Swipe Right for Murder

by Derek Milman

  “Jackson!” I scream.

  “Yo, where are you?”

  “In the park.”

  “Central? Kinda late, isn’t it? Alone?”

  “Jacks!” I scream again. I look around. I’ve penetrated the southwestern corner of the park, which is about to officially close for the night, so cops might spot me. I’m running down a pretty well-lit path. I veer off it, onto a lawn, staying clear of lights until I’m next to a pond, still and becalming. For some insane reason I think of that hotel pool in Cabo and Santiago’s hand gripping my thigh, and I feel myself blush everywhere. What the hell is wrong with me? Even now? Seriously?

  “Are you okay?” says Jackson.

  It’s hard to catch my breath. “Some shit went down, man.”

  “What happened?”

  I glance at my phone. The battery indicator is red. I have 15 percent power left. And I don’t have my charger with me. “My phone… almost dead.”

  I find a bench and sit down hard, panting, heart pounding. I’m in partial darkness, away from the dusky streetlights, but the sky is overcast; the skyline reflects off it like the clouds are engorged with LEDs—a black-and-white movie flickering in the sky.

  “Dude,” says Jackson. “I forgot to text you. But I didn’t really know if I was going to go and then I did.”

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m here!” I hear heavy background noise now: thumping music, laughter, shouting. “I don’t know exactly,” he says. “This place is awesome! There are two DJs. I think they’re both younger than us. EDM with this, like, influx of Northern Soul. You gotta check this shit out. There are these brainy tech babes here, man. They’re like—”

  “Where are you?”

  “Dude, I don’t even know.”

  “Then how can I meet you? Where is Tats?”

  “She’s asleep at home. She didn’t want to come out. She’s being annoying.”

  I scowl. “So you’re out… flirting with other girls while she’s home sleeping?”

  “Word, I’m like… not ready to settle down.”

  I understand I’m being chased by murderers and cops, but… I really like Jacks and Tats as a couple; they are great together, they are something stable, and the fact that this stable unit, which indirectly stabilizes me, is endangered makes me immediately unhappy.

  “I thought you guys were all about each other?”

  “Shit got weird with her parents—yeeeeaaah YA ARE—” he shouts out to someone, with a forward gallop of a laugh, his voice sliding away from my ear, into the wash of noise, and then right back to me. “I don’t know where we’re going.”

  I don’t know if he means his relationship, or literally, like he’s heading elsewhere. I keep my voice steady. “Jackson. Listen to me… are you… drunk?”

  “A little.”

  “Juuling?”

  “Vaping with Garrison. I’m good. Been dancing. I met this girl.”

  “Who the fuck is Garrison?”

  “Guy I met here.”

  There’s a shadow moving through the trees. Someone’s coming toward me; maybe it’s someone walking a dog, maybe something else. I get back on the path and start walking rapidly. The luminous funnel of the black-and-white sky follows me like a powdery spotlight. I think of the Bat Signal. Gotham City. Pulpy comic-book adventures. My brain desperately trying to suppress the string of horrors I just witnessed and can’t quite reconcile yet. Evil Tinkerbell. My family being threatened by a stranger on someone else’s phone. And Benoît, a man I barely knew, who was cute, and was kind to me, and knew what to do with his hands, before someone blew his brains out.

  I see flashlight beams, then groups of flashlight beams in the near distance, coming through the park. I lower my voice. “Look. I’m in trouble and I need you to pay very close attention to what I’m saying.”

  “I’m here,” says Jackson. “It’s okay.”

  “My phone is almost dead. And I need to get to you.”

  “Get on the L train. Head east. Jefferson-Wyckoff.”

  “I’m in Central Park. That’s not helpful!”

  “Dude, Uber it.”

  “I don’t have an Uber account! I don’t have the battery power to download the app. And I don’t know where you are, asshole!”

  “Oh, shit, just use mine, just use my Uber. Where are you?”

  Okay, good question. Where am I?

  I glance at my phone. As if knowing my distress level and wanting to ensure my weakened heart gets a nice hard pummeling of pure seismic fear, my battery has precipitously dropped to 9 percent. Shit. If this phone dies, I might die. This is real.

