, you’re a different height than I remember. We’re still a little drunk with it as we walk toward home. Half of my face is raw and swollen, as if there’s an island beneath it pushing up, new continents of unexplored terrain. Prodding my cheek, testing its density, I realize a new concept has formalized in my head without my noticing it, that a shift has occurred over the course of the night, or since the last time I found myself walking in this direction, toward a familiar place with this subtle feeling of regularity, of returning: our building has become “home.”

You nod your chin at the bag. “Whatcha got there?”

I knead the bottom of it with my fingers; it’s stuffed full of someone else’s supplies. “Just some goodies,” I say.

I hold the backpack in front of me until we’re out of sight, to minimize the likelihood that it will look familiar to anyone. We walk north for a while, away from human activity, and then east, mostly not speaking. At one point a line of police cars barrels down the street in the direction we came from; the instinct is to turn and watch them disappear behind us, but we don’t. Eventually the sirens fade into nothing, into the backdrop. As always, we scope out our street for on-lookers, and then, confirming that we’re alone, we duck into the gated area in front to enter through the abandoned basement, pitch-dark, which we navigate like a haunted house, me first and you behind, your hand on my collar. We climb the four flights of stairs to the top floor, not really taking care to quiet our feet. On the landing, I drop the bag like a sack of groceries and unconsciously, mechanically reach into my pocket for a key—this idea of “coming home after a night out” having swept over me—but, of course, there isn’t one. There isn’t even a door. We walk through the open frame.

Two objects resolve themselves in the moonlight filtered through the blindless broken windows, this absence of barriers even further evidence of what this building is not, and has never been in our time: the vase overturned on its side, and a figure wrapped in my sleeping bag.

“Someone is sleeping in my bed.” I don’t know if I say it out loud or not; either way, all of my breath is gone.

We stand frozen in the doorway, totally silent, like we’ve accidentally walked in on an intimate exchange in which we play no part. I feel warmth in my left hand, and realize belatedly it’s because yours is wrapped in it. The sound of our presence—our footsteps still on the stairwell, our bodies shifting—draws back like a curtain, and the sound that replaces it is louder than everything: a deep, slow breathing, as if a lead for us to follow, coming from the figure on the floor, peacefully asleep. A growing tower of dread looms above us. I feel deeply betrayed.

Neither of us speaks or moves. The image is too foreign to register properly, though it shouldn’t be—this building wasn’t ours any more than it was anyone else’s, we’ve never had claim to it beyond the fact of our presence, our dwelling over consecutive nights. But my pulse is still racing from the show, I’m brimming with bloody energy, and as our eyes adjust to the dark I recognize more and more: our backpacks, torn inside-out with their contents scattered across the floor, the wind-up flashlight, our candles, water bottles, their shadows interrupting the room’s barren order. I feel my body drain and refill with something uncontrollable, misguidedly righteous—for some reason, the overturned vase upsets me the most, seems the most intentionally arbitrary.

I grit my teeth, and take a step forward into the room, with you at my side.

Something adjusts behind us. I whirl around, panic flooding my chest.

Against the wall, a figure sits in the dark in a collapsible folding chair I’ve never seen before, something you bring to a kid’s soccer game. They hold a knife in their lap, an unreal gleaming blot on the scene. You let out a gasp, an errant breath. I can’t immediately identify the sound I make.

“What are you doing here?” a male voice says from the dark. The accent sounds transplanted here, like someone who’s been training to talk tough. I can’t tell the age.

“We live here,” I say. I feel like I’m telling a lie: no one lives here.

There’s a newspaper on his lap that falls to the ground as he stands. I imagine it’s dated from the day Reagan was elected. The image of him sitting here pretending to read in the dark, waiting for us to arrive, in his ratty chair and its mesh cupholders, is flatly terrifying. “You’ve gotta have someone keep watch. That’s the first fucking rule of this game.”

