by Kevin Wilson
In the morning, as Trey collected his clothes from the night before, the razor blade fell out of his pocket.
“What the fuck is that?” Ashley said.
“Oh, it’s just a good luck charm,” Trey replied, putting it back in his pocket.
“ ’Cause it looks like a fucking razor,” Ashley said. She grabbed his arm and made him show her the razor. “What are you doing with this?”
“I carry it everywhere I go,” he said.
“That’s kind of creepy, Trey,” she replied.
“It’s just. It’s silly,” he said, and when she simply stared at him, he continued. “It belonged to . . . my grandfather. We were really close. I, um, I used to watch him shave with it and it was just a good memory, the smell of his shaving cream. He died when I was young and I got to keep it.”
“Okay, I guess,” she finally said. “I wish he’d left you a pocket watch. When you fuck a guy and a pocket watch falls out of his pants, you don’t feel like you’re about to get murdered.”
She took the razor from his hand and opened it. “Your grandfather’s name was ‘Wildfire Johnny’?”
“It was his stage name. He was, like, a performer.”
“This could do some real damage,” she said, pointing it at him. “If shit goes down, I guess you’ll be ready.”
“I hope so,” he said, and then he took the razor back and put it safely into his pocket.
After three months of dating, they announced their relationship to their editors, who said it would be interesting to make it known to their readers. It caused a huge flurry of activity, people on Twitter freaking out that Mr. and Mrs. Lonelyhearts had fallen in love. The New York Times did a profile of them, the two of them photographed at the barbecue restaurant, Ashley resting her head on Trey’s shoulder. As they read about their relationship online, Ashley turned to Trey and said, “I never said love, just so you know. It’s too early for that.”
“I’m in love with you,” he said. “I think.”
“Good,” Ashley said. “That’s good information for me to have.”
Trey started to use the razor more liberally. One night, after he ate some leftover Thai food, he got food poisoning, and the vomiting was so intense that he took the razor and, almost without thinking, slashed his throat. When it came time to eat the Thai food, he threw it into the garbage, whistling a happy tune.
He got caught up in an eBay auction over a rare punk rock record and ended up winning with a bid of six hundred and seventy-five dollars. He logged into his bank account and looked at his balance and then slashed his throat. All day long, repeating it, he simply listened to a YouTube clip of the song and felt like it was just as good.
He backed his car into a utility pole, and a throat slash later, the car was fine, not a mark on it.
The weirdest part of going back in time wasn’t the disorientation of jumping back, it was the boredom of going through the same twenty-four hours again. What he figured out was that, if you simply shut your mind down, as if you were meditating, you could just allow your previous actions to replay, as if you were being carried away by the tide. Then, when you needed to act, to change the past, you woke up, took control of your body, and did what needed to be done.
After Ashley and Trey had been dating for a year, his parents wanted to meet her, were driving up to Nashville to have dinner with them. “Are your parents cool?” Ashley asked.
“Not especially,” Trey said.
“I mean, are they cool with the two of us being together?” Ashley then said.
“Oh . . . sure.” Trey had not thought about it. “They’re cool.”
“They know that I’m black?” she asked.
“Oh, yeah. They saw the photo in the Times,” Trey said, trying to think back. He didn’t talk to his parents all that much, honestly.
“Well, good,” Ashley said.
When they walked into the restaurant, his parents were already sitting at the table. They stood up to greet them, and Trey said, “Hey, Mom and Dad, this is my black girlfriend, Ashley.”
Ashley turned to look at Trey with a look of complete bewilderment.
His mother’s ears turned red. “Honey,” she said to Trey.
“Oh, God, I’m sorry. I’m just nervous,” he said, looking at his parents and then back at Ashley.
“Jesus, Trey,” Ashley said.
Trey felt for the razor in his pocket. “If you guys will excuse me for just one second, I need to go to the bathroom.”
“Trey,” Ashley said, holding on to his arm, but he pulled away and rushed to the restroom, leaving Ashley and his parents standing there, staring at one another.
There was another guy in the bathroom, washing his hands, and Trey went into the stall, slashed his throat, gurgling, blood spray. Just before he passed out, he heard the man shout, “Holy shit!”
When dinner came around again, everyone got along so well. Afterward, his mother took him aside for a second and said, “We really like her, sweetie.”
“So do I,” he said, smiling.
Most of Ashley’s friends were black, professors at Vanderbilt or visual artists, some of whom had started their own gallery. But she had white friends, too, Asian friends, Hispanic friends. Trey thought back and tried to remember if he had ever had anything other than white friends. There was James, a black kid, with whom he’d been best friends in junior high, but they’d drifted apart and then gone to different high schools. There was an Asian kid, Paul, that he’d been friends with in college, though he could not remember his last name. At work, sometimes he got drinks with Marco, but he couldn’t remember if he was Mexican or from South America.
“I don’t have any black friends,” Trey once said to Ashley.
“You don’t actually have that many white friends, either,” she told him.
“I’m serious, okay?” Trey said. “Do you think it’s a problem?”
“If you think it’s a problem,” Ashley replied, “then you should try to change it.”
“How?” Trey asked.
