The way to imagine yourself as an animal is from the outside in. Begin with the skin. Do you have scales? Fur? Feathers? A salt-encrusted hide? Then take yourself slowly into your body. Go on a tour of your organs. Do you have the same organs as a person? At any rate, you have a heart. Take a moment and hear the beating of your heron heart or your sea lion heart or your chipmunk heart. At this point I stopped reading because the animal I had instinctively envisioned was a sea urchin, and I was pretty sure that they did not have any organs. I put the book aside and turned out the light.
Lying there with my eyes closed, I went back to my fantasy from the day before, of the golden man looming over me. It was still powerful; it still made me feel weak.
But now I had to admit that I could only generate so many fantasies before the actual skin of the actual man became necessary. In other words, there would be no way around this longing. Only through.
* * *
That Saturday—my day off, and an unusually mild day for this time of year: eighty and perfect—I went to the bus stop as usual, as if going to work, but I did not get on my usual bus. I just sat there and calmly watched it leave without me. From the corner of my eye I saw the golden man glance in my direction with a puzzled look; so he had been noticing me, was aware of my patterns. This gave me courage to execute the next part of my plan: when his bus arrived, I followed him on, swiped my MetroCard, and sat down next to him.
I had no plan other than to see what happened. At the very least I would learn where he got off. If the moment seemed right, I would make a bolder move, but usually I found that I didn’t have to make bold moves when a man interested me. The bold move was just showing up. It’s all about positioning. Men like to believe that they initiate things, but often they only initiate when the fruit is very low-hanging, when the fruit is right in front of their face, whispering “Pick me.”
Now, sitting next to the electric man, I could feel a specific heat wafting off his body, as if he had a fever. This did not surprise or alarm me. It seemed consistent with my imaginings. He didn’t look over at me but kept shifting in his seat, as if he couldn’t get comfortable.
Finally, after the bus had gone a few stops, he turned and said, “You’re making me nervous.”
“Oh.”
“Yes. It’s something about your lipstick. It’s so red. It’s like a stop sign.”
“Sorry,” I said. “It’s just my lipstick.”
“It’s okay. I just keep noticing it.”
“What’s your name?”
“Thomas.”
“I’m Rachel.”
“Rachel,” he said. “Hmm. Not what I expected.”
“What were you expecting?”
“I don’t know. Nadia or Renee or something. Something more European-sounding.”
“You think I look European?”
“Yeah. It’s something about your haircut.”
I reached up and touched my hair, as if I needed reminding of its shape. I’ve had the same haircut since I was a child, the same chin-length brown bob.
“So where are you going?” I asked.
“All the way to the end of the line.”
“What’s there?”
“I just have to do something. An errand. What about you?”
“Just running errands too. Nothing important.”
Luckily, he didn’t press me further, because I had not come up with a specific excuse in advance. Instead, he started asking me lots of other questions about myself: what did I do for work, where did I grow up, what was my apartment like, where had I gone to college, what was my favorite vegetable, had I noticed the way a lot of girls right now cut their bangs in such an annoying style, way too short, as if an expansive forehead was a sexually desirable trait? (I had not cut my bangs that way—mine were long and off to the side, as bangs should be.)
I answered all his questions, and tried to get a few in edgewise about him, but he never let me. As soon as I’d answered he would either fire off another question or start talking, as if to himself, about my answer—he seemed to have many fully developed theories about me, most of them now confirmed. “Yeah, it makes total sense that you grew up in Maine—I knew you were a cold weather kind of person. I bet you can knit. Of course you like Almodóvar. Okay, who’s your favorite Japanese writer? Let me guess. Mishima.”
Before I knew it, we’d gotten to the end of the bus line. I hadn’t intended to stay on this long, as it ruined my alibi—what was I doing way out here, other than following him?—but his incessant stream of questioning hadn’t given me the chance to finesse an exit. Anyway, he didn’t seem to care. It seemed that we were already past alibis. When the bus stopped, he nodded matter-of-factly, assuming I’d follow him: “This way. It’ll only take a second.”
I looked around. This was a desolate neighborhood I’d never been to, with weedy cracked sidewalks and wide streets strewn with broken glass and occasional storefronts proclaiming wares in Spanish or faded Cyrillic. Bare-chested men in gold chains guarded the stores against the empty streets.
We got off and crossed to the opposite corner, where a mailbox stood next to a bent streetlight. He took a sealed envelope out of his pocket, looked it over briefly, and put it in the mailbox. Then he turned to me. “Time to go back,” he said. We sat down on a bench at the bus stop.
“That was it?” I said.
“That was it.”
Silence. Perhaps his stream of questioning had exhausted him? As for me, I didn’t know where we were, either literally or figuratively, but each moment I felt less and less certain that I wanted to be there. He was just as gorgeous as ever, but there was something unsettling about the way he talked. We hadn’t really had a conversation so much as he had had a conversation, with himself, about me. Was I really participating yet, as more than a fact-checker? And why didn’t he want to talk about himself? These questions pressed so hard on my brain that it didn’t even occur to me to wonder who the letter was for, or why he had to mail it from this particular mailbox at the end of the bus line when there were perfectly good mailboxes in our neighborhood.