In the light from the windows he looks ancient, but the voice clashes with the reading, probably less than forty. A mess of tangled long hair hides most of his face, the beard scruffy and incomplete, strived for. He’s dressed in a bulky gray sweater, camo pants, and boots, ballooning his physical stature; I don’t understand why no one here dresses for the season. He is pointing the knife—military grade, made for actual combat—directly at my chest, as if at any moment it could become a gun. The fact that he has a weapon at all seems absurd, an apparition conjured from the most exaggerated and predictable places, like he’s drawn from the newspaper at his feet, with its messages of panic and urban rebellion. I feel you shaking beside me, a furious vibration through our joined limbs. “Also, you need to hide your shit,” he says. “You can’t just leave it lying around for anyone to take.”

His tone is of begrudgingly teaching dumb children a lesson. I wonder how everything became such a cliché. I open and close my fists (letting go of your hand), snatching uselessly at air, as if I’m owed it, as if something will appear in my fingers. Without the physical attachment you seem separate, hovering at a distance.

“At least let us take what we brought with us.”

Part of me thinks I’m being clever, because everything here—except the chair—everything is something we brought in ourselves. A part of me that believes we’ll get away on this technicality, pictures us walking triumphantly burdened down the stairs while he shakes his head with a knowing smile, pure capitulation. To my right, I notice your body shifting, opening minutely up, arms rising, as if in support of what I’ve said, demonstrating reasonableness, that no one wants to die here, and I’m angry at you for it.

“I don’t think so,” the ageless man says. “Everything stays here.” The knife still tipped at us, he kneels down to the newspaper at his feet. His eyes drop from us for a second. Your fingertips brush mine and startled fear pours adrenaline through my body. I throw myself forward and plow him into the wall. Dust and displaced plaster burst around our shoulders. I shove my forearm against his throat above the ragged collar, where the skin feels like it’s barely intact, has ebbed away around the muscle, and I use my other arm to pin his knife hand. He seems to lean into the blow, to buckle around me as if for support. With my weight pressing into him, beneath the baggy clothes, his frame is wasted and crackable, bends to my will. His heart beats in its rickety cage. I imagine you behind me, floating like a planet.

The victory is short-lived. He wrenches his arm free and shoves the knife up through the gap between our bodies, into my face. The rubber handle jams against my mouth and smears it open, digging into my gums and teeth while the very edge of the blade slowly splits my top lip. A metallic chattering fills my ears; the taste spreads like a disease. “I will shove this piece of metal down your throat and I do not give a shit who hears the screaming. Stand down.”

I stand down. My lips curl into my mouth. I’m amazed by how far I have to draw back until our bodies are no longer touching. I back into you, this time desperate for the contact.

He steps forward from the wall. An angry, body-sized patch of material has shaken free from behind him; the stirred dust lends the impression that he is stepping through a veil. His person clarifies: his eyes are vaguely familiar, dark and acquisitive. In his other hand, he un-crumples the newspaper, smooths it on one dusty thigh, and then raises it to his head—it’s folded into a crown. “This city belongs to the kings now,” he says.

My mouth fills with blood for the second time in hours. It stings wildly. I swallow in one gulp, the taste so strong that I feel dizzy. I take your hand again. For some reason, I’m not considering how many more arms we have than he does, that there are two of us against one of him; the darkness around us seems invisibly filled with others, pressing inward, damping our potential. The man, insane-looking, motions to the overturned Satsuma vase. “What’s in the vase? Is that where you keep your stash?”

You answer, which makes it sound like a cover-up. “There’s nothing in the vase.”

He laughs—it’s more of a wheeze—and my failure to restrain him suddenly seems merciful: I would have killed him. “We’ll see about that,” he says. “I am giving you babies thirty seconds to get out of my apartment.”

What else can we do? We run, again, past the stolen bag just outside the doorway—unopened, forgotten entirely—with less than we’ve ever had before, and when we’re midway down the stairs I realize that throughout everything, the figure bundled up behind us in my sleeping bag did not awaken, did not move or react even once. I wonder if their breathing was actually from the man in the chair, or something I imagined altogether. I tongue the seam of the cut inside my lips, relishing the pain, the minute warmth, evidence that I did not give up, wholly, without a fight.

