Running

by Cara Hoffman

  We walked through the tall grass out into the clearing by the pond. I was barefoot, wearing running shorts and a pink tank top from Kmart.

  “Show me what you know,” he said.

  I knelt and unscrewed the cap on the metal water bottle full of gasoline, then pushed strips of an old cotton rag into it so they could soak. Once they were saturated I poured the ammonium nitrate into the strips, wound them up, tied them, doused them with more gasoline for good measure, and then jammed them into a wide-mouthed plastic bottle. I had no idea if it would work. Finally I sunk an M-80 into the bottle as a detonator. It was primitive, easier than building model planes. Dare watched me, an expression I didn’t recognize on his face: angry, proud, scared, maybe all three. When I was done he took the bottle, lit the fuse, threw it into the pond, then grabbed my hand and ran to the edge of the clearing.

  Nothing happened.

  I started to move toward the pond but he jerked me back. There was a loud roaring whump and hiss and the surface of the pond swelled and burst and shot into a short vertical column that expanded, spraying water and leaves and green slime. The blast cut into us, covered our goggles with algae, soaked our clothes. It was a shocking, terrifying pleasure that sucked the breath from my lungs. For a frozen moment we stood, skin stinging from the cutting force of the water and whatever particulate life it held. The air was still again and a great swell ran back into the pond from the banks. Then slowly the sound of a summer storm pricked our ears, a thick patter of slaps and hollow thuds as bodies of fish and frogs rained down upon us, hitting our heads and backs and arms, landing broken and still in the clearing, dumb like plastic toys, dead before they’d hit the ground. And the pond too—its surface covered with floating fish that had been killed by the force.

  “That’s what you don’t know,” he said.

  Lately, walking home around dusk, he would look for enclosed construction sites, scaffolding—places that would be easy to break into and hard to see from the street—or he’d head back toward campus to his office or to a study room in the library. Once there, he’d remember about the apartment, alarmed that he had somehow gone back even further in his mind than Athens, to the days when he and Jasper were living out.

  Jasper had run out of money when they were near Zagreb on the way to Athens; Milo’d never had any money to begin with. They slept in parks before they found the hotel. Running seemed like the clear solution. They’d save their money, make friends, move on to the islands, head east, head south. But after six months the only thing they’d managed to save were some books.

  The first passports they sold were their own, to Boulous, a boy Jasper had flirted with in Drinks Time. He was from a country that used to have a different name, and Jasper began calling him the Rhodesian, though Milo was fairly certain he was from Serbia.

  It took three minutes with Boulous, a few hours in the marble halls of their respective consulates getting documents reissued. Shocking how easy it was back then: answer some questions, pretend to be a college kid on a backpacking trip. Fill out a form. Jasper’s was reissued within twenty minutes. For Bridey and Milo there was a wait. When they were done, they had enough money to walk away from the heat and desolation of Athens and go anywhere.

  “For nationality I put Drunkard,” Jasper said. They were walking toward the flea market. “And for profession I put Alcoholist.”

  “I got an F in sex,” Bridey said.

  Down by the Roman agora two men were sitting on folding metal chairs, listening to accordion music coming from a small black radio. Jasper gave them some drachmas though they hadn’t asked for money. “That’s how they’re busking,” Jasper explained to Bridey and Milo. “They’re not playing music, they’re listening to it, and we’re paying them for whatever they’re thinking about while they listen; we’re paying for something we’ll never know ever.”

