Then she was alone, in another room. Sitting on their wide white bed. “Angelo,” she said quietly, with conspiratorial gravity. “When I woke up this morning, you know what I saw first thing?”
“I do,” I said.
“On the window, in the frost.”
“A pair of wings,” I said as she said, “A pair of wings.”
She whispered, “You’re watched over.”
I sat at my desk, opened the blinds a little, and texted my brother: i don’t want to be watched over.
Another from Sujata: wait, don’t come over. bad. let me get you lunch. guadalupana?
Another from Sujata: beer lunch at hay merchant?
Another from Teresa: you won’t, will you.
Another knock at the door: I opened it to Jonas, a handsome young fellow in his mid-twenties, my neighbor with whom I shared a wall. Mostly I heard him more than saw him, his buoyant laughter bobbing through the walls at all hours, pulling with it the lesser laughter of his friends and boyfriends. Teresa had said that he was clocking in and out on his good looks, that when he one day found he had only so much left it’d be too late for him to learn a new way of working. I’d disagreed too strongly. She’d said, You can see it.
Jonas held a stack of slim books. “You check this shit out?” he said, motioning to the accident. He said the man in the U-Haul had stayed in his seat to bang the window with his head. “Listen.”
A faint tap tap tap. An omen.
Laughing, Jonas handed me the books. “Tell Teresa she’s helped me express myself.”
Everything in the stack was poetry: chapbooks, collected works, a few she’d had the poet sign. More than once she’d sworn to me she’d stop lending, that too many of her favorites had never made it back. To hide my surprise I said, “You liked them?”
“Dude, I wrote all night, I’m writing this epic love poem to Montrose. I got to where it was like I was inside the poem—you know what I mean?—but kind of outside the poem at the same time, cheering myself on and shit. It was cool. It was like I was close enough to give myself a reacharound.” He plucked a hand-rolled cigarette from behind his ear. “Smoke?”
We stood in front of our doors, directly beneath Warren’s second floor porch-space. A cop the size of a professional wrestler escorted the U-Haul driver to his squad car. The driver wobbled, his face tucked as close to his armpit as possible. From that angle it was tricky to tell much about him—his age and his race, his build, and was he even a dude? Charlie, sitting in the driver’s seat with the door open, chewed his lip. Jonas took a drag and handed the cigarette to me. I hadn’t had a smoke since Teresa had moved to Sujata’s. I pulled hard. It was a joint.
“It’s Angelo’s birthday,” said Warren above us, unseen.
Jonas told a story about a birthday party he’d attended, drunk and on E, in the back of a U-Haul. They’d taken turns tooling the thing around a forest preserve while everybody in the trailer danced in strobe lights to deafening house music. His little brother had brought fireworks. “I lit a roman candle between my legs,” he said. “All night I blew glowing loads.”
He laughed at this and made a note on his phone.
A convertible zipped up and jerked to a stop across the street. A fuming woman got out, dressed for office work, not for moving boxes. She talked to the cop, then marched to the U-Haul. A breeze brought her perfume to us: the smell of an older woman or an older time. Doors banged. Charlie drove away, the cop drove away, and the woman, behind the wheel of the U-Haul, turned the key. A whiny wheeze. A sound the woman seemed incapable of making.
We moved to the plastic chairs beneath the banana trees. The sun’s spread had shifted—it freckled the surface of the dirty pool. Warren nodded from above, leaning on the rail. He now wore a cowboy hat.
“I’m thirty-one,” I said, though no one had asked.
Jonas told a story about the first thirtysomething he’d ever dated, a conservative self-hating drug dealer named Freddie, who’d treated him with less respect than the average man would give to a stranger’s turd. A few months after they’d broken up, Jonas was walking home toasted from the bar when he spotted Freddie’s pickup parked in front of a fire hydrant, windows down. “I called it in. That is, after I took a shit on the driver’s seat.”
Warren said, “When I was thirty-one I was living in Chicago. I’m from California.”
“Where in Chicago?” I said.
“Naperville.”