When we hit the ground floor, we hear shattering porcelain from above. It’s enough to resolve us. I will not swallow this city. I’m turning the corner toward the basement when you stop me. “Wait. Let’s take the front door.”

We exit through the front of the building. We slam the door behind us.

There’s a collection of spraypaint cans just inside the gate, abandoned by someone caught in the middle of something. I wonder if they were dropped during the time that we’ve been here, if this conflict played out on the street outside the apparently empty building while we slept obliviously above. I’m about to pass them up, but you shove a few cans into my hands and tuck two more under your arms.

“Just so we have something,” you say. We open the gate, and here, too, we slam it as hard as we can, so the sound saturates the street, sends its stupid echoes everywhere.

At the bus stop, we shove the cans under our clothes. We beg our way to a free ride, going north; it feels terrible, even when the driver doesn’t seem to give it a second thought. Alongside the motion of the tireless bus in the night, I discern the indistinct, swarming movement of people in the opposite direction, the bus parting them like a sea.

*

Indoors again, back uptown, we move on to the next painting, scribble a giant cock across an immaculately rendered, classically proportioned, four-hundred-year-old face—as per the routine we’ve quickly established, you with the broad strokes, me with the line work—and you tell me there’s a class war coming.

The prophecy is a familiar refrain. I sit down on one of the little viewing benches and idly rattle a can of spraypaint, my ears still ringing with the sounds of the vase breaking, the weird composite of his speech. “Everybody is someone else’s pawn,” I say—one of my answers that is less an answer than a gesture or an abstraction, that ducks responsibility. I imagine our roles in such a war: the man in the apartment, the people camped out in the street, the crowd at the show, would they be our enemies or our allies? A distant alarm sounds, not because of our entry, but because it’s been doing that for weeks.

“We could have taken him together, you know,” you say. “That man.”

I don’t respond, which seems to admit that you’re right. How much less genuine was our poverty than his, because we rejected what we’d been given, because, if we’d wanted to, we could have taken it? We could have engaged that system. The next room over, on one of the famous French portraits of Greeks, I produce a token gallery-label factoid, this time about stoicism: “The Athenian government accused Socrates of denying the gods and ordered him to either renounce his teachings or die. He chose death.”

You tell me that Socrates, like the subjects of most of these paintings, probably never even existed, and before I can tell you how fundamentally wrong I think that is, how truly absurd a denial, the Athenian scholar vanishes before my eyes in a thickening haze of black so dense that it drips off the canvas. When I’d first laid hands on one of the objects in the museum, it felt like crossing a million invisible barriers, committing some unholy act; now, the paintings just mark the walls, they’re littered across the world. I worry that we’re doing someone else a powerful favor, the inevitable collector surveying value in negatives.

Just before, on a whim, you marched from room to room spraypainting a crude X over “every exposed nipple and twat” in all of the European nudes, and you’d already circumcised and de-titted about six Venuses before I caught up to tell you that it came off maybe a bit fascist to do that, maybe a little like the hand of censorship.

“If it’s indiscriminate, it can’t be fascist,” you said, castrating a cherub with a spurt from your spray can. I have no idea where you found that particular aphorism.

The first gallery we stopped in, I’d meticulously blacked out the eyes on a pair of Cot springtimes when you came up behind me and said, “No, no, no.” You took my hand and sprayed a wide, sloppy arc across the two lovers, then a vertical line, then a swirl. “There shouldn’t be any patterns—see? It’s supposed to look random.” As if the ultimate aim of this was to leave our mark as senselessly as possible, in the final tally our particular violence bleeding indistinctly in with the rest.

Currently, you spray a capital letter A on the flag in a Revolutionary War painting.

“You know, that could be misinterpreted,” I say, watching it bleed over the faces of the Patriots like it’s no texture at all.

“How?”

“A for America.”

I say it as a joke, but by the time you turn away the painting resembles nothing so much as a black scour on the gallery wall. Compared to the others, it positively screams with intention.