“God, Trey, you’re a writer. Read writers of color and reach out to them to talk about their work. There’s Jayson at your work. Go out with him for drinks.”
“I don’t think Jayson likes me,” Trey said.
“Just open yourself up. Be deliberate. Don’t force it, but get over the fact that it makes you uncomfortable to be around black people.”
“I’m not uncomfortable,” he said.
“You know what I mean,” she said.
“I’m comfortable with you,” he said, and she sighed.
“You’re a good boyfriend, Trey,” she said.
“If we had kids, they’d be mixed race,” he said.
She kissed him. “Let’s watch some TV, okay?”
Trey did a profile of Will Ferrell for Esquire, his first big celebrity profile, and it went really well. “You’re a good interviewer,” Ferrell had said to Trey, who blushed.
“It’s good,” Ashley said after she’d read his draft. “It’s really good.”
“Thanks,” he replied. It was good, he thought.
“Do you think you’ll do more celebrity profiles?” she asked.
“If they let me,” he said. “It’s fun.”
“What else do you want to write?” she asked.
“Silly things,” he said. “Weird stuff.”
“You’d be a good reporter,” she said. “You have a kind of blank slate thing going on that would make people confide in you. You could get people to admit that they’d murdered someone.”
“I don’t want to write about murder,” he said.
Ashley had gotten her MFA in fiction at Columbia, and she was writing a collection of stories, one of which had been published in Tin House. She was also interested in long-form journalism, but that didn’t really appeal to Trey. He wanted to look at something, say a few things about it, then move on.
“You should try to write a novel,” she said. “A comic novel.”
“Maybe,” he said.
“We can’t do the Lonelyhearts forever,” she said.
“We can’t?” he asked.
“I can’t,” she said.
In Maryland, a fourteen-year-old African American boy was shot in the parking lot of a Walmart. He’d bought a toy gun from the store and was playing with it in the parking lot when somebody called the police. When he didn’t put the gun down immediately, terrified of the lights and the police officers, they shot him.
“This is such fucking bullshit,” Ashley said.
“It really is,” Trey said.
“It’s murder, plain and simple,” she said. “And it’s happening all the fucking time.”
Trey wondered if it was actually murder. It seemed more like manslaughter, accidental, the police losing control.
“How realistic was the gun?” he asked her, looking over her shoulder at the computer.
She turned to look at him. “If we had kids,” she said, “and they played with a toy gun, the police would shoot them.”
“The world is fucked-up,” he said.
“You have no idea,” she said.
Ashley got an assignment for The New Yorker, a big break, to write an article about her father’s half brother, who had been convicted twenty-five years ago for the rape of a white woman. Just last year, he had been exonerated thanks to DNA evidence. She was going to Birmingham, Alabama, to meet with him for the first time. She would study the case, talk to people involved, write about all of it.
“Can I stay with you?” Trey asked.
“You can come see me,” she said. “But you can’t stay. I want to talk to him by myself.”
“But you don’t even know this guy,” Trey said. “He could be dangerous.”
Ashley just stared at him. He both loved and hated it when she stared at him. He understood that she was probably trying to figure out what it was that she loved about him, but it also meant that he had her attention.
“You can drive down with me. My brother lives in Birmingham, too; you can meet him.”
Ashley and her parents did not talk; they were evangelical Christians, fanatical, and she had grown tired of fighting with them. But she still talked to her brother, who was six years younger. His name was Freddie and he was a producer. Ashley had shown Trey her brother’s SoundCloud page, heavy bass and weird metallic beats, swirling sounds. It sounded like what an alien would rap over. Apparently he was blowing up, was becoming well known among Atlanta rappers, was making good money. Trey looked at Freddie’s Instagram, lots of clips of him making beats, always smoking huge blunts. A few photos showed him standing around with dudes who were brandishing guns. It felt entirely foreign to Trey, but he found himself listening to Freddie’s beats all the time when he was writing.
They drove in separate cars to Birmingham, pulled up to the parking lot for Freddie’s apartment in downtown Birmingham, a few miles away from where things were respectable and expensive. There was a massive dog in the stairwell and he eyed them as they walked up.
When he opened the door, Freddie was wearing sunglasses, velour sweatpants, and a Japanese T-shirt that Trey, thanks to the Gentleman Caller, knew for a fact cost more than two hundred dollars. Freddie smiled and gave Ashley a huge hug. She giggled. Without acknowledging Trey, he took Ashley’s hand and pulled her into the living room. Trey walked in, awkward, not sure where to stand.
“You look great,” Freddie said to his sister. “It’s good to see you.”
“You, too,” she said, and then Ashley gestured for Trey to come closer. “This is my boyfriend, Trey.”
“Hi,” Trey said, and Freddie simply nodded. “I like your music,” Trey offered.
“You like rap?” Freddie asked, looking interested for the first time in Trey.
“Oh, yeah,” Trey said.
“Who do you like?” Freddie asked.
“Oh, just, you know, everyone,” Trey replied, flailing. He could not remember the name of a single rapper at this moment.
“Eminem?” Freddie asked, nodding.
“Among others,” Trey said, and Freddie was done with him.