  They walked for another half mile or so, getting beyond the maze of shops and restaurants to the narrower crowded streets. The sky was deep blue above their heads, and their shadows pooled around them as they passed rows of modern ruins, junk shops, and dingy stalls. The sun beat down upon a lifetime’s worth of objects, laid out blunt and bare and disavowed on blankets by the street: lamps and trumpets and old turntables; milk crates full of silverware; sewing machines and nautical instruments, dishes, shoetrees, old telephones, prayer beads, postcards, knives, moldering books in a variety of languages, rusty toys, and dust-­encrusted jewelry. Paintings stacked upright against the sides of buildings, a whole section dedicated to the Crucifixion in needlepoint and beadwork. People were selling pipes and plumbing fixtures out of the backs of trucks. There were rows and rows of bicycles and boxes of records, discarded electronic equipment; cords, crates of batteries, irons, old shoes, statues, and Hummels; and clocks and painted canvas reproductions of reproductions. And the whole place teemed with motion and life; music drifting through the alleyway, raised voices. The smell of dust and mold and engine oil baking in the sun. Milo watched Jasper’s hands reaching out to touch this domestic wreckage. He’d cut the cast off only a week before and his wrist looked narrow and white, his fingers thin and frail, as he traced the bronze profile of Diana and her bow; the base of a candlestick that was exerting some power over him.

  Jasper did away with six hundred quid that day. He bought a Persian rug, which he said he’d put down in the station to make it look nicer, but which he later dragged back to the hotel. He haggled in musty junk shops or beneath makeshift blue tarp awnings over things like buttons, shabby furniture, and photographs of other people’s families.

  Milo could only think of his mother, could only think he had never in his life held this much money in his pocket.

  Coming out of a shop by the Plaka, Jasper handed Bridey a ring which she tossed into the air, then kicked across the street. Milo remembered the hollow sound of it hitting her boot, her satisfied laugh as she turned away from them to light a cigarette.

  Past Sokratous Street they found a café to drink Fix Hellas and Amstel. Beside them a happy-hour crush of older Greek men sat, cigarette smoke haloing their heads, eating meat and pickles from small plates, sipping tiny glasses of clear liquor. Milo looked down at the things Jasper’d bought stowed now beneath the table while they drank, knowing if he raised his eyes he would start crying.

  Jasper flipped through a shoe box of old postcards he’d found, a collection likely abandoned for decades, that he was thrilled to own. Some were old enough to be in black-and-white: the Parthenon, maps of the Cyclades, sheep on a rocky hillside. The colorful ones were of the ocean, blue-domed mosques, flags, people dancing in a ring. He gazed at each one, smiling, wistful, leaning back in his chair. Then one in particular, murky gray-green and ghostly, made him sit up, as if he recognized it, as if he were watching moving images. It was a dim picture of a garden path, with broken, moss-covered columns ornamented with acanthus leaves, lying half buried in the mud.

  Jasper’s eyes were dewy and green like the image he admired and they shined fervent and adoring, radiating whatever it was he saw on that square of cardboard.

  “This might have been lost to the world if we hadn’t discovered it,” he said. “I’d have easily spent another thousand quid just for this.”

  Milo looked at the postcard, then down again at the things beneath the table.

  Bridey leaned in and put her hand on his before he could close it into a fist.

  * * *

  Now, in New York, Milo would forget he’d enough money to buy coffee or lunch. He didn’t take cabs, walked everywhere. People told him the city would be enormous and confusing but it was actually idiotproof and you never get bored wandering. The clothes he owned—six shirts, a sports coat, and three pairs of pants—seemed excessive, but from appearances his colleagues owned more clothing, had more than one pair of shoes. Milo had never known what people with more than one pair of shoes were trying to prove.

  When h
e went out to Ty’s or Nowhere Bar the boys there were so meticulously put together. So aware of their self-documented beauty. You didn’t see someone confident enough in their own skin or with their own thoughts to dress like Jasper had; even the punks couldn’t. Everyone so clean, afraid of dirt or the slightest discomfort. And the conversation was insipid. Everyone wanting to be seen as good—even if they worked for a bloody bank or drug company or built fucking bombs, they had to tell you how they ate cruelty-free meat, did a fun run for charity.

  And he did not understand the culture of phones, everyone broadcasting their location to an international network of advertisers. If you were sitting with a boy and got up to go to the bar or the jacks, you would not return to see his thoughtful face in repose but illuminated by the glow of a little square: anxious, occupied, afraid to be alone, of seconds ticking by unconnected. The maps bothered him the most. Everyone, it seemed, wanted to know exactly where they were going, exactly how to get there, exactly what it would be like so they could trek across a few city blocks with utter certainty.