You cap the spray can with a clack that rebounds through the galleries like every door closing. “Just meet me by the Egyptian thing when you’re done,” you say, and disappear, a tinge of resentment in your wake, for questioning your radicalism—the temple to Osiris, relocated from other shores via freighter to the museum’s northern wing in the 1960s, has been a place of solace since we started coming here in daylight hours, when most of it was still encased in glass. The stone is now so thick with graffiti that it gives the entire monument a greenish cast, but there’s something comforting in the fact that it’s still standing, that despite best efforts no one has been able to take it down.

I walk through just the emergency lights like an ill-defined spirit of vengeance across beds of shattered glass. I pass a decapitated statue of Sakhmet, its head resting three feet away, one ear missing. Deeper within the museum crouches East Asia, Oceania, their pedestals empty, artifacts spewed across borders. I pause at each unmarked painting and object, unsure of how to proceed, as if totality had been something we intended when we arrived here, when I recognized the cross-streets and pulled the cord on the bus, saw the butt of a metal pipe against porcelain and knew finally where I was, as if this wasn’t ultimately the perfect example of just using the items we suddenly had in our hands.

By the time we leave the magnificent cavern, our heads are filled with paint fumes, outbursts of black.

*

The second-to-last phone call I received—on the bus, as we crawled across Pennsylvania toward the city, numbed now to the changing landscape—was from a high school friend I hadn’t talked to in three years, who told me that another mutual friend, close-knit into our group during school but, again, whom I hadn’t spoken with in years, had died unexpectedly, at twenty-one. The circumstances were mysterious and difficult for my friend to corroborate: he’d seen him the previous night, they’d hung out for a few hours drinking, went to a restaurant, and then parted ways and gone home (they were both on summer break from school). That morning, the morning we left Indiana, the mother of the mutual friend had gone up to check on him, but his bedroom door was locked. Eventually, they’d broken in and found him dead inside. There was speculation that he’d accidentally or purposefully mixed some kind of pills with the alcohol, my friend said, but they weren’t sure. People (he listed names) were gathering in Dayton for the funeral tomorrow, in case I wanted to be there.

I turned and told you what happened, about this friend who was dead (who I don’t think I’d mentioned before), and about the friend who called to give me the news (likewise). I left it dangling at the end, the hint of proposition: “The funeral is tomorrow.” You burrowed your head into my shoulder but didn’t say anything, silently refusing to enter—I realize now—the trap that I’d created, that I would blame you for setting when Casey died a month later. How much grief, it seemed to imply, could I reasonably be expected to exhibit for someone I’d never mentioned caring about, who didn’t exist between us until this moment? How deep and true could you expect this to go?

The last phone call came two hours after that, when you were asleep, the scenery in the window unspecified, probably still Pennsylvania, and was from another high school friend, with whom I’d communicated even less recently. He said my first name, then my first and last name, to confirm who he was talking to. He asked if I’d heard about Nik, who had died this morning. I told him that I’d just heard. He was less sure than my other friend, more audibly broken up. They still weren’t sure. People were gathering in Dayton for the funeral. I filed the losses.

The peripheral world gets smaller.

Let’s pretend we’re walking home.

South again, you mount one of the stone lions outside the library. “What do you think it takes to bring one of these beasts to life?” You wiggle your hips.

“Probably a little more than you can give it,” I say. “Probably nothing short of divine intervention or a lightning strike on an eclipse night.”

You resolve to try anyways. You begin to grind back and forth on its back, grabbing the mane for leverage. I look side to side, embarrassed, as if someone will catch us in the act, but the street is deserted, almost seems to mock my concern. “What are you doing?”

Keeping the rhythm costs whatever breath you’d otherwise use to answer. You set your jaw and close your eyes, like this routine takes every ounce of your concentration. The scene is baroquely pornographic, as if we’d walked onto a tidily composed set on which we were supposed to play out the fantasy of some unknown director, where I’m the audience, and standing there beneath the streetlights and security cameras and around it capitalism and maybe somewhere above that the moonlight, tasting residual blood, watching your thighs tense—imagining, as anyone would, the lion as some beastly stand-in—I think, yet again, of the broken vase, glazed with an invisible layer of our dried sweat and oils, degrading it by degrees. I’d brought up your brother again once, obliquely. After we’d had the vase for a few days, when it had settled into the arrangement of the room, I drew my finger across the pattern of lotuses connected to cherry blossoms etc, etc and said, “It reminds me of something I’ve seen before—does it for you? Remind you?” The question was phrased in a way that made it incomprehensible. The only aspects of your brother I remembered were the tattoo and the fact of his death; I couldn’t have picked him out of a lineup in long sleeves.