A tow truck backed up towards the U-Haul. Its bony driver popped out and lowered the rig. The fuming woman, on her phone, stood as if she knew how to crush whatever happened next. She appeared to be in her late twenties, mid-thirties, or early forties, depending on the angle. I squinted, like Teresa, and that’s when she met my stare—in her fury I saw no shadows, only painful light on light. She held our eye contact hard while speaking loudly in a language I didn’t recognize. Embarrassed, and embarrassed at being a bit aroused, I lost our staring contest. Out of the corner of my eye I watched her walk behind the trucks.
Jonas told a story, and then another story, and then another. I listened to the weed I’d smoked crinkle my spine and my head and my heart. I didn’t feel tripled. I felt divided, the portions unequal and vague. I catalogued the omens: the fallen bathroom panel, the broken key, the crash, the crash’s kiss-like tangle, the tap tap tap of the driver’s head, the fuming woman’s gaze. Did these omens argue that my future had my number? That I had no role in my future’s making? That my future was already making of me what it pleased?
I thought, Maybe such things are only true in retrospect. Or always. Always true in retrospect. I folded my hands behind my head: the rotating shade, the hot slash of full light.
The gate slammed. Eduardo strolled in, built like a cylinder, a friendly piston of a man. He’d invited me to have a beer in the courtyard more than all my other neighbors combined. Any time he said hello it sounded like a clap on the back. He was squarely in his thirties. In one hand he walked his big sweet dog, Lady, and in the other he carried a case of Shiners. When he saw me, he let go of the leash and pretended to have an acid flashback.
“Man, is that Angelo?” he talk-shouted, his normal tone. “No way that’s Angelo! Angelo keeps his door closed, Angelo doesn’t answer when you knock—no no no, I’m seeing shit!”
Lady jammed her head between my legs. I let her. I scratched her ears.
Warren took off his cowboy hat and said it was my birthday. He seemed sad.
Eduardo cheered my name and tossed beers to everyone but Warren. He took the chair between me and Jonas and asked me what was new, how was work, Teresa?
Everyone waited for me to say she’d moved out. Including Eduardo.
“She moved out,” I said.
He said he was sorry to hear it. “You love her?”
I said I did. That I meant it, though, felt shameful.
If I loved her, why had I let her leave?
“Can’t help who we love,” said Eduardo, his resignation humble. “Only how.”
Jonas laughed.
Eduardo said, “My sisters haven’t talked to me in ten years.”
Still laughing, Jonas began a story about how pathetically long it took him to move out of his first boyfriend’s minivan and how fucked up it was that the situation he’d landed in was so much worse than the situation he’d run away from, and maybe because what Jonas was saying seemed more real than anything I’d ever heard him say before or since, I interrupted him to tell Eduardo that Teresa had hated the job and hated Houston, she’d hated the strip malls and parking lots and potholey streets, the double whammy of douchey car culture and douchey business culture, not to mention guns and megachurches and humidity, and worst of all, she hated who we were when we were here. It took me a long time to say this. Jonas had stopped his story.
Eduardo handed me another beer. “At least it wasn’t somebody else got between you.” The way he said it, he was giving me an opening.
Jonas moaned, “Old bootsies!�
�
I leaned forward. Jonas had squeezed his face into a constipated approximation of sexual passion. He banged his chair’s arms and squealed, “Don’t stop, old bootsies, don’t stop . . . !” He groped an invisible me.
“Man, that’s not cool,” said Eduardo. “But yeah, we heard it.”
Warren put on his hat and left. It made me want to hug him.
“ . . . you stopped,” said Jonas breathlessly.
The performance over, he slapped at the air and laughed—I noticed for the first time that when not filtered through a wall, his laughter had a toxic edge. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but you had to be talking too. What sort of shit were you saying?”
“I was reciting shitty epic love poems,” I said. “I stay up all night shitting them out.”
Jonas just smiled. He tapped a note into his phone.
