by Herocious
the bright yellow bottle cap and hands her his Dr. Pepper. He drags his heavy backpack with him to an open computer and sits. A cardboard sign trails behind his backpack like the muddy train of a wedding dress.
Luckily, he doesn’t see me.
Is he really homeless, living on the street? But he can’t be more than 25. He has to have a family he can turn to for help, right?
After a little while, I forget about him and begin to read my lab papers. A tall guy sits next to me. He cold boots his mean-looking laptop. The fan makes a noise like a jet.
I don’t think anything of him until he takes out a dingy brown bed sheet from his bag and drapes it over his head and laptop. I try to guess how long he’s going to hide like a kid reading by flashlight after his parents go to sleep.
But before I can start hypothesizing about what he’s doing under there, he throws off the bed sheet and begins stabbing his laptop.
I suddenly realize all he did was type in his login password. He covered himself with his blanket to make sure no one in the library saw what he typed.
Obviously, he has sensitive information on his laptop. A password isn’t enough to keep him safe from his enemies in the library. No, he has to make sure not a soul in sight can even see him typing his password.
Talk about paranoid.
Why is Austin so weird? Michael and I have discussed this before. He thinks it’s something about our corner. But for some reason I don’t think Austin’s finest are exclusively here. I think they’re everywhere, on every corner.
What is it about Austin that makes it a wasteland for the mentally ill?
9
The clouds are swimming across the white heavens. They really are. This isn’t a cliché. It is truth. The clouds are swimming across the white heavens, and the live oak is swimming its branches on its corrugated trunk.
If you must know, my boxer shorts are sweaty from our first run in Austin. I figure it is a good time to drink a Sierra Nevada Torpedo and meditate with Baoding balls.
We took Congress Ave north to the Colorado River, stretched our bodies out, and ran west on gravel paths to Lamar Blvd. Austinites were in heat. We took a bridge to the gravel paths along the northern banks of the tortuous Colorado, ran back east to Congress Ave, and then south across a different bridge to our starting point.
Locals call this Town Lake Trail.
Running is such a raw exercise. Seeing bodies running makes me want to run. On the other hand, seeing bodies lifting weights makes me sorry for those lifting.
I want to run while I’m alive. If I live to be 70, I want to do it running. If I live to be 80, I want to do it running. 90, 100, 110, I want to do it running.
7
The Oaks sneaks up on us unexpectedly.
“There it is!” shouts Bridget.
“Where?”
Then I scan the colorful sign:
CHANGES ARE AFOOT
Bridget holds my shoulder. I slow down and make a sharp right turn that Jon’s Silverado handles with surprising ease considering our home must weigh 1,000 lbs in the bed.
Although Holly, the girl we found on craigslist and are subleasing from until the end of her lease, left the key under the doormat, we don’t know where to park or where to find the doormat.
We’re disoriented and greasy and smelly after a full 24 hours of driving and sleeping in the cab. We long for a shower, for body cleansing, for ablutions. We can taste what it will feel like to be horizontal on an actual bed, our legs stretched, our bodies eager for renewal.
The road still hums in our ears when we see what looks like the management office. I pull in nose first, turn off the American engine, and kiss Bridget. “Here we are. Here we are.” We’re thinking this, mumbling our arrival through our road-weary lips, and we’re also taking in our surroundings, which are completely foreign and unknown. I have never been here. Bridget has never been here. Yet here is where our home is, not in Miami Beach, not on the road, not anywhere but here, in The Oaks: 130 Cumberland Rd. If not for this address, we’d be homeless, shiftless.
What is this place? How will it treat us? Where will we go from here?
The Oaks is comprised of multiple buildings. Although we know our unit number is 228, we don’t know our building number, so we’re lost. We duck into the office to be found.
Inside, the air is climate controlled and nectarous. There’s a large painting of a partially unpeeled orange with the truism:
IF YOU DON’T TRY
YOU’LL NEVER KNOW
Right from the start, the Lone Star State is giving me permission to indulge in all my weird ideas, to be Michael Davidson.