  It had never been this way with Milo and Jasper. Or even Milo and Marc, back when Marc had openings in Chelsea and they’d go out after and get lost, end up fucking in a stairwell, walking over the Williamsburg Bridge, kissing in the ­Remedy, or along the waterfront, or in the Ramble, wandering till dawn.

  There’d been no reason for leaving Marc and going back to Manchester other than the kindness with which the man had treated him. There’d been no reason to come back to New York other than the fantasy of running into a cipher after twenty-five years. He had wanted it to be different.

  When he first moved to Manhattan, Milo went out to Ty’s several nights a week with shockingly little success. Navas tried to help him improve his attitude to make him more of a catch, then gave up and told him about Grindr. Jasper would have loved Grindr. It was a list of the exact locations of people you could rob after fucking.

  He had truly wanted it to be different. He had. But being at the New School was becoming a greater strain each day. The hollow, earnest conversations, walking home through a gauntlet of beefy boys who thought the East Village was their campus food court. And the idea that Milo and his colleagues were, by “educating” these people, working for some greater good was just absurd. By late fall it was clear that the only person Milo really spoke with was Navas. That the only people he wanted to drink or spend time with lived at the southwest corner of Tompkins Square Park by the chess tables.

  He’d stop at the liquor store after work, sit beneath the cover of tall trees, amid the smell of fall leaves with these friends and watch the rich people who didn’t know they were rich go by. There were public restrooms and kids on swings. People watching the hawk hunting squirrels or rats. They’d drink and get together enough change to buy hot dogs from Ray’s Candy Store across the street. There were usually four or five of them by evening, people with good stories. A short man who carried chess pieces in a ziplock bag wore a shower curtain as a cape, or hung it with nylon cord between the iron fence and his shopping cart to make a rain shelter. Milo and a woman with infected face piercings and a beaten Chinatown handbag full of clothes, Duane Reade vitamins, and a glass pipe had crowded beneath it with the man once or twice, watched the rain shake the leaves, hit the rose petals, make the rats scurry.

  They were smart and funny, especially the woman, but only Steve had the right kind of beauty: a wiry, wily, sullen grace and patient, trusting eyes. His age indiscernible from sleeping out. Milo never passed the park without looking for him.

  Weeks ago, when the Christians were giving away food and Chinese women with handcarts were lined up around the block, Steve had asked Milo how much money he thought the recycling ladies made. He meant the Chinese women. They walked from the Lower East Side with clear garbage bags full of cans and bottles they’d scavenged block by block from the bins; some carried two of these big bags tied to either end of a broomstick, balanced across their shoulders. “I don’t think it’s a very good hustle,” Milo had told him. “Not until they raise the recycling deposit.”

  Steve was opening doors at the bank for tips, asking for money outside the Fine Fare on Avenue C, and selling pigeons he’d caught to a man named Will at Bowery Pigeon and Pet Supplies, just south of Canal, for five dollars each. Two dollars if the ­pigeon was fucked-up.

  Milo and he had gone wandering that day, with their meal from the Christians to the Sixth Street overpass and down along the East River, where they could sit on a bench and look at the bridges. After, they found a church under construction on Seventh Street. There was scaffolding up, the doors were open, and no one was around. The sooty, acrid smell of Steve’s body in the cool darkness was intoxicating. His muscles moved beneath his skin, pressed hard and gentle against Milo’s chest, his breath on his neck. Steve smiled and his teeth were bad, and he looked away in embarrassment when Milo stroked him, leaned down to taste his neck, his chest. Milo had not felt such clear desire, famished body pressed to famished body, in more than twenty years.

  Walking back to Tompkins Square, Steve talked about how he’d been sleeping on Avenue D and Ninth beneath graffiti that said Jim Joe. The kids that walked that way to school thought it was his name, so now when he saw them being led through the park by their teacher, some would call out to him “Hi, Jim Joe!”