I stood. I said I’d be back, and passed through the gate and onto slanting root-ravaged sidewalks. I walked down Pacific, past the rainbow-flagged gay bars and dance clubs, then crossed Fairview into Montrose’s northern edge, the old homes coming down and the snazzy condos going up. Nothing was an omen. Not the flowering bushes that lazed through tall gates, or the dead palm trees that stood like extinguished torches, or the parked car with dozens of action figures glue-gunned to its hood, or the balcony populated with rhinestone-peppered mannequins holding one another’s hands, or the two old women on a driveway in lawn chairs using straws to drink from beer cans, or the rotting possum caught in the crack of a rotting fence, or the fact that just before the sun squeezed out on the horizon I was standing in front of Sujata’s. She lived on the second floor of an old house cut up into apartments. All month I hadn’t come by once. I’d come by way too many times in the months before, sometimes alone. When we were alone we always nearly kissed. I buzzed up.
Her boyfriend Patrick said through the speaker, “Angelo?”
He didn’t live there but he often spent the night. During the day he helped the newly blind adjust to service dogs, learn Braille, and find jobs. He wasn’t blind himself, but his voice worked the spirit like a deep massage worked the body. It was strong and velvety. For years he’d voice-acted in locally produced religious radio dramas. He’d played almost every apostle.
His voice made me more aware of myself. I was no good to anyone.
“We’ve been worried,” he said.
I put my head on the door. Everything he said, I’d hear later. His voice was that astounding.
He said, “Is Sujata with you?”
“Where did she go?” I asked.
“She said she was meeting you at the bar. Come on up! I’ll call her again.”
The door buzzed unlocked. I opened it, let it close, and left, walking fast and checking my phone.
Sujata: at hay merchant
Sujata: drunk
My brother: ha dude mom says the same shit to me. i bet to everyone. i’ll call you soon, you won’t believe my day. i don’t know how i’m not in the hospital
My brother: seriously
My brother: oh shit, i just got it, you must be seeing shit again!!! OMENSS
My brother: looking forward to what the fuck you saw today i hope this time it teaches you something
My brother: actually fuck learning, i hope this time it makes you actually do something, something different
My brother: by which i mean happy birthday little baby waby angel wings
Teresa: i want you to open it. right now.
I stumbled as I read the texts, the glow dizzying me whenever I looked back to the smashed-up sidewalks. Everything lurched and I lurched with it.
Happy voices met me as I returned to the complex’s courtyard. The gate was propped open. I walked in and around, and where I’d been sitting sat Sujata. She sat like she was waiting to be seen. She wore clothes one might wear to bed. When she looked at me I felt terrible and then terrific, and then terrible, and then terrific. In her I saw what I’d been seeing in her since we met: who I’d once wanted to be, not who I was.
“I’m telling them what you were like in college,” she said, very drunk.
Eduardo grinned as if the solution to my situation had been handed to him, beer-like, and all that was left was for him to open it and pass it on to me. “Man, I don’t believe it! Angelo the party-monster-animal, Angelo the Romeo. I can see that, the Romeo. But not puking in a cab.”
Meanwhile, Jonas tapped away at his phone. He mouthed words, his handsome face enchanted in the screen’s pale glow. Alone but not lonesome, he seemed to be casting a spell on himself. It made me angry.
“I told him about the time you stripped to ring tones on the Red Line,” said Sujata.
I said that there were worse things that were even funnier and then I said I had to use the bathroom. Sujata said that she should too, she’d been holding it. Eduardo just about applauded.
I locked the door behind us and sat on the futon. She stood, watching me. She stepped closer. Space popped and snapped. She was the kind of woman who, just by being near you, made you certain that you could be who you wanted to be.
But after you became that you, would it be boring to you both?
And after you broke up, would guilty longing bring you both back?
Under that, was that love?
She shook her head. I saw her seeing in me what she always saw, another shot, one she felt she had to take, and I knew then that this moment was what the omens had brought, that this was how their happening was answered, and whether anyone had anything to do with it or not, my end of what happened after this would be up to me, would make me make it mine.
To sit beside me she moved Teresa’s gift to the coffee table. It was wrapped in the Christmasy paper we’d used two months ago. Whenever I asked Teresa about things she thought I ought to remember, she said, Think. I looked at her gift on the coffee table. I thought.
Sujata took my hand. I touched her arm. We’d been here before, tempted between our breakups. We’d dated eight years ago for two years at the University of Chicago, then a year later for one year after graduation. When I found out I was moving to Houston she’d been in grad school at Rice for three years.
“It’s a sign!” she’d said when I’d called, when I’d asked her to help us find an apartment. “We can be friends. You have a girlfriend, I have a boyfriend. Friends friends friends, the four of us!”
