pretty fucked up last night,” he said.
I pulled the pillow away from my face. Squinting, I could see his outline opposite me, the sunlight behind him. He was fully dressed, with a big water bottle in his hand. “Water?”
“Yes … Is this … Where is this?”
“We’re at my apartment,” he laughed. “We went back … to my place.” Recognizing my puzzled look: “Oh, well, maybe you don’t remember. I’m Simon. We came back here after the Spectrum. You wanted to. You said your place was a mess.”
“Yes. Right … right.” Simon. The boy with the pill who lives on Ludlow Street and who must be rich, as I had said to him in the cab ride over the Williamsburg Bridge. “Do you obsess about other people’s money?” he’d asked. “I just want to know, well, your politics,” I said, the last of the molly still coursing through my blood in a supercharge of emotions. We’d paused mid-make-out to watch the sun rise over Lower Manhattan as the car clipped along the empty bridge until we met a brief wakeup snarl on Delancey Street. It might have been snowing. All winter I kept thinking that it was snowing, though it was often too warm to stick or seemingly too cold to snow, and so the silver-gray clouds, like the underbellies of fish, kept their close, mindful distance, always refusing to break out of their steady overhead stream into an event. The weather did not like to make itself understood.
“I’m not rich,” he had said, though he was. That was his politics, to the extent that he had any. I said sure and went back to kissing him. My hands, on their own journey across Simon’s body, found their way into his pants as the driver eyed us in the mirror, neither offended nor interested but something else, a twinkling, passing curiosity that I thought meant he might want to join.
“Simon, right. Right. I’m sorry. It must be so late.”
“It’s four.”
“In the afternoon?” I couldn’t believe it. “Oh, god.”
“I know. You were out. It was like you’d died but you were breathing so.”
I grunted, tried to laugh, went into a coughing fit, then managed: “I definitely died.”
I leaned up in bed to look around. The room was small and oddly shaped, with the bed pushed up against the wall near two doors—one that opened to a kitchen with a shower in it and the other to a bathroom (or, really, to a closet with a toilet but no sink). From the bed, you could see the entire apartment.
My eyes finally adjusted to the afternoon. It was snowing. This was Manhattan. Simon extended the water bottle to me. Tangles of his curly hair hung across his forehead, down nearly to his eyelids. I could see him better, finally. He had serious, cold eyes set in a thin, serious face and a nose that was scarred at the tip, like it had been cut. “So,” he said.
I slid the comforter off. I was naked, and my arms were marked with dark bruises. I ran my index finger over the blotches, unsure of how they got there, and then looked up at Simon. “Last night was crazy?”
“Yeah.”
Simon. I rolled this name around in my head. Simon from the Spectrum.
“What do you do?”
“I’m a stylist,” he said without much confidence. I knew several stylists but never knew what they did.
“Oh OK,” I said.
An uncomfortable silence fell over us. He broke it with a funny smirk: “You should come up to my house in the country. We’ll have more fun.”
“Up where?”
“Upstate, duh.”
“Do you live upstate?”
“No. Well, yes, my parents have a house there. But you were telling me last night you went to school near Kingston. You apparently love going upstate.” He laughed.
I couldn’t remember what he seemed to recall effortlessly: whatever conversation we’d had, in the last few hours at the Spectrum, hadn’t produced any strong memories through the blitz of drugs and booze that had erased nearly everything else in my head save a few flickering seconds of the cab ride, jump cuts of us kissing, stripping, my hips pressed against his rear as my cock found his ass, his right hand reaching back to grab my thigh, squeezing it tightly, before he ejaculated all over the sheets and apologized for it as though we were at my place and it was my mess to wash out. My confused, “No, no, I’m sorry, actually.”
I wanted to dip my head in the fountain at Washington Square Park. I wanted to jump in the river, stick my head out of a cab, scream off the headache.
Simon turned to look out the window as I struggled out of bed and began to search for my clothes in the pile of his laundry on the floor. As I leant forward to pick up my socks my brain imploded between my ears. “Worst. Hangover. Ever,” I said. I felt slugged, maybe still drunk, maybe even a little high. I waited for him to say something but he kept quiet.
“But sure, I’d go upstate one day,” I told him, not recalling our conversation about it.
I would like that, he told me, “Let’s hang out again soon.” Sure, definitely. We will. My head throbbed. I should stop doing this, I thought, in what passed for a fleeting acknowledgment that I needed to course-correct in my life, though I knew I didn’t mean it, not yet at least, and that I’d be out again later that night, at some party, having already forgotten the brutal hangover of the afternoon, which, when I stood up in Simon’s room, fully seized me in its awful grip, like it would never let me go. “I’ll see you later,” I said, trying my best not to throw up. Do I have your number? I did.
3
I woke up halfway through the third (and final) talk—delivered by a somber Canadian environmental activist-artist, a de-feathered buzzard draped in a large anti-fracking t-shirt, whose latest project involved dropping bags of an invasive, destructive ant species into the ventilation shafts of branches of Deutsche Bank, thereby shutting them down for days at a time—and went out for a cigarette I bummed from the woman sitting next to me. “I’ll come with you,” she whispered.
Outside, she moved to the other end of the barn to call someone. I was drowsy, stoned on the fresh air that rippled in a light breeze through the night. The rear of the main house, where the residents were setting out dishware on the porch, lit the slope of the field. There were about twenty visitors in attendance, maybe twenty residents, too, not counting Helen, and I wondered how she would fit all forty of us around two medium-sized tables. I dragged on the cigarette.
Two residents, a man and a woman, stopped setting the tables and peered inside the kitchen, seemingly to check whether anyone was paying attention to them. So, from my distance, finally, a plot, forming movie-like up the hill, with me its lone audience member about thirty feet away. The man, with sandy blond hair, leaned in to whisper to the woman, who stood across the table from him. Another woman came out and the man pulled back, though slowly, and the three stood together with rigid formality. The new woman pointed into the kitchen, put her hand on the man’s shoulder, and directed him back inside.
What was this? Everything about the project suggested two levels: the first the story Helen told us, and a second, the one that was truly taking place, organizing these elements—the residents, Helen, their collective politics, whatever those politics were—into actual,