You answered, “I mean, it reminds me of Japan,” which, fair enough, was what I’d replied to essentially the same question when we first brought it back, and that was all we said. Already a tacit understanding had formed, an unspoken agreement on what we would and would not acknowledge, a kind of commitment to choosing silence over dialogue.

By now you’re straddling the lion’s neck, totally spent, your hands splayed over the molded mane. You look up, panting, and brush the hair off your forehead. It takes you a minute to catch your breath, and then, saying nothing, you slide off the statue—I have the briefest image of your fingers untangling from long hairs—leaving a glistening streak down its side. You walk lightly, in a wider stance for a minute, then seem to forget. I wait for a breeze to clear the evidence, to crystallize this into an anecdote you’d once have shared among our circle of friends while I sat beside you, envied and silent, the chosen accomplice. The eyes stare out like statues do.

*

Three blocks later, we cross a high-end chain drugstore, recently shut down, its windows freshly blacked-out. We break in at my suggestion, a demonstration of our volition. The alarms go off immediately; in this neighborhood we still only have a few minutes before the cops arrive. You grab the back of my shirt and we stumble forward in the dark, as in the cellar—the only light comes from the jagged hole in the lower half of the sliding door. “Oh, John, let’s live here,” you say.

The shelves are still variously stocked; they haven’t had a chance to come in and clear it all out yet, to distribute the remainders to other branches or ship it off to a landfill. “Okay…” your voice comes from behind me. “So, what exactly can we take?”

“Anything that fits in your mouth.”

You dash off in the direction of the beauty aisle, while I lurch uncertainly toward the nonperishable foods in the back, for no particular reason except that they’re the most recognizable in the dark. I paw the shelves blindly, not really trying to accumulate but enjoying the feeling of knocking items to the ground, as if I’m some larger and more basic creature. After a minute I shout through the alarms, toward the general sound of your presence, “What’re you finding?”

“Cosmetics!” you shout back. “I can finally do my eyes!”

I slam myself into the back wall, padded with bubbly packages of junk food. I let them rain down on me from the upper shelves. I clamber to my feet and circle the store toward your voice, upending sundries as I go. I hear you rustling behind a nearby shelf. You scream, “AERIAL ATTACK!” and something shatters at my feet.

“Jesus Christ!”

“Oh shit, it’s a second barrage!” Another item hits the floor, and a third cracks against my head. I go down onto my hands and knees.

“Fuck! Joey!” My palms pick up little shards of glass and paint-smelling liquid. Something cool oozes down my forehead, hardening in the air. I hear sirens. “We have to go,” I say, as the synthetic, faintly peroxidal liquid trickles into my eye. “We have to go.”

Another shout—“BOMBS AWAY!”—but this time it sounds like it’s from the street. Still, it must act as a trigger because you launch another bottle from the adjacent aisle. It ricochets off my back before breaking open on the floor.

My vicinity now smells very strongly of chemical flowers, something created in a laboratory without context.

Through the imperfect black paint on the windows, spears of bright light trickle through. The hole in the sliding door glows orange, then red, like an unearthly halo. The sirens are right out front. When you shout “CATAPULT!” I’m sensible enough to roll out of the way, and whatever you’ve thrown lands just to my left—it clatters like something cheap and plastic, easily broken apart, I guess probably a hair dryer.

A roar—from a car, I’m sure—tears through the wall, and I hear signs of an escalating conflict outside. My right eye is glued shut.

“Joey, we have to get out of here.” By now, I’m speaking mostly to the ground.

One aisle over, however, you are having way too much fun. “Quick! They’re mounting! I hear them at the gates!”