“It’s a sign,” she’d said the first time we were alone at her place, in the kitchen, at the table, on the couch, wanting to touch.
That night I’d said that signs were us seeing ourselves, that we saw the parts of ourselves we wanted badly to be there. She’d said I had it mostly wrong, that if you saw it it was there, there for you to take.
The futon creaked. I touched our hands with my other hand. So did she.
She said, “I could say I’m sorry. I could say I don’t know. We know it’s a bad idea, but is it the only idea we have?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
We kissed. Our mouths fit like before, and like before I didn’t feel as if I had anything to do with it though I knew I did. Then we were standing. Then we were in bed, naked except for underwear. My body stank of sweat. Her breath was like an old man’s clothes. We pushed and we pulled at each other’s limbs, and when I went down on her, she stopped me. She was crying.
Then she was sleeping. I set my head on her shoulder.
I woke to knocking at the door.
I sat up. Sujata was gone and so were my boxers. The clock read quarter to three. The knocking was patient, steady, and firm, with intervals. I didn’t feel patient, steady, or firm, and I didn’t feel inside of any intervals. I touched my chest. Dread wheeled, a slow and anxious turning. Its edges churned up guilt and regret and a madness for forgiveness, for willful confrontation, for confessions and repentance and confirmation.
I felt certain that I would act. The certainty widened my dread.
I stepped out of bed and onto Sujata, who was asleep on my laundry
bag. She grunted and I fell—I whacked my head on the corner of the footboard. Mumbling, she climbed over me and onto the mattress, carrying an armful of my dirty clothes.
The knocking continued.
In pain I walked across the apartment and pressed my ear to the door. At every knock I blinked, the sound a blade in my head. In the interval I switched ears and noticed blood—I was bleeding down my cheek and chin, bleeding onto the door, bleeding onto the carpet. The more blood I touched, the more blood there was. It didn’t seem possible that I could be its source.
The knocking continued.
I said, “It’s me.”
The knocking stopped mid-knock.
“It’s me,” I said, louder.
A righteous voice said, “Angelo.”
I remembered to act: I opened the door.
One of the Days I Nearly Died
When it was happening I was alone. I didn’t think of my wife, of how she and I suspected she was pregnant (she wasn’t, but by the time the period came we’d both said a brace of big ugly honest things that had made the other think, These big ugly honest things you’ve said are who you Really Are, when really the big ugly honest things were only who we’d clubbed each other into becoming for a one-month spell inside a six-year spell that up until then had us living on Logan Boulevard in Logan Square thinking we’d be local, organic, and happy right up until we died blissful simultaneous deaths in the final scene of the epic film of our active old age, or at least that’s how I remember it out loud when I apologize, and when I see my ring on my finger in a mirror, and when I slam dishwasher drawers and shout, Listen! You aren’t listening!), and I didn’t think of my pray-hard mother, who expected me and my wife for dinner, for our family’s weekly Family Dinner Night in the house I grew up in in Western Springs, homemade raviolis, and I didn’t think of my brother who didn’t at the time go to our family’s weekly Family Dinner Nights because he was way away in another state (Texas) with a woman we all liked (she liked him) and he for some reason didn’t, a woman he’d tried for four years to trick himself into thinking he liked so that he could trick himself into thinking he loved, despite how he felt compelled to act in front of her in front of us, despite every big ugly honest thing I ever said to him when we were so deep in drinking at the Map Room that we with old-timey windups pitched each other’s phones at the wall, and I didn’t think of my dad who was dead, six years dead, dead and in the dead place where if I died there in the Loop in my car alone (which it looked like I would) I’d be too, doing this probably, and I didn’t think of my dopey dingdong stepdad who to this day doesn’t know how to think of anybody other than my mother, which we should appreciate but don’t. No. What I thought of was the other day I’d nearly died. The other day wasn’t much like the day that made me think of it, I think. The other day had only a little bit of something pinched inside it. But it was long. Because it was long and you were in it, in it like the little bit of something, you were made to laugh at yourself, or at yourself laughing. It was the kind of day that made you think that thinking about the things that mattered was what mattered.
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