Freddie and Ashley sat on the sofa and talked about people they knew, minutiae about Mobile, frustrations about their crazy-ass parents. Trey sat in a recliner and tried to think of a rapper who would impress Freddie. He knew nothing that he said would be good enough.
A few hours later, it was time for Trey to go back to Nashville, and Ashley would spend the night with her brother before starting her work the next day. Trey shook Freddie’s hand. Freddie said, “My sister likes you a lot.”
“Freddie,” Ashley said, shaking her head.
“Do right by her, okay?” he said. “She’s a real unique person.”
“I will,” Trey said, “I know.” He felt like he had received a blessing, that he could now marry Ashley.
“Bye, sweetie,” Ashley said, kissing him, and then she closed the door when he walked into the hallway.
The month turned into two, and Ashley was still working. “It’s insane,” she said. “This place is so blatantly up-front about its racism that they don’t even think to not tell you the truth. I can’t get over it. My dad’s brother doesn’t even seem entirely surprised by any of it. He’s just accepted it, like, what else could he have done. He’s a really interesting guy, the exact opposite of my dad.”
“Do you think you’ll be back soon?” Trey asked.
“I really don’t know,” she replied. “There’s so much to figure out.”
“Maybe I could come see you,” he said.
“I don’t think that’s a great idea,” she said. “I need to stay focused.”
“I miss you,” he said.
“Well, fuck, I miss you, too,” Ashley said, sounding frustrated. “But this is important to me, Trey. It means a lot to me, to my career, to my family.”
“I understand,” Trey said, but he wasn’t sure that he did. He felt like she was becoming so frustrated with the racism of the justice system that she couldn’t stand to be around him, that he was responsible for it.
Ashley had asked him to write her half of the “Lonelyhearts” column. “You know my voice as well as I do,” she said. “You’re a good writer.”
He told the woman who was concerned that her boyfriend was becoming too obsessed with his job that she needed to give him an ultimatum, that she was more important than work. Ashley agreed. “Nothing’s more important than your relationship. Ask him how much he’ll like his career if there’s no one there for him when the workday is over.”
I’m just frustrated,” Ashley said one night after they’d been arguing for a solid hour. She was crying. “It’s not about you, really.”
“It sure feels like it’s about me,” Trey said, annoyed.
“That’s fair. I guess it is you, a little bit. I feel like maybe this time away has made me think more about what our relationship is. I think maybe we should take some time to—”
Trey already had the razor to his throat, a quick slash.
As soon as he came to, he went online and found a first edition copy of Gordon Gibbs’s first novel, nearly five hundred dollars. He ordered it and had it overnighted to Ashley. When the phone rang that night, Ashley wanting to talk, he simply let it go to voice mail.
The next night, she called him. “Oh my God, Trey,” she said. “The book! It’s amazing. Thank you.”
“I love you,” he said.
“Well, I love you, too,” she said.
“People are going to love your first book,” Trey said. “I’ll sell first editions online for thousands of dollars.”
“I’ll even autograph them,” she said.
Two weeks later, he got a call from Ashley, who was frantic, nearly sobbing.
“The police arrested Freddie,” she said.
“What?” Trey said. “When?”
“Last night,” she told him. “He was sitting on the steps in front of his apartment, and they just pulled up and started harassing him. They said that he smelled
of weed, but he didn’t have anything on him. They pushed him against the wall, and when he tried to get them to tell him what was going on, one of the cops hit him. Then they hit him some more. They said that he had a gun on him, which he obviously didn’t. They planted it, Trey.”
Trey thought about those Instagram photos of Freddie’s friends with their guns. He thought of all the photos of him smoking weed.
“This is fucked-up,” he said.
“I feel like they’re punishing him because I’m writing this story about my uncle and how racist the justice system is here.”
“What can I do?” he said.
“He hasn’t even seen a judge yet, but I’ll need to pay his bail when it’s set,” she said. “But I don’t have hardly anything in my account right now.”
“I’ll get it,” he said.
“Come as soon as you can,” she said.
He got there that night, went straight to Ashley’s motel room, a run-down place off the highway, not many cars in the parking lot.
Ashley was in her underwear, smoking a joint.
“Where did you get that?” he asked.
“From a drug dealer, Trey,” she said. “Jesus.”
“Tell me what’s going on,” he said.
“I haven’t been able to talk to Freddie since he first called,” she replied. She was agitated, pulling at her eyelashes, a nervous habit of hers when she was really stressed. “I don’t know what’s going on.”
“We’ll get him out,” he said. “We’ll get him a good lawyer. It’ll be okay.”
“I don’t think so, Trey,” she said. She looked up at him. “I think it’s fucked-up and it’s going to stay that way. I’m just so tired of this shit. I don’t think I can live in the South any longer. I need to go back to New York.”
“Oh, like the New York City Police Department is any better,” Trey said, and he could tell that this was the wrong thing to say.
“Don’t do that, Trey,” she said. “As soon as I get things sorted with Freddie, I’m moving back to New York.”
“What about me?” he asked.
“Come with me,” she said.
“I like Nashville,” he said, but then he quickly said, “but I like you more.”
“Come here,” she said.