A handful of glass containers hits the tile by my head—the expensive nail polish, I think.

“What do you say, John? Are you hurting yet?”

Something explodes by my ear and I’m misted with glass particles and a scent so concentrated and powerful that I choke on it. My body reacts as if to vomit, but there’s nothing to bring up; my chest goes rigid against the gray tile and my throat clenches repeatedly, mouth open, struggling to find something to expel. I get up ropy spit and drool until the convulsions subside, breathing shallowly, like the air can’t find a deeper way into my lungs. I roll helplessly onto my back and look up at the ceiling. I chew a few times on nothing, slowly and carefully, like I’m working into a motion I haven’t performed in a long time. Through an indeterminate haze drifting in through flaws in the black windows, I can just make out the shapes of the fluorescent lights above, empty and dead. The darkness is tinged with red, presumably from a safety light—no matter where you are, somewhere, something still has power. The memory of the gun rises up within me, a memory I’ve fought to keep buried: it was on a frantic night like this that it appeared in my hand, that the weapon revealed itself. I hear your footsteps first, and then watch you loom into view above me.

Earlier on in our days of exploration, when we were dividing the city into neighborhoods, you once got off the train at one station while I stayed aboard, bound for somewhere else. Immediately after the doors closed behind you, I turned to flirt unabashedly with the woman sitting next to me. In my head, it was a terrific joke of detachment—this complete stranger had been sitting next to us the entire time, had watched you rest your head on my shoulder and kiss me goodbye; it was unfailingly clear that you and I were a pronounced and public couple. Yet as I dug into this woman over the next several minutes—her book, her music, her destination, her home—my attempt at affecting her became, for all practical purposes, serious, the comedic timing apparent to no one but myself, and thus it slipped from my supposedly lighthearted, obvious joke into something else, something sinister that felt awfully like real damage, that felt like menace. When I noticed the shift—this dangerous, unaccountable shift—I removed myself from the train, I pulled back.

You did not. “I told you there was going to be a war,” you say, standing over me, your feet at either shoulder, arms crossed, bearing of statue. “Just listen.”

From the sound of it, your lions have come alive outside. You haul me up in the faulty non-light. I’ve got sea-legs, as in they don’t work at all. The top half of my body slumps into yours.

“You’ve dribbled down your front, bless you. Let’s get you home.”

With that innocuous final word, I feel a shiver in your chest—transmitted through us both—indicating that every time we say it now, no matter how often, it will be an accident.

The good thing is: I smell like flowers, and they no longer seem that fake.

Together, we shoulder through the blacked-out doors and into the street, now lit by a false, electric daylight, the tone of a parking garage. My eyes are stinging, tearing up from the perfume and polish and sudden light, one of them stuck fast. Close at hand, I make out the shape of something burning beneath a glaze, hear a pattern of thunderous crashes, human yelling.

Beside me, you whisper, “I told you.”

I want to tell you that I suspect it’s not as big as you think it is, or that it’s much bigger than you think it is, that violence creeps up in the oddest, most convenient places—but it sounds too much like a truism, especially from someone who can’t effectively see anything. Still, I consider the heightened sense of smell particular to the big cats. And all at once, my legs are working just fine.

*

We move eastward, away from the fires, toward the northbound subway—not running, exactly, but walking quickly, as fast as you can walk away from a situation without looking suspicious. Beyond the immediate perimeter of the store, the burning and mounting whatever, the streets are empty—no traffic, no human bodies, no cops. The concrete-bordered avenue is bathed in a glow of red light that seems to come from beyond above, or to occlude the above, as if someone’s put the entire bubble of existence here into lockdown. As if, all at one time, the city has finally decided to address itself. The air is close, busy with the sense of mass movement somewhere just out of view, but a distinct, concentrated chill pipes through the streets and directly into our faces, giving the impression that we’re still indoors, that some controlled substance is being filtered in to appear natural, that the streets themselves are part of a greater structure. I look up—the persistent flow of air now pushing on my throat—and am not surprised: the sky, or whatever is beyond the glow, is matte black, no stars, so uniform as to seem artificial—again, this feeling of shuttering on an immense scale, a dome sliding over.

