the absurdity of this flailing and dexterous figure, like the untouchable fiddler in a mob scene as the city burns in outline. I’m jostled forward again, or move forward in some way, and my hands graze the tree-man’s hips like we’re tender dancing partners and I’m thinking that I seem so relatively short and he is so awkwardly tall and unclothed and half-hard that it would be just so convenient to suck him off right here, that I’m close enough to detect the sweating fruit smell from the deep crevices of his body, even over everything else, and this, too, is hilarious, so I am probably cackling when he punches me in the face, probably cackling.
I don’t go all the way down—doubled over, I raise my arms like a luxurious bird and taste copper while my feet do an unintended grape-vine to keep upright. When I finally drag myself back to eye-level, absurdly weighty, I see the moshing crowd again through some kind of tint, from the perspective of the stage, and every single one of them looks like Casey, dead Casey, or Candace (dead Candace, for all I know), or predatory August with his scribbled-on arms, or you, the version of you I mistakenly followed, like another self I’m drawn back to in counter-point to current you, somewhere beyond. I grab the guy in the leather done up with band patches that stop strictly at 1988, who I notice is wearing giant safety pins as earrings, symbols that no longer mean anything, I seize his studded lapels and scream “WHAT YEAR IS IT?” into his face. I throw him away, I spit blood on the tree-man’s flawless burnished chest, and I fall away. I have no idea what the band is doing.
*
When the show ends, the violence spills out of the building and into the street. On my way to the basement steps, behind it, I pick up an olive-colored backpack from where it rests against the wall, one that feels hefty but doesn’t clank with bottleweight when I lift it, like it could still have something useful inside. In the anonymity and rush of the aftermath, I see no consequences in taking it.
A few minutes pass before we find each other outside, and when I spot you, you’re a different height than I remember. We’re still a little drunk with it as we walk toward home. Half of my face is raw and swollen, as if there’s an island beneath it pushing up, new continents of unexplored terrain. Prodding my cheek, testing its density, I realize a new concept has formalized in my head without my noticing it, that a shift has occurred over the course of the night, or since the last time I found myself walking in this direction, toward a familiar place with this subtle feeling of regularity, of returning: our building has become “home.”
You nod your chin at the bag. “Whatcha got there?”
I knead the bottom of it with my fingers; it’s stuffed full of someone else’s supplies. “Just some goodies,” I say.
I hold the backpack in front of me until we’re out of sight, to minimize the likelihood that it will look familiar to anyone. We walk north for a while, away from human activity, and then east, mostly not speaking. At one point a line of police cars barrels down the street in the direction we came from; the instinct is to turn and watch them disappear behind us, but we don’t. Eventually the sirens fade into nothing, into the backdrop. As always, we scope out our street for on-lookers, and then, confirming that we’re alone, we duck into the gated area in front to enter through the abandoned basement, pitch-dark, which we navigate like a haunted house, me first and you behind, your hand on my collar. We climb the four flights of stairs to the top floor, not really taking care to quiet our feet. On the landing, I drop the bag like a sack of groceries and unconsciously, mechanically reach into my pocket for a key—this idea of “coming home after a night out” having swept over me—but, of course, there isn’t one. There isn’t even a door. We walk through the open frame.
Two objects resolve themselves in the moonlight filtered through the blindless broken windows, this absence of barriers even further evidence of what this building is not, and has never been in our time: the vase overturned on its side, and a figure wrapped in my sleeping bag.
“Someone is sleeping in my bed.” I don’t know if I say it out loud or not; either way, all of my breath is gone.
We stand frozen in the doorway, totally silent, like we’ve accidentally walked in on an intimate exchange in which we play no part. I feel warmth in my left hand, and realize belatedly it’s because yours is wrapped in it. The sound of our presence—our footsteps still on the stairwell, our bodies shifting—draws back like a curtain, and the sound that replaces it is louder than everything: a deep, slow breathing, as if a lead for us to follow, coming from the figure on the floor, peacefully asleep. A growing tower of dread looms above us. I feel deeply betrayed.
Neither of us speaks or moves. The image is too foreign to register properly, though it shouldn’t be—this building wasn’t ours any more than it was anyone else’s, we’ve never had claim to it beyond the fact of our presence, our dwelling over consecutive nights. But my pulse is still racing from the show, I’m brimming with bloody energy, and as our eyes adjust to the dark I recognize more and more: our backpacks, torn inside-out with their contents scattered across the floor, the wind-up flashlight, our candles, water bottles, their shadows interrupting the room’s barren order. I feel my body drain and refill with something uncontrollable, misguidedly righteous—for some reason, the overturned vase upsets me the most, seems the most intentionally arbitrary.
I grit my teeth, and take a step forward into the room, with you at my side.
Something adjusts behind us. I whirl around, panic flooding my chest.
Against the wall, a figure sits in the dark in a collapsible folding chair I’ve never seen before, something you bring to a kid’s soccer game. They hold a knife in their lap, an unreal gleaming blot on the scene. You let out a gasp, an errant breath. I can’t immediately identify the sound I make.
“What are you doing here?” a male voice says from the dark. The accent sounds transplanted here, like someone who’s been training to talk tough. I can’t tell the age.
“We live here,” I say. I feel like I’m telling a lie: no one lives here.
There’s a newspaper on his lap that falls to the ground as he stands. I imagine it’s dated from the day Reagan was elected. The image of him sitting here pretending to read in the dark, waiting for us to arrive, in his ratty chair and its mesh cupholders, is flatly terrifying. “You’ve gotta have someone keep watch. That’s the first fucking rule of this game.”
In the light from the windows he looks ancient, but the voice clashes with the reading, probably less than forty. A mess of tangled long hair hides most of his face, the beard scruffy and incomplete, strived for. He’s dressed in a bulky gray sweater, camo pants, and boots, ballooning his physical stature; I don’t understand why no one here dresses for the season. He is pointing the knife—military grade, made for actual combat—directly at my chest, as if at any moment it could become a gun. The fact that he has a weapon at all seems absurd, an apparition conjured from the most exaggerated and predictable places, like he’s drawn from the newspaper at his feet, with its messages of panic and urban rebellion. I feel you shaking beside me, a furious vibration through our joined limbs. “Also, you need to hide your shit,” he says. “You can’t just leave it lying around for anyone to take.”
His tone is of begrudgingly teaching dumb children a lesson. I wonder how everything became such a cliché. I open and close my fists (letting go of your hand), snatching uselessly at air, as if I’m owed it, as if something will appear in my fingers. Without the physical attachment you seem separate, hovering at a distance.
“At least let us take what we brought with us.”
Part of me thinks I’m being clever, because everything here—except the chair—everything is something we brought in ourselves. A part of me that believes we’ll get away on this technicality, pictures us walking triumphantly
