Then, though: the dream.
I dreamed I was underwater, in some kind of river. Above me the sun filtered through clear water, tiny silver fish darting around. Below me lay a riverbed paved with smooth black stones.
I reached down to scoop up one of the stones from the bottom, but the hand that reached down was not my hand. Or actually it was my hand—it was clearly attached to me—but it was different: completely stripped of flesh, just an elegant spider of bone. I was a skeleton. I tried to scream, but I was underwater.
I woke up with a start, soaked in sweat. My phone told me it was 4:03 a.m. Thomas was still in my bed, but he’d rolled away from me, curled up on his side facing the wall, the light cotton blanket twisted around him. He looked pale and unreal in the thin, greenish, diluted urban moonlight that streamed through my window.
Still under the spell of the dream, I started to have a strange feeling: that Thomas wasn’t there at all, that I had just imagined him, was imagining him now in some kind of waking dream state. I do not mean this as a figure of speech; this is a very real fear of mine, that the things I imagine will take on such solidity that I cannot differentiate them from reality. It is a disease of girls who spend lots of time alone, reading books and making up stories; they grow up to be women with intense dream lives and daydream lives, who sometimes confuse their private reality with the shared reality of others. Sometimes I have referred to something only to see a confused frown on the other person’s face, meaning that they have no idea what I am referring to because it never actually happened except inside my head.
I turned on the bedside light, went into the bathroom, and splashed my face with water. When I came back and found Thomas still there, I felt a little bit better. But still some dark thing sloshed around inside me, uneasily; still I was nauseous with the questions the dream had raised, questions that I could not now, in the middle of the night, un-ask.
I suddenly remembered Jimmy’s warnings. I hadn’t noticed an ankle bracelet, but what if I’d just been distracted? I felt seized by a possessive urge to see his whole body, to confirm his reality, to search the map of his skin for clues that I might have overlooked. Slowly, I slid the comforter down, revealing his sculpted white-gold shoulders. I patted them gently with my hands. They were scalding hot. He didn’t wake up. I eased the blanket down further, and then I gasped.
In the center of his chest was a hole the size of a baseball. No blood, no seams, just a perfectly round absence, as if he’d been nabbed by a giant hole puncher. The hole’s borders were flesh-colored but fuzzy, like a mirage.
Unsure what to do, I went to the kitchen, poured myself a glass of water, and drank it in one gulp, standing up. When I got back, the hole was still there.
I eased the comforter down the rest of his body and inspected him thoroughly. No other holes anywhere. No ankle bracelet either.
Now it seemed actually preferable that this was all a dream. The sooner I could wake from it, the better. I went to the bathroom, slugged two mini cupfuls of NyQuil, and returned to the bed. The drug did its work and in a few minutes I’d fallen back into an uneasy, sticky, greenish-colored sleep.
When I woke up in the morning, he was gone.
* * *
Over the years, Jimmy and I have developed a habit of texting each other in the middle of the night from strange men’s bathrooms. There’s always some detail that seems crucial to share—like the stack of old Tintin comics on the back of the toilet tank of the French law student with whom Jimmy had his first threesome; or the way a library school classmate of mine insisted not only on wearing his socks during sex, but on leaving them hitched up his calves like a schoolboy; or the cadence with which a British historian that Jimmy once seduced cried out “Good God!” at the moment of climax.
Eventually these texts acquired a name: “failed novels.” “That was one of your best failed novels,” we’d say, or “Oh yeah, I remember that detail from one of your failed novels.” The truth at the heart of the joke was that Jimmy and I had once been aspiring writers, but realized eventually that we didn’t have the stamina to sustain anything for longer than a page. We wrote excellent sentences and paragraphs; our emails were Pulitzer-worthy. But neither of us had ever published anything, or bothered to try.