Just as I started to think it had been a mistake to follow him onto the bus, rather than leaving him safely relegated to the realm of my fantasies, he spoke. It was as though he’d been reading my mind.
“Sorry,” he said. “I got a little overexcited before. It’s just that I’ve been through a lot this year. Something really bad happened to me, and I’ve barely talked to anybody new since then, and it’s like I forgot how to interact with people. And I don’t know, I’ve just had this feeling about you. For a while. I like you.” He paused, reconsidered his word choice. “I mean that I register you, very strongly.”
“Me too,” I said. “It’s all right.”
“I can’t talk about the bad thing,” he said.
“Okay.”
“I’m not being coy,” he continued. “I just can’t. I also can’t talk about the letter I just mailed. Also, I should tell you that I’m leaving in about a month.”
“Leaving New York?”
“Well—yes.”
“Why?”
“I can’t explain it now,” he said. “Sorry. That one requires a little warming-up-to. I just thought you should know.”
I took this in. “So why don’t you tell me something you can tell me?”
“Okay.” He leaned forward, as I’d seen him do many times at the bus stop, elbows on knees, and thought for a minute. Then he sat up. “Okay,” he said. “Here are the basics. I grew up in Tennessee. Two medium-shitty parents, no siblings. Came to New York for college. Went to art school, dropped out.” He paused, as if unsure whether to continue, then plunged in again. “I have sloppy handwriting, but perfect oral hygiene. I’ve never had a cavity. I can play piano just well enough to fool some people into thinking I’m good.” He glanced at me. “You still with me?”
“Yeah, I’m with you. By the way, I think that’s our bus.” It had pulled up to the curb and was idling, the bus drive
r leaning back in his seat and doing a crossword.
“Oh yeah.” He stood up. “It won’t leave for a few minutes, but we might as well get on.”
We were the only people on the bus, and had our pick of the seats. We chose the two-seater furthest back. As soon as we sat down, our hands slid into each other’s—casually, as if we’d been doing this for years.
“Are you hot?” I asked.
“What?”
“Your skin. It’s so warm.”
“Oh,” he said. “That. Don’t worry about it. It’s just something weird about my body. I have, um…extra-fast circulation.”
“Okay.” This kind of made sense. “I actually have extra-slow circulation. When I give blood, it always takes me twice as long as everyone else. The nurses always feel bad and give me extra cookies at the end.”
“How about that,” he said. “We’ve got complementary weirdnesses.”
“Complementary weirdnesses,” I repeated. I liked the sound of it. This was exactly the problem I’d always had with the men I’d dated: either they weren’t weird enough, or their weirdnesses were not complementary with mine. When you have noncomplementary weirdnesses, they just amplify and sharpen each other, collide at uncomfortable angles.
The driver put down his crossword, shut the sliding door, slowly pulled out into the street.
“Anyway,” I said, “I have one question.”
“Shoot.”
“Have you ever been struck by lightning?”
“What?”
“It’s my single theory about you. You got struck by lightning once, and you almost died, or maybe you technically died for a second. That’s why your hair is golden, and why you’re so…jumpy.”
He looked pensive for a minute, as if the answer were complicated. “Something like that,” he finally said.
I let it go. We talked about other things. I asked him about growing up in Christ-loving Tennessee: was it really as bad as they said? Did everyone own guns? Did he have to go to Jesus camp? These notions were thoroughly exotic to me; there were a handful of grizzled libertarians in my Maine hometown, but I’d never been to a red state before.
“Jesus camp,” he said, shaking his head. “Did I ever. It’s even cheesier than you’d think. I sang in the children’s choir, then played piano for it. I wore suspenders and a gold bow tie. I can’t believe it when I see the pictures now. I mean, it’s so campy. Pun intended.”
I laughed. “What else?”
“Well,” he said. “Not to brag or anything, but every single year I won the Bible Verse Memorization Competition.”
“Wow.”
“It’s not something I advertise. I mean, it’s intimidating to some people, when they learn that about me. Like, they just don’t see me for me anymore. All they see is the line of gleaming crucifix-shaped trophies…”
“They were shaped like crosses? Really?”
“I always used to think, I’m just so glad Jesus wasn’t guillotined. Or electric-chaired.”
“Or lethal-injected. Gold-plated syringes around all the nuns’ necks.”
“Yeah. But you know? When you think about it, the cross was worse than any of those things. Way worse. Hanging up there for days, your broken bones just kind of dangling?”
I frowned; our banter seemed to have suddenly taken a dark turn. I wasn’t sure how to reply. “Well,” I said. “I guess there’s no good way to die.”
He closed his eyes and flinched.
“You okay?” I asked.
“Yeah.” He opened them again. “Just a chill or something.” But he released my hand, folded his arms, and looked out the window. I didn’t understand why, but I’d lost him. He’d become tense and distracted. His eyes narrowed and his leg jiggled up and down.
I squirmed in the silence for a minute, then broke it. “Tell me one,” I said.
He turned toward me. “One what?”