  “Stay on the phone with me,” I tell Jackson, thinking it’ll use more battery power to hang up and call him back. I don’t know if that’s even true. I know nothing.

  “Yeah, yeah,” he says. “No worries. It’s fine.”

  I work my way through the foggy, moonlit park, a dark jumble of low hills, stone arches, and winding paths, until about ten minutes later I see lights and hear traffic and emerge on Central Park West and 89th Street. How the hell did I get this far up from 59th? I have 4 percent battery power left. I tell Jackson where I am. I see clumps of police vehicles at various intersections, flashing lights—nervous-disco reds and blues. I can’t possibly think they have anything to do with me.

  “Look for an Acura MDX. Your driver’s name is Nazrul,” says Jackson. “Three minutes.”

  I hide behind a tree until I see a car slow down. “Nazrul,” I repeat. “Okay.”

  I open the door and slide inside. Nazrul barely acknowledges me as we drive off. He’s involved in an intense phone conversation with his brother, who apparently may or may not be getting out of prison tonight. I hang up, relaying the Uber drama to Jackson via text.

  They’re always on the phone with their brother, Jackson texts back. IDK why.

  Then my phone dies.

  CHAPTER 5

  Bushwick

  It was a warm Saturday morning, on the cusp of noon, when Tom first asked me if I wanted to go for a swim, playfully throwing me one of Shane’s old bathing suits. I had just finished mowing. I was all sweaty; I smelled like soil and freshly mowed grass, and my knees had patches of dirt on them, so sure why not. I changed in their downstairs bathroom while I heard Tom, outside, dive into the pool, getting a head start. I peeked out at him through the blinds, my curiosity piqued in a very specific way.

  They had a nice round pool in the middle of their backyard, very out in the open, so when you were swimming you were aware of the vastness of the sky. The wooden fence around their property was really low. Neighbors could easily peer over it if they wanted to; an infusion of innocent suburbia—every shout and splash heard three houses down.

  I thought of Archie Comics and that sunlit town of Riverdale, lost in time. I had just started reading them, with a keen interest in the Kevin Keller stuff, obviously, but had back-ordered older issues because I was interested to see what Riverdale looked like through the ages, and I was happy to discover it hadn’t changed all that much. I find weird things comforting like that.

  I never had much interest in Riverdale, the TV show. That was something else. Although the guys in it are super cute.

  Tom and I swam laps together. He had been a swimmer in college, so he gently adjusted my form. Then, still shirtless, towels wrapped around our shoulders, we escaped into his kitchen, where he microwaved us a plate of pizza rolls and poured lemonade over ice. I could see that he was uncomfortable in his kitchen, and was making food only for me, was doing all this just for me. We ate from the same yellow plate, sitting on barstools facing each other across the kitchen island, keeping our feet off the cold tiled floor, and didn’t say much at all.

  I had ideas from Insta and Snap who gay boys my age crushed on, or were supposed to be crushing on—Troye Sivan, Roy Harper on Arrow, the dudes from Supernatural—but I was interested in the way Tom’s muscles moved when he reached for the glasses in a cupboard over their stainless-steel f
ridge. I liked the shape of his back, how tall he was, and the way his mouth crinkled on the sides when he smiled. And I did wonder if that made me different from the ways I was already different—a double whammy of not fitting in.

  Leave it to me: simultaneously worried about not fitting in, yet terrified I was a boring suburban clone with my whole life laid out before me.

  We went swimming a bunch of times after that, any kind of physical contact filed under the casual guise of a late-morning impromptu swimming lesson. But gradually the lessons didn’t seem quite so impromptu anymore, and the distance between us closed.

  I think I was attracted to something I sensed in him that I didn’t completely understand yet, but identified with anyway: a quiet desolation. As our activities evolved, I realized he was home alone a lot of the time. I began to see more of Tom than I did Shane, which felt weird at first, but then not weird at all.

  We started watching TV together—post-swim, post–pizza rolls—and each time, we slid closer to each other on that beachy white sofa. If you fast-forwarded all those moments together you would definitely see the perceptible shift, like one of those nature documentaries that show a flower growing out of the ground in sped-up time.