So our lives became source material for a novel that unfolded in real time, text message by text message. It was like that Joni Mitchell line—“Love is a story told to a friend; it’s secondhand.” I couldn’t truly enjoy the glow of a mounting flirtation, the pleasure of tangling in strange sheets, without describing it. Sometimes the sentences formed themselves inside my head even as the night unfolded, particularly when the date turned out to be cringeworthy: when someone spoke only in pickup-artist clichés, or attempted a sexual move copied inexpertly from porn, or extolled the virtues of paleo or CrossFit. Jimmy could occasionally get swept away: when I didn’t get a text, I knew his date had gone well; if it had gone really really well, even his later in-person debrief would be hopelessly vague. I occasionally felt bad about this difference between us—about the way I reliably failed to inhabit a moment, instead hovering outside of it, catlike, waiting to isolate and pounce on a tellable detail.
It was only as I surveyed the bedroom that morning, taking in the fact of Thomas’s departure, trying to piece together the truth of what I’d seen during the night, that I realized it hadn’t even occurred to me to text Jimmy, or to think about the fact that I wasn’t texting him. For the first time that I could remember, I’d remained thoroughly within a moment’s dreamlike grip; reality had become more potent than a story about it.
Now, this was no consolation. I lay alone in the early-morning light, taking measure of my bedroom’s emptiness. The sheets on Thomas’s half of the bed were tangled and twisted, as if he’d fled in great haste and agitation. He hadn’t left a note.
Last night this space had brimmed over with lovemaking; last night my body had expanded, become a kind of heat, taken up the whole room. Even the corners, even the dark spaces beneath the furniture—it all had been filled. Now the room felt hollow and scraped out.
It had rained during the night, and the woolly light said it was still overcast and drizzly. Everything looked gray and drained of color. I felt as though I was in an old black-and-white movie, perhaps a French or Swedish movie about doomed claustrophobic love, where everyone smokes a lot and makes aphoristic pronouncements about impossibility.
The actress has a beautiful stony face and wears a beret. She holds a cigarette and stares into some vague middle distance to the left of the camera. “He has a hole in his heart,” she says. “An actual hole.” She reaches down and extinguishes her cigarette with a single cruel motion. End of scene.
The worst part was that I was still turned on. The night before, we’d spent hours working each other up, but neither of us had come. Despite what I’d seen in the middle of the night, despite the room’s cold stillborn feeling now, all that potential still hummed in my body. No one had informed certain parts of it, the cave lady parts, of the latest developments. I caught a whiff of his scent on my pillow, and my body responded: urgently, humidly, tropically. This felt grotesquely unfair.
I slid my hand down between my legs and began to vindictively masturbate. I forced myself not to think of him, instead going back to my previous default fantasy, in which I made love to a woman physically identical to myself. I pinned her to the wall and shoved two fingers up her real quick to show her who was boss. Then I tied one of her wrists to the bed and made her touch herself with her other hand. She got really hot from my meanness. Normally this was where things really took off: the moment when the two mes—the objectifier and the object—merged into one being, writhing and squirming in the grip of the same shameful imperative.
But this morning it didn’t work. The other me seemed unconvinced. She stared up with a dull, stale look, disappointed, as if to say, Is this all you’ve got? And where is the melting, where is the heat?
I gave up. I needed
some coffee. I put the pot on and stared out the window, just as I’d done the day before. Today a veil of fog clung to everything; even from my fourth-floor apartment window, it seemed to coat the lots and backyards. Water above, water below. Water everywhere. I was not in a building but on a ship. Slowly we were pulling away from the dock. Slowly we were leaving reality behind.
Once I got outside, I felt better. Whatever had taken place in my bedroom last night, the outside world seemed unaffected. Real rain fell gently on the heads and umbrellas of real people. I hadn’t brought an umbrella myself, a fact I was glad of now. The cool water felt good on my face, a reminder of all the true ways that science described the world. Somewhere clouds were condensing into liquid, gravity pulling the water down. Gravity was a kind of embrace: the earth gathering in the rain, gathering in everything, including me—holding me close to its body, reminding me I belonged.
