by Mark Leidner
I watched my ball get caught in the mushroom-shaped bouncers for a surprisingly long time, loudly racking up points, but somehow this triumph felt empty, like when you try to go back to sleep after waking up from a good dream too soon, and when you return to it, the world is the same but a crucial emotion is missing. I was about to leave the rest of my balls for the universe to do with as it saw fit when I felt someone’s presence beside me.
“Yo, lady,” said a male voice. “You okay?”
I knew it was the one in the Broncos hat without looking.
“Excuse me,” I said without thinking, either. “I’m playing a game here.”
The ball was still pounding around in the mushrooms. When it finally fell, I waited until the last second, then slammed the right flipper button with perfect timing. The ball flew through a hanging flap and zipped up a curled white ramp.
“Oh,” he said, backing away. “My bad.”
One of his friends buzzed his lips. He shot his friend a bird while walking back toward them, and then they laughed at him. Something shot my ball up another ramp and the scoreboard went crazy with sounds and bells. When my ball got stuck in some kind of bonus cage, I glanced back and saw he was watching. He looked away and grabbed a pink gun out of his friend’s hand, which his friend protested. In my game, the cage had opened and two balls had come out where there had been one. They followed one another lazily, like pals, drifting toward the limp left flipper. I don’t know why I didn’t hit the button. I watched the balls glance off it and fall into the hole in ignominious succession. Letting them die felt good somehow. When the next ball popped up I fired it into the mushrooms and watched it suicide too. With GAME OVER blinking on the marquee behind me like an explosion in an action movie—or so I imagined—I walked over to the boys and their guns and said to the tall one, “I lost.”
All three stared at me. After a moment, the tall one frowned at me like he thought I was about to ask them for money.
“Any other games in here worth the tokens?” I asked coquettishly. He still looked clueless.
I looked at his torso, then back up at his eyes. I thought I was being enormously clear, but I saw on his face an almost unplaceable lostness, so I took the plastic gun out of his hands and pointed it at him and said, “I’d play this one, but I hate guns.” I handed it back to him, held it against his body, then let it go.
A moment later he handed the gun to his friend.
HIS APARTMENT WAS ABOVE THE bar, where I thought he was leading me at first, but then we walked around it and up an outdoor stair. I regretted coming on to him the whole walk over, yet also felt the terror of an upcoming eternity of nothingness distorting my decisions and sucking me forward like an enormous vortex. I kept telling myself the second my phone rang, the suction would reverse and blow me back, toward the clinic, toward my car, toward my husband, toward my home, toward my grave, toward the world moving on. But the phone hadn’t rung, and then it began to seem like it never would, and that made me feel like I’d been granted a second method by which I might live forever.
I sat on his couch in front of a coffee table covered in ashtrays, magazines, and unwashed dishes. He sat on a folding chair he’d pulled from behind a door and opened next to me. I got the feeling I had sat in his normal spot and he’d neither wanted to correct me by asking me to move nor presume to sit beside me. By the time the young man and I had finished smoking two bowls of weed whose pedigree he tediously and endlessly extolled, I’d halfway forgotten my diagnosis and slipped back into something like normal time. At one point I had the very high thought that I was just a fraying strand in the elaborate tapestry of history. It must have been good weed after all. When I remembered death again, instead of feeling like I was dying, I felt above it, like a goddess trying as hard as she could to seem mortal—like my whole life I had been temporarily waylaid by this petty body in this petty reality and soon again would resume my proper position in the pantheon.
Imagining my breath as one of the four winds, I slowly asked the young man what he did. He said not much, just hang out. When he saw his answer didn’t impress me, he added that he’d worked at the hospital for a while. I asked if he was a doctor. He said no, and I was disappointed that he didn’t get my joke. He then reported that he’d brought the food cart around to the inpatient rooms. “But I got fired,” he concluded, as if that was the end of his entire life’s story. When I asked why, he shook his head as if such a question was existentially unanswerable. He asked if I was high, and I said yes. He asked how high I was, and I said I didn’t know, pretty up there. Then I said it was the highest I’d been in as long as I could remember. He asked if I wanted to get higher. I said I didn’t need to, but the way I said it left it open. He produced something from a tin box that looked like brown sugar but glossier, then he said, “Because we could get seriously tilted.”
“What is it?”
He smiled at the utter innocence of my question, then looked at me like he wanted me to guess.