  I can’t remember what we were arguing about. I think we were watching a silly TV show, some buzzy Hulu drama, and he predicted where things were going to go. I disagreed in a really sassy way and kicked at him, nudging my bare foot into the side of his leg. And he just went for me.

  We pseudo-wrestled on the carpet. When I was clearly winning (or he was letting me win), pinning him down, I said something like: I guess swimming really WAS your thing in college cause it sure as fuck wasn’t wrestling.

  He scooped me up and slung me over his shoulder. He spun me once around the room, which was enough to make me dizzy. He was stronger than I thought. Then he just stood there, with me still dangling over his shoulder, his arms wrapped tightly around my legs, holding me in place. I was conscious of his breathing, of his body working. It was clear he didn’t know what to do next, and it was clear he didn’t want to put me down. So I rested my hand against his lower back and said:

  Take me upstairs, you stupid dumbass.

  I can’t believe I said that.

  But I did, and he did.

  When he first put his hands on me after that moment—the very first touch after the game between us changed, and our playfulness became something way more serious—I was like: oh, shit.

  I remember touches, where people first put their hands, and he put his palm right below my throat, on my upper chest. I instantly felt a charge run through my body, something clicking into place. It was the first time I ever felt that I mattered to someone, felt accepted, or cared for in that way. I didn’t want to let that go. Something scary emerged in me then: I realized I would fight to keep this. This was a part of me I didn’t know I had. And I didn’t know where it would lead, because the rational side of my brain was screaming that this could never be, that this was very wrong.

  And I wondered if I was willing to see people get hurt to keep this, to keep him.

  Over time the risk became part of the thrill, I think, each of us doing something wrong for different reasons. I became a little obsessed with Tom and with what was going on between us. That was probably my biggest mistake.

  The night flies by the car windows in hurried wisps of light and muddled sound. After about twenty minutes, we go over a bridge. The view of the city stretches out; it feels momentous, the skyline almost toylike as we skitter along its top edges, as if it’s trapped and glittering in a jar. I think I hear the sound of motorcycles twice, but each time I look out the rear window I don’t see anyone following us.

  Eventually, once we’re over the bridge, the Uber slows to a stop on a quiet corner outside a liquor store. I don’t see much of anything around us. Nazrul insists that we’ve arrived at the correct address, so I get out of the car. As soon as I close my door, he skids away, still on the phone.

  At first I think I’ve been left in an abandoned industrial wasteland, but then I see pockets of life: bars in sneaky corners, spills of light, tight clusters of people smoking, laughing—the neighborhood slowly revealing itself, undoing its creases and folds. I don’t know which direction to walk. Jackson never gave me the address, he just plugged it into the Uber app and now the fucking Uber is gone.

  Goddammit.

  I walk across the street, trying to get my bearings. I’m facing a large warehouse. The windows are lit up gold, shapes and words painted on them from the inside; some of the windows are colored with hanging sheer cloth. But the place seems deserted to me. I walk farther along the street, looking around, hitting a string of cafés, some of them still open even at this crazy hour, the loud festive voices and the clank of silverware from inside momentarily soothing. The traffic lights change, a few cars zoom by, then a bus, and suddenly the neighborhood doesn’t seem as sleepy and dead to me.

  Then I see the motorcycles.

  They round a corner, facing me, facing the wrong side of the street. My heart starts to play a Led Zeppelin song inside my chest. It’s the same motorcycle I saw outside the Time Warner Center, and now there are two of them—two dudes on vintage bikes with iridescent green visors. They followed me all the way to Brooklyn.

  So I run.

  I turn a corner. I’m on a side street now, where it’s super dark and quiet. There’s an empty parking lot behind a fence, a few dilapidated apartment buildings with cracked windows, an elementary school set back from the street, partly hidden by clusters of trees. Sneakers hang from power lines.

  I keep running, past another fence with rusty automobile skeletons and piles of mangled metal junk behind it. I hear the distant roar of the motorcycles, growing closer. I round another corner. I’m just getting myself more lost, tunneling into the bowels of a neighborhood I’m not familiar with in any way.