The other people at the bus stop all seemed soggy and afflicted, coughing into their coat sleeves or staring down at their phones. Thomas wasn’t there.
I boarded the bus and, out of habit, watched the waiting area as it pulled away, staring out through the scratched and foggy window at all these people who were not him.
The workday was a wash. I stared off into space, unaware of the library patrons, uninterested even in alphabetizing. All I wanted was to get through my shift, go home, and crawl back into bed. At the same time, bed seemed like the worst, most claustrophobic place to be; my sheets were still tangled and clotted with nightmare.
Halfway through the day, Jimmy texted: how was ur date??? The multiple question marks signaled his surprise at not having received a failed novel about it. I thought a long time before responding. For the first time with Jimmy, I felt tongue-tied: there were English words that existed to describe what I had seen, but when I typed them into my phone and read them back to myself, I felt assaulted by a migraine-like dissonance so profound that I actually had to close my eyes and raise my fingers to my temples and wait for it to pass. In the end I deleted the message and texted it was good but weird…busy day i’ll tell u later.
After work I thought about killing time at the coffee shop or bookstore for a while, or taking a walk to tire myself out. But when the bus deposited me back at my stop, I looked across the street and saw that another bus was arriving in the opposite direction—not mine but Thomas’s, the one he rode every day. Seized by a sudden impulse, I ran across the street, narrowly avoiding a speeding bicycle, and got on.
I took the same journey I’d taken with Thomas just a few days before, all the way to the end of the line. But this time, of course, I was alone.
When I arrived at my destination, I was disappointed: it was just a normal mailbox, after all. What had I expected? And now that I was here, what was I supposed to do? I looked around, as if for clues, but all I saw was the desolate street and the bus depot on the other side.
At a loss, I opened the little door to the mailbox and stuck my hand in. Nothing happened, but the air was definitely different in there. Colder, and pointier. My hand tingled faintly. Was this simply a consequence of air science? Enclosed spaces, slower movement of oxygen particles? No: after a minute, I got the distinct sense that this air was doing something. It was feeling me just as I was feeling it. I’d thrust my arm into a thoroughly active absence. I left my hand in there for a minute or two, letting the air become acquainted with it, and then I slowly pulled it out.
I couldn’t really think of anything else to do, but I didn’t want to go home yet either. I decided I would leave something behind in the mailbox. It didn’t matter what. I held open my bag, rummaged around, and pulled out my notebook, the bus notebook: sometimes I took it out during my ride and jotted down phrases that popped into my mind, or did quick sketches of the backs of people’s heads. Now, as I flipped through it, I realized that I hadn’t drawn or written anything in the past two weeks. I’d been too busy staring out the window and daydreaming about Thomas.
Annoyed at the notebook’s blankness, I opened the little hinged metal door of the mailbox and tossed the entire thing in. Then I crossed the street and took the bus back home.
When I got there, he was sitting on my stoop.
* * *
He looked the same as always, wearing his same uniform—except that everything was a shade darker than normal, because he was completely soaked through. He must have been sitting there a long time. Also, his brightness seemed to have dimmed. His eyes still glowed, but flatly, as if tarnished; his hair had lost its luster.
“You’re soaking wet,” I said.
“I know,” he said. “I’ve been sitting here in the rain.” He gave a half smirk, as if he couldn’t quite take his own romantic gesture seriously. “The rain,” he repeated, holding his hands out to the side, palms upturned. “That’s the kind of guy I am. The guy who sits on your stoop in the rain, for hours, just to earn the right to apologize.”
I folded my arms. “So,” I said. “This is you asking me if you can come in?”
“If you’ll have me. I’m sorry. I just want to explain why I left this morning.”
I sighed. “It’s okay,” I said. “Come in, I guess.” He followed me inside.
“So,” I said. I sat on the couch, looking up at him; he had remained standing, to protect my furniture. Little droplets of water kept falling from his clothes onto the rug.