Don’t be afraid to try, Austin is telling me. Be more afraid of never knowing. Is this sound advice? Aren’t there times when we should keep away from trying and be rewarded for never knowing? Is Truth always worth the innocence and ignorance we’re born with and can never get back? I’m not sure, but Capitol City is telling me yes. Capitol City is telling me a world of not knowing isn’t a world worth knowing.
A misshapen woman with purple boots steps out of the break room.
“Hi!” she says. “What can I do for y’all?”
“Hey, I’m Bridget, and this is my boyfriend Michael.”
“Hi Bridget and Michael.”
“We just drove here from Miami Beach.”
“Oh!” says the woman with purple boots. “That’s a long drive. Welcome to Austin! I spoke with you on the phone, right? You’re subleasing 228 from Holly?”
“Yes. I know Holly left the key under the doormat, but where’s 228?”
The woman with purple boots hasn’t introduced herself. She points a fake fingernail north, “Y’all are in Building Nine, on the second floor. Holly did leave the key under the doormat. It should be there.”
“Is there anything we need to do now?” asks Bridget.
“No. Y’all must be tired after that drive. I bet y’all just want to shower and rest.”
Bridget gives life to her dimples. I nod and speak my first words, “A shower sounds,” but I can’t complete my sentence, and the woman with purple boots laughs at our condition. She proposes, “Why don’t y’all clean up and rest and come back here later to watch a short leasing video, but I actually need to get the contract printed, so that can wait until another day.”
We drive Jon’s Chevy to Building Nine, find a leopard key under a doormat, and push the front door open.
1
Michael doesn’t understand Honeyed Cat is delicate. He doesn’t understand she’s a precious little princess who needs to be treated tenderly. She likes to be loved softly on her head and under her chin. She starts to purr. But even when Michael tries to be tender, he isn’t tender enough.
I try to show him how to do it right, but he can’t get her purring like I can. I think it’s because he uses his fingernails and I use my fingertips. A subtle distinction for a cat to make, I know, but Honeyed Cat definitely responds to my touch more.
He’s too rough with her. I know he loves her, but he’s too rough with her. She’s a little kitten, a little girl. She’s even sensitive to his verbal abuse.
He doesn’t think she understands what he’s saying, but Honeyed Cat is delicate. She’s a little princess. She may not understand exactly what Michael’s saying, but his tone gives him away more than he thinks.
Then there are those times when he throws her and flips her and scares her into sprinting as quickly as her tiny legs can spin.
His excuse, “I’m keeping her agile.”
But I know he loves her. I just wish he’d be more gentle. I think the main problem is he takes her for granted.
6
This evening, I feel stuffy inside. It has to be 90 degrees in our apartment.
“I’m hot,” says Bridget, simply stating a fact.
“You want me to turn on the air?” I offer reluctantly.
“Please, Viejo.”
She’s prone on the sofa, reading a non-fiction book about autism. The last
two books she read were also about autism, but fiction. Bridget kills books. I don’t know how to put it lightly. Her eyes scan the page, and I wonder how much longer this book will live. Not that it dies when she finishes, but it’s mostly dead, or at least left dying. In death throes it will sit on some shelf, pressed tightly between other dying books. I sometimes resuscitate them. I open their binding and give their pages new breath. It’s an act of salvation, opening a dying book. But this salvation is mutual.
I fiddle with the thermostat until warm, stale air is sucked into an intake and cold air is spit through vents.
“I’m cold!” I yell, slapping Bridget’s red corduroy shorts in jest.
This is me at the height of my sarcasm, claiming it’s cold after about a minute of cold air cycling through our one-bedroom.
It’s still 90 degrees in here, no doubt.
Notwithstanding, Bridget asks, “Are you really?”
“No,” I say, laughing like a child and playfully slapping her red corduroys again. Her inner thighs feel good even without an iced latte between them. I say, “I’m joking.”
I rest my head on her slim stomach, which is digesting the pinto beans, tortillas, rice, and avocado lunch we cooked from scratch in our cramped kitchen.
“Want to take the bikes to Half-Price Books?” I propose.
Getting out of our apartment seems like the only sensible thing to do when I picture the digits on our meter recklessly rolling toward greater numbers, each number equal to a monthly electricity bill with no upper bound.
“Sounds good,” says Bridget, letting the book fall limply in between her breasts. I thriftily power down the