  Intense psychedelic art, painted on low brick walls, pops out: Q*bert wearing Beats headphones and devouring a purple octopus; a flying saucer shooting red rectangular laser beams; Pac-Man eating a laptop while being chased by government-agent ghosts: vintage video game imagery updated with millennial hacktivist angst.

  I hear music. I feel a beat. I just can’t tell where it’s coming from.

  I turn another corner, trying to run toward the music, but the sound of a rumbling train, somewhere overhead, drowns it out. I hear the motorcycles again, closer now, and then a hand reaches out and grabs my shoulder and I scream and jump five feet in the air.

  “Dude!” It’s Jackson. His phone is halfway to his ear, casting a little pool of light against the side of his face. He has a slightly dumbstruck expression. A throng of girls in groovy-patterned tops, his latest admirers, all move aside like a wind. They pretend to check their phones, swaying, keeping one eye on me, curious.

  “Oh, my God,” I say, and hug him hard. I have never, in my whole life, been more relieved to see someone.

  “I was looking all over for you,” he says. “Where the hell did you—”

  “We need to go,” I tell him. “Where is this thing?”

  The twin motorcycles appear at the other end of the street. They gun their engines. The two bikers, shielded mirrored faces growing more chilling each time I see them, turn their heads in unison to stare me down. I point at them.

  Jackson looks at the bikes, then back at me. “Seriously?”

  “YES! Let’s go!”

  “It’s right here,” he says.

  Jackson grabs my hand and we hop around a corner, partway down an adjacent block, past a gate. Then an unmarked door, scribbled with pink graffiti, is thrust open, and we’re inside.

  Everything is doused in acid-green light. Cloud rap is echoing through the cavernous, multi-tiered space. Everything is cloudy in general—blurry, off-kilter. Shadowy bodies, silhouetted against the light, bounce up and down to the music. Lines of people wearing Day-Glo bracelets and necklaces that change color in tandem snake around makeshift bars, the
bottles illuminated from behind with an underwater glow. Sequined acrobatic dancers with greased-up hair hang from poles, gyrating. I see a lot of unusual tattoos, choppy asymmetrical haircuts, girls in black miniskirts, dudes in muscle tees bearing mysterious insignias.

  Projected on one wall is the original Space Invaders arcade game. But it’s tricked out with molten colors and twitchy-looking aliens. On the opposite wall, the bright-blue sky and puffy clouds from Super Mario Bros. serenely scroll by.

  “It’s a fashion-and-tech theme!” Jackson shouts, pointing out a group of revelers in one corner wearing Adidas jackets and Oculus Rift headsets. “This whole party is virtual reality–ready,” he says, but it’s really hard to hear him over the music.

  “What does that even mean?” I shout, as he leads me across the dance floor.

  “I think you can put on a headset and parts of this place become a 3D wonderland or some shit. This whole thing was organized by a group of post-conceptual artists who work across different mediums. Like Cory Arcangel.” He points at the Super Mario clouds. “Got famous for hacking Nintendo NES cartridges.”

  A girl in a slinky blue dress—older, with severe eye makeup and an Amy Winehouse-y beehive—hands Jackson a drink that glows blue from ultraviolet light. “You want anything?” says Jackson, pointing at me.

  “No, no.”

  Jackson is totally wasted, clearly has been for some time, and I have to figure out how to bring him back down to earth, because I need him to focus and help me right now.

  “This is Charlotta,” says Jacks, pointing at the Amy Winehouse girl. She smiles, faintly. “She does PR for—”

  “I’m a digital marketing strategist for Xavier Lightbeam,” she corrects him.

  I nod. She might as well be speaking Portuguese.

  “It’s a Brooklyn-based tech start-up,” she explains, looking around, bored.

  “Charlotta is from Sweden,” says Jackson, winking at me. He’s got on his turquoise muscle shirt, which is what he wears when he’s actively on the prowl. Another girl in a black dress wraps her arms around his neck, like she’s known him forever, whispering into his ear. Jackson nods, and looks at me, bringing two fingers to his lips. “Do you want to…?”