“So,” he said. “Where to begin?”
“I saw your hole,” I blurted.
He flinched, as if I’d slapped him, and closed his eyes.
“In the middle of the night,” I continued. “I woke up. You were lying there asleep, but you had a giant hole in your chest.”
He didn’t respond, just stood there with his eyes closed.
“Who are you?” I said. “You don’t have a cell phone. You won’t tell me your last name. You can’t reveal anything about your life. And you seem to have…some totally other kind of body.”
Slowly, he reached down and peeled up his wet shirt, exposing his stomach inch by inch. Except that where his stomach was supposed to be, I could see right through to the far wall: there was a hole just like the one I’d seen in his chest in the middle of the night, except bigger—and spreading. I watched it expand so far that it almost reached the edges of his body. Only a thin vertical strip of flesh was visible on either side.
“So,” he said. “This.”
“Yeah. Is this what you meant when you said you were leaving New York?”
“More or less.”
“I see now why it was hard to explain. I’d assumed, you know, you meant your whole body at one time.”
“Yeah.”
“When did it start?”
“Just this morning. I noticed it when I woke up.”
“But you knew this was going to happen?”
“Not exactly. But something like this. I wasn’t surprised. It’s hard to explain.”
I gazed down at his stomach again—or rather, through it. The wall beyond was covered in wallpaper, a black-and-white vintage-y floral pattern that I’d chosen and put up a week after I moved in, trying to make the apartment’s crappiness look artsy and intentional rather than just crappy. It was already starting to peel. I barely noticed it anymore; it had become just another part of the room. But now as I stared at this one patch of it, his flesh surrounding it on four sides like a picture frame, it looked impossibly strange—familiar yet improbable, like a stranger’s face that somehow resembled my own. I looked up at Thomas’s face, then down at the wallpaper. Face. Wallpaper. Face. Wallpaper.
“Well,” I said. “I guess you tried to tell me.”
“I did.”
“What does it mean?”
He sighed. “As you’ve probably figured out, I’m not really alive. In the traditional sense.”
“What other sense is there? I always thought there was only the one.”
“No, there’s at least two. I don’t know an exact number.”
“Were you born like this?”
“No. I was like you once, but I died. ‘Died.’” He made exaggerated air quotes, as if it was a silly made-up word.
“How?” I asked.
“I don’t want to talk about it. Sorry. Even just thinking about it makes things worse.” Sure enough, even as he spoke, the hole slowly expanded. Then I watched the two flesh-colored lines at the edges of the hole completely disappear, so that now he looked as though he’d been cut in half: his chest hovered above his narrow hips, a band of empty space in the middle.
“Sorry,” I said. “Are you in pain?”
“No. I don’t really even feel my body at all, right now. I’m kind of numb.” Slowly, the edges of his abdomen reappeared, and the hole started to contract.
“It was…sudden, wasn’t it?” I asked. “Your death.”
“Yes.” Immediately the hole started to expand again.
“I’m sorry.”
“That’s okay.” He closed his eyes, waiting for his flesh to reclaim the emptiness.
So: this man glimmered so brightly because he was constantly on the edge of not existing. Like anything beautiful on the edge of nonexistence, he now seemed unbearably precious. I didn’t care anymore about his disappearance last night. I just wanted to hold him together, and keep him here.
I got up, went into the bathroom, and pulled out my fluffiest towel. Then I went over to him, reached up, and gently began to dry his face and hair. While I did this he looked down at me so tenderly I was afraid to meet his gaze. His hair was curly and soft, like a lamb’s, and smelled like wet wool.
After I’d dried his hair, I slowly removed his shirt. He submitted to this disrobing like a child, raising his arms without being asked. Then I wrapped the towel around his narrow shoulders and used its ends to pat down his arms, still glowing faintly. I rubbed down his torso, absorbing the little water droplets from the few sparse hairs on his chest.
The Regrets Page 8