“A Bible verse.”
He sat up straight, seemed to revive. He spoke in a clear, exaggeratedly officious voice: “‘I saw a brilliance like amber, like fire, radiating from what appeared to be the waist upwards; and from what appeared to be the waist downwards, I saw what looked like fire, giving a brilliant light all round. The radiance of the encircling light was like the radiance of the bow in the clouds on rainy days.’”
I golf-clapped, wiped imaginary tears from the corners of my eyes. “That’s beautiful.”
“Thanks. It’s Ezekiel.”
“So, did you, like, believe it?”
“Believe what? Christianity?”
“Yeah.”
“Mildly and unquestioningly till age nine. Fanatically from nine to eleven. Then not at all.”
“What happened at nine? Jesus spoke to you?”
He shook his head. “Weirder than that.”
“You can tell me,” I said. “I’ve had some weird stuff happen to me too.”
“Like what?”
“Dreams that predicted the future. But minor, stupid things. Like in elementary school, I’d dream someone was going to be absent from class, and then they would be. I could foretell outbreaks of chicken pox.”
“This was weirder,” he said firmly.
“Tell me.”
He paused and looked out the window. The bus was slugging through Bensonhurst now, stopping at every single stop, picking up doughy old women laden with grocery bags, muttering in Spanish and Russian. He turned back to me and raked his hand across his head, then dropped it back into his lap. His golden hair stood up in spikes. “Actually,” he said, “it’s really hard to explain. Maybe now’s not the best time.”
“That’s okay,” I said.
I reached over and took his hand in mine. This time, the touch was even more charged than before; it pulsed through me, lighting up my bones like an X-ray. The feeling must have been mutual: we looked at each other, blinking and wide-eyed, surprise rippling between us like heat.
We didn’t talk for the rest of the ride. That was okay with me. I wouldn’t have been able to pay much attention to words anyway. My focus had shifted to our bodies, to the way my hand fit into his, the way our clothes brushed against each other when either of us shifted in our seats, the strong yet delicate line of his jaw, his clean and well-shaped mouth.
I grew more and more restless. I squirmed in my seat. I started to Morse-code messages into his hot palm. He probably thought it was foreplay, and it was, but I do actually know Morse code. I was a lonely child and I taught it to myself one slow summer out of boredom. Because of the particular book I used, I mostly learned anti-German war slogans.
By the time we disembarked at our stop, the one from which we’d begun our journey, so much had changed. U-boats lurked beneath calm Atlantic waters. Dark Teutonic forests rippled with threat. Sap rose in our American limbs. Our bombers lay waiting, loins tingling with gunpowder, noses toward the future.
Before parting, we made plans to see each other the following evening. I went home and flopped down on the bed and looked up at the ceiling. Something had shifted in the color resolution of my life: there was this new brightness in it, and in contrast to that brightness everything else seemed dim and unimportant. The things that would happen to me between now and the following night—the birthday party I’d attend later that evening, my Sunday library shift—were just interludes, a gray wash of negative space.
* * *
That night I could not avoid telling Jimmy about the golden man because he always knows when I’ve got a love interest I am trying to keep secret. He says that it’s right there on my face, that my skin gets red and I go sort of cross-eyed. I don’t believe it’s that obvious, but somehow he is always correct.
Our friend Samira was turning twenty-eight and had decided to celebrate by cooking Moroccan food for everyone she knew. Like many things Samira did, it was a generous impulse whose execution was hampered by basic, easily predictable facts about reality. Like the fact that she had never cooked Moroccan food before, or that her studio apartment was
too small to accommodate everyone she knew, or that her window unit air conditioner would not be able to outperform her stove on even a relatively temperate night in late August. As a result, within twenty minutes of our arrival, Jimmy and I were sitting on her stoop, ordering takeout Thai with an app on my phone while Jimmy smoked a cigarette.
“So I met a new guy,” I said, hoping to preempt his needling.
“I thought so. I thought you had that look. Where’d you find this one?”
“The bus stop.”
He snickered. “You know, right, that you’re just, like, two steps away from picking up a homeless guy under a bridge?”
“Ryan was technically homeless.”
“Oh yeah. That was the freegan?”
“Right.”
“Where was he living again?”
“Remember? He had a friend who ran an S and M dungeon and he said Ryan could live in the back room, but only if he came out at certain times and opened the dungeon door really abruptly, for people who had a fetish about being interrupted.”
“Oh right. Amazing. I can’t believe I forgot that.” He passed me the cigarette; I took one drag, then passed it back.
“Come to think of it,” I said, “I met him at that bookstore in Dumbo, so technically I did pick up a homeless guy under a bridge.”
This made Jimmy laugh in such a way that he choked on his cigarette smoke, which made us both laugh harder. “Okay,” he said. “So what’s wrong with this one?”
“He won’t tell me.”
“What do you mean: you asked? I was joking.”
I sighed. “I know.” So I told him, in detail, about my conversation with the golden man, about the nameless “bad thing” that had happened to him, his warning about leaving New York, the unexplained excursion to the mailbox.
The Regrets Page 6