  “It was so sweet,” he said. “Y’know?”

  “You have kids?” Milo asked him.

  “Yeah. In fact, I gotta run, I’m picking them up from violin lessons in Brooklyn Heights. No, man, I don’t have any fucking kids.”

  Once toward morning, very drunk, they were panhandling for a bottle and Milo remembered he could go to a bank machine. It wasn’t the first time this had happened but it was the first time when he was with someone else.

  “The thing is,” Steve said, walking beside him across Grand Street to the Citibank, “or rather not the thing but a thing you gotta consider . . . what you gotta consider is that you could have a problem with your brain chemistry. Listen, I read about this. If you’re not poor—destitute, y’know?—then maybe you’re crazy to be living like this. It makes sense right? Milo, man, think about it. No one would stay out all night near that fucker Louis if they could just go home.”

  “I don’t know Louis,” Milo said, pocketing forty dollars and handing sixty to Steve.

  “One with the dog,” Steve said, gesturing to his forehead. “Planet tattoos.” Then he looked at the cash and sweat broke out on his upper lip. He shoved the money quickly into his pocket while Milo turned away in shame.

  “Don’t tell anyone from the park you have money,” Steve said.

  Candy said my name and the silence of the dream broke into voices and music, loud television sounds. Stephan was nudging his pint forward with one finger, prompting me to go get him another, his face more puffy and bruised than it had seemed before. The drivers had done their best work.

  “Did you go to the hospital?” I asked.

  “He’s fine,” Candy said. “We got medicine. We got enough for a month.” She lit a cigarette, exhaled. “Do you want some?”

  “What’s it for?”

  “Pain.”

  “No.”

  The movie was over and now there was music coming from somewhere. I looked at the table beside us and saw runners playing cards with a deck Jasper had bought months ago, the backs ornately inscribed with the word Ixion and a man lashed to a wheel with living snakes. Every runner in the place must have taken something from our room, the way we’d been so thoroughly cleaned out.

  Stephan tapped his ring against his empty glass. “What are you waiting for?” he asked me.

  I pushed my chair back and headed out into the night, flushed and dizzy, then running fast and nearly blind in the narrow back street. My joints felt loose and numb and the lights of the neighborhood streamed past. Omonoia Square was littered and abandoned and the sound of my boots echo
ed across the plaza. The air was almost cool against my skin. The streetlamps of the empty city drew my shadow along beneath me on the pavement and threw it grotesque and misshapen against the walls of buildings all along the way.

  It was dark at Athens Inn, no one at the front desk. I sprinted up to the second floor two stairs at a time, a vicious gnawing feeling burning in my throat; tore down the long hallway to the walk-in linen closet at the back of the building, and wrenched the door open.

  A hand shot out and clenched my wrist, jerked me roughly into the dark space and down on to the floor. I lay gasping with the wind knocked out of me and a knee pressed into my chest, a cold knife at my throat.

  I tried to breathe so I could tell him who I was, then he snapped on the light, crouched over me, and looked directly into my eyes until he was sure I wouldn’t move. The closet was big; floor-to-ceiling shelves lined with sheets and towels made up one wall, and a cot and a table and chair pressed up against the other. He was shirtless, barefoot, wearing a pair of jeans. His tattoos radiated their story of reckless senseless pain between us. He pulled me up and sat me roughly on the chair near the door but still held the knife.

  “You bloody fuckwit,” he whispered close to my ear. “Just what d’you think you’re doin’?”

  “Where is he?”

  “Who?”

  “Stop it!” I said.

  He smirked and looked me up and down. So invested in death, like a hunter, he could see life wherever it might be hidden. His dark-blue eyes dilated to black as he stood in the shadowed narrow room appraising my body.

  He brushed my hair out of my eyes, tucking some tangled strands behind my ear. His own hair was shaggy and touched his shoulders, silver strands through dark auburn.