As we walk against this wind—which feels in its benign constancy like the static gust of an air conditioner—I notice that to either side of us several of the gated storefronts glow orange from within, as if someone had set fires inside them. The light reflects through the gates in pixelated patterns on the sidewalk. The color is inviting, like hearth.

Your commentary is constant, endlessly speculative about the nature of these changes, yet strangely offhand, as if the consequences lacked real effect, could only be interpreted symbolically: a class war, a changing of colors. I’m not listening specifically. I peel my eyelids apart into a clouded right field as a flaming figure hurtles around the corner, running toward us in rapidly increasing resolution. It takes a moment to put it fully together, build it up from an animal: it’s a man on fire.

We tighten our grip on each other and jolt to the side, stepping toward the fires that aren’t burning in the open. His path doesn’t divert, continues to move in a line parallel to ours. The vent of cool air billows the smoke ahead of him and into our eyes. He makes no sound himself: the only noise we hear comes either from the background—the pulsing sirens from everywhere, the hum of the vent—or the physical act of his running and burning. His shoes hitting the street at a constant, unnerving rhythm, the melting rubber sticking and then breaking free; and, as he nears, the crackling of the fire, the flickering bursts of skin separating under so much heat. He pumps his arms, he doesn’t scream—like something mechanical, wound up and then released, repeating the same motion until it winds all the way down, and comes finally to rest.

He passes dangerously close—just a few feet from my left side—and the heat feels like enough to break the skin inside my clothes, as if to draw it prickling outward from my body and consume it in the blaze. There’s a sensation like light rain on my sleeve, sparks of him erupting onto me. Something runs down my leg. I can’t remember if it’s blood or piss that comes out cool. He leaves us in his wake.

“This is us,” you say, turning abruptly to a subway entrance on the right, which, miraculously, hasn’t been closed off.

We descend and enter another, deeper chamber. The station is still lit and not completely empty, which surprises me, as if I’d assumed we were the only ones to have sense to go elsewhere, to hide underground. There are people milling around the empty guard booth, down on the platform below; their movement doesn’t indicate disaster or panic. We vault over the turnstiles, not because we have to, not because they don’t work.

We wait on the uptown platform, where the mildly ironlike smell of tuna fills the air, like someone’s broken open the rations early: undercutting this smell, perversely, that of fresh water. The idea of waiting for a train seems ludicrous—if there was any delicate piece of the city’s infrastructure that would collapse first, it was the trains. At this point, though, I can’t tell if what we’re experiencing—the conditioned air, the planned and random fires, the winnowing of all our paths down into one, this feeling of controlled synesthesia—is the work of such an infrastructure crumbling or boning up; falling apart, or testing its limits. On the other side of the tracks, a woman sits hunched over on the platform, her top half hidden in a heavy fur coat, her leggings in a pattern of hundred-dollar bills, legs dangling over the tracks.

“That man,” you say, rocking back on your heels against a tiled column.

There’s still some resistance, some stick every time I open my right eye. I bat my eyelashes to ease away the sting. “What about him?”

“He was a cop.”

I can’t make out what this means—the implications of each action, already, are starting to lose their individual meaning in the collective well of paranoia. “How could you tell?”

You shift and put your hands behind your back, flattened against the column. “It smelled like bacon.”

You mime turning a badge upside down and pinning it to your chest. The train drowns out my lack of response.

We step inside, along with several of the others standing on the platform. They move to empty seats as if prescribed, but we remain standing. It doesn’t occur to me until we’re aboard that the train, too, could be a hostile mechanism, an operative part of the defenses that I intuit around us. As it crawls out of the station, I see through the window, across the way, a drenched figure haul himself up from the tracks onto the platform, water splattering everywhere. The woman in the money-printed leggings struggles to her feet, screams silently, and falls.

