store advertising scandalous underwear. A bare mattress lies discarded on the side of the street. I consider it theoretically, as a fixture in someone’s home somewhere in the past, sustaining their impact daily, now lobbed out among the populace. I’m amazed by how instantaneously everything can turn to funhouse-like squalor. I could close my eyes, open them, and everything would be different.
A spanging couple is camped under an awning with a sleeping dog and a cardboard sign offering hugs. The dog looks like a prop. I raise my hand to my face as I walk past, really my stretched earlobe, our visual match. I can’t tell if they acknowledge me.
When they’re out of sight, I close my eyes, and take eight steps in the dark. The experience is extremely disorienting, but in a pleasantly weightless way, especially when I don’t immediately collide with anyone. It’s liberating to think that, if I make myself willfully blind, people will make the effort to steer clear. I open my eyes, and voila, it’s you, ten feet ahead, walking with your back to me.
You’re dressed in the type of outfit I haven’t seen since the months just after we met, clothes I didn’t even realize you’d brought to the city: Converse, skinny jeans, a studded belt, and patched leather jacket (ridiculous in the heat), hair combed off to one side, glared by the shaved parts in the sun (mohawk at rest). It strikes me as gratuitous, this ensemble and its impeccable presentation, like a tailored denial of where I thought we stood, of the austerity to which we aspired. A kernel of resentment forms. A cop passes by my left shoulder, spares you a long look. I wonder why you chose today to trot it out—that’s the phrase I use in my head, “trot it out,” like goods on display—and from this distance, the whole of you, your posture looks different: I notice the way you take each step with just an instant of deliberation, a crackling bounce, as if the shoes are brand new and you’re still settling into them, as if this is the first day out in your new disguise. It’s strange to assess under these conditions, like you’re the subject of some basic surveillance, like I’m just one among the many, but, apart and unnoticed, this is what I do. Perversely, I feel like I’m the one being checked up on, like I couldn’t be trusted to take this neighborhood on my own, to reliably pass on the data. I follow you at a distance; I get caught up in it, crouch a little like the caricature of a detective, turn it into a game between me and your obliviousness to my presence.
It’s unclear how long I keep following after I realize the woman ahead isn’t you. Surely, we draw parallel long after I understand that the bearing, the accessories aren’t yours at all. I pick up my pace on the sidewalk, crossing against a light ahead of her, now making directly for the subway but without a specific destination in mind. Just in front of me, a couple approximately our age walks holding hands. As I pass them, I lightly squeeze her free hand and then let it go—a glancing touch, noticeable but unmentioned. It’s a small betrayal, an act of revenge for your absence, for my own misplaced recognition.
Underground, the train is packed enough that I’m still sweating like crazy, despite the air conditioning. I collapse into an empty space on the bench. The people to either side of me shift, and I worry that I’m starting to get that smell, the smell of days spent sweating through the same clothes. At the next stop, the center of the car clears out and I notice that the family sitting across from me—an entire family! mother, father, little boy and girl—are wearing surgical face masks, and all I can think to myself is Finally.
Three stops later—the family gone now, the car emptying—the train stalls at the station. The doors hang open. After a few minutes, I notice there’s commotion in the car behind us. I hear shouting. I look through the window behind me and see people spilling out of the train onto the platform. The conductor comes on over the speakers: “Ladies and gentlemen, we apologize for the delay. A child has been left on the train.”
I stand abruptly and exit the car, an odd ache in my chest. I walk up the platform beside the train, past a ring of onlookers and transit officials with their hands at their hips, clustered around this narrative of abandonment, guilt passing from face to face as the responsibility is shifted from one person to the next, as their humanity is tested. I’m surprised to find myself walking again beside the woman from the street above, who looks like old you. Other than the concerned crowd at one end, the station isn’t busy, and I walk approximately behind her for most of the length of the train, still paused. Inside, at every car, every open door, there’s a man standing: one by one, I watch each of them turn their heads to watch her, as if connected on a series of tripwires or pulled by something beyond their control, each taking a piece. The doors slide closed at last, and a final face rotates in the window, observing from a tank. The train barrels out of the station. Far behind me, the gathered crowd disperses, nothing at its center. I imagine the tunnel filled with water, the eyes drowned and blank. We walk up the stairs, the tiled walls punctuated with posters of missing people.
A mild panic of disorientation takes me at the corner on the street above, having exited at a stop I don’t recognize, the traffic insistent in all four directions. The past version of you moves off with authority, and for a second—for the moment where I see just the top of her hair in the crowd—an old impulse nudges me to intervene. She disappears, and my recognition spreads to the rest of the street, skewed younger, toward my generation. Shifting from one face to another, I make inadvertent eye contact with a blonde girl, broadly familiar. I break it; the way I let my eyes fall to the ground, skittering over her body, makes it feel as though I’ve regressed by years, like I’ll have to start all the way over, to re-teach myself how not to make these judgments. I blur my eyes until they—her and everyone—become teeming, indistinct shapes, straining as hard as possible to black out my gaze.
When I described my first subway encounter to you later, the staring man, you looked at me incredulously, like I knew nothing: these experiences had been your whole life. “What decade do you live in? Are you an ascetic?” you said. “It’s a body. We’re all being watched. Have you ever considered the use of lipstick? It’s basically a bullseye for your cock.” It was declarations like these—combative, associatively broad but unequivocal—that had drawn us together, had tonally linked us, and around us had built a wall against the world.
Three hours after someone’s child disappears underground we reconnoiter at the apartment, new and disparate parts of the city poorly configured in our heads: today, you’ve been to the west, to slaughterhouses converted in recent decades to boutiques and gourmet dining. We fuck against the vase, our hands on its sides like a third party, a coolant wherever we touch it. Your breath fogs up the porcelain. I watch your fingers clench on its surface, tensing and unbending, the wrinkles flexed open at each joint, like bright wounds among the encroaching dirt gray. I’ve been to the library downtown, making use of the public bathrooms and reading up on the vase’s origins and those of its kind, trying to put together what I didn’t take from the plaque on the gallery wall. I whisper “Satsuma” in your ear, like an exhalation, a new word that’s not your name but is actually a Japanese pottery style tailor-made for export, for Western consumption. The vase is probably not as old as I originally thought. In the end, the ways we each spend our days reduce down to the same thing, making maps of places we’ll never visit again; a product of Japan is the same as a product of America. You wear the dirt like it’s something you earned, but we didn’t fall into this, we didn’t end up here by accident. We jumped.
*
Our first week in the apartment, before we turn off our phones and find the vase, you read online—a link to the Richmond newspaper via a wayward text from someone you haven’t heard from in a year—that Casey, the grinning, perpetually buzzed, hoop-eared kid from the old crowd, the kid we’d shot fireworks at the night we met, has died in a car wreck. The article is non-committal, but the shape of the thing is obvious: he and a friend, whose name you don’t recognize, in a parent’s borrowed car on eastbound 70 and fully blazed, sailed obliviously off the road and across the grassy divide between highway lanes, directly into oncoming traffic. Needless to say, both of them were creamed. There’s a picture of each accompanying the article, an old high school yearbook photo from a