The train fills further at each stop, but never reaches capacity. I watch the passengers, but whatever their disguises are, they keep them. A man drums his knee impatiently whenever the doors open; a woman consults the map once, then again two stops later, using the same series of gestures each time. No one exits the train. At the last northern station on the island, we disembark alone. We have to surface outside and go west for a block, to the aboveground trains that travel north more broadly, to other cities and states; it’s been decided, somewhere, that we are leaving, that these are the steps we’re taking. As we walk, the pedestrians surrounding us break off the sidewalk and move determinedly as one group toward the other side of the street, clutching baggage and children, curving in a line and cutting off traffic, as if they’ve collectively decided to change direction, alerted by a signal we don’t have access to, that doesn’t choose us. The implication is always that the crowd knows something we do not, has some deeper, more fundamental knowledge about how to practice life, how to guarantee safety, but here we don’t listen—we go in the opposite direction while the rest funnel back, deeper into the city. Alone, we climb the stairs to the elevated outdoor tracks, and stand on the edge of the platform where the trains go north. The arrival and departure screens are all blank and dead. Again, we ignore the ticket machines, and again, we wait for the train we have no right to expect will ever come; this time, we’re the only people on the platform. I look down the track in both directions, at empty rails.

A few minutes later the tracks illuminate and the train arrives from the south, shamelessly. We board. I pace the empty car up and down, looking for people lying down or slumped in the seats or crouched with a weapon where I wouldn’t see them at first glance, an abandoned child, but there’s no one. The speakers crackle in anticipation of an announcement, then fall silent. We finally slide into the plastic-lined seats. Regardless, the doors close, and the train begins to move. Regardless, we go north, approximately, exactly to where is neither profitable nor known.

*

Gradually, the city collapses and slides from view, and through the window the reddish glow fades, replaced in shades by real, heavy night. I’m unreasonably shocked when, what feels like half an hour later, the train pulls into a station and stops. The doors open, and I inhale sharply, pushing myself down in the seat—the feeling in my gut is that everything is over, they are about to storm the train, we’ll be exposed and forced out, interlopers that we are, that this is where it all ends. You put your hand on my arm, feeling my body tense. No one boards, no infantry arrive. I breathe hard until the doors close again. The train begins its slow acceleration. Forest appears on both sides, occasional stretches of gray water. The towns we pass—visible through the trees, armatured by streetlights—don’t look specifically unpopulated, but I don’t notice any movement within them either. After the first stop I stand and make a show of consulting the map printed on the wall, a mess of primary-colored squiggles spilling in every direction. I trace my finger up the red one and into reaches unknown. “Do you know which line we’re on?”

“I don’t know, the main one.”

Between each station, the panic builds, but as the stops continue, farther and farther apart, deeper and deeper into this endless night, and the train remains empty but for us, my physical reactions lessen. At intervals, we talk quietly about nothing, careful of disturbing the fragile complex of our existence here, of revealing our presence, as if we’re a technical flaw in the system, slipping by and getting out unnoticed.

I lean my head against the window. At some unspecified point in the journey, a force pulses through the landscape outside, jostling everything to one side, a sudden ripple that I’ll only think I saw in retrospect.

The train rolls into another station, without fanfare. The engine shudders to a stop, and the doors open automatically with an empty, metallic sound. There’s no light from the platform outside. I wait for the doors to close again. The lights inside the train blink once, and then go off, too. A new layer of silence pervades the car, an absence of anything mechanical, while the sound of insects slowly wafts through the open car doors. We wait, past the point at which it seems obvious that the train isn’t going to leave the station, that wherever the tracks go, this is the last stop. You clear your throat, uselessly—it’s so obviously a space-filler that I almost comment on it—and we wait a few minutes more. Eventually, we peel ourselves from the seats and stand, shakily, as if we’ve been asleep for a long time.

We step out onto the unlit concrete platform and hear night sounds, air moving through trees. As we walk away from it, the train seems to become a husk—not something we ever rode in on or that ever traveled, but a static piece of the background, a painted-in part of the scenery. We feel our way to a staircase in the dark, your one hand at the back of my neck, the other in the air. I see a railing in the moonlight, and we follow it down.

The train doors do not close behind us. The train does not move again.

There was never any going home.