“Meth?”
He drew some out on a piece of plastic that looked like it had once been a gift card.
“Heroin?” I didn’t know anything about drugs.
“You’ll be fucking plastered to that sofa,” he said aggressively. Something about his confidence made him sadly repulsive, and I was prevented from walking out right then only by my fear of moving a muscle.
He tapped some of the crystals into the end of the same pipe we’d used for the marijuana. He was grinning, too, like he was getting away with something. Now I didn’t want to leave, but I did feel like correcting him.
“Is that even yours?”
He looked at me, offended. “Hell yeah, it’s mine.”
“Sorry,” I said.
“What do you care?”
“I don’t. I don’t know why I asked.”
He shook his head and went back to packing the pipe. It was my least favorite thing about myself—a kneejerk suspicion that came out when I was on edge. My husband had borne the brunt of it graciously for our entire marriage. I was about to apologize again when he grinned at me with desire. I felt like forbidden fruit suddenly, or a trophy of some sort, and I didn’t know how I felt about feeling that way. I wanted to touch him, then I didn’t, then I did again. More than anything, I wanted to not think about anything to do with myself. I decided not to smoke whatever he was putting in the pipe because I was afraid it might make me think about myself even more. Marijuana was plenty, I thought, and then, as soon as I had thought that, even marijuana was too much. I wanted to run screaming outside. I saw myself do it in my head. I ran so fast, though, I tripped and bounced down the stairs and rolled out into the alley, head cracked open, blood gleaming in the sun. I saw myself explode through a hole in his apartment wall as if fired from a cannon. I saw a giant eagle crash through the window and pluck me from the couch and race screaming with me in its talons into the afternoon sky.
In reality the couch was simply too cushiony to move from. And if I moved I knew I would die. If I moved my pinkie even a centimeter from its position on the armrest, that would begin the chain reaction that would inevitably lead to me calling my husband and telling him what I’d been told and watching him watch me while I lost all my dignity. Sitting on this disgusting couch was holding back a tidal wave of eternity.
Showing the same concern he’d shown in the arcade, my host asked if I was okay. My eyes were closed. Slowly, as if I could forestall the future with the pace of my pronunciation, I asked him his name. When he answered I didn’t understand what he’d said.
“Caleb?”
“No, K… Lo. Like Sweet’N Low… except K instead of sweet, and no ‘and’.”
I crushed my eyelids, trying to think about what he’d just said.
“What’s your real name?”
“K-lo. I just said it.”
“That’s not a real name.”
“Yo,” he barked. “It’s what I go by.”
“What’s it’s from?”
> “What do you mean?”
“How’d you get that name.”
“Fucking… childhood. Look, you want to hit this or not?”
He was lying. He’d given it to himself. I shook my head. I didn’t want to hit it.
I hadn’t opened my eyes yet, and in the dark I heard the lighter spark and something crackle. Then I heard him sucking air through the sides of his teeth. I expected it to smell but it didn’t. I heard him put the pipe on the table. He offered a beer, his voice wavering. He breathed in again through his teeth. I sensed in him something of the host who’d realized he’d failed to entertain his guest before entertaining himself, and I felt sorry for him. I nodded and whispered, “Yes to the beer.” I heard him rise. I still hadn’t moved or opened my eyes. I felt like a space traveler. My husband and I used to watch Star Trek, and I felt like the captain, the bald guy, the fabric of time flowing around my aerodynamic scalp. K-lo shuffled back over and opened the can so close that I felt the fizz on my forearm, and I opened my eyes.
He’d taken off his Broncos hat. There was a red line pressing his bleached hair to his temples. He was backlit by a window with a sheet over it. There was a TV under the window, and in the reflection of the screen he looked like an angel in one of those engravings by Dürer, or whoever it was that did those.
“Yo,” K-lo said slowly, trying to push the beer can into my fingers.
It was the coldest thing I’d ever touched. I tried to sip it, but my lips were too weak, I couldn’t even purse them. I set the can on a magazine on the coffee table and leaned over in K-lo’s direction and curled up on the couch and started crying and staring into the rippled denim wall of his jeans.
“Yo. Damn. Are you okay? Hey. What’s wrong?”
I remembered my mother and father, both long dead, wondering if they were here with me, watching over me like real angels, and I knew they were not. I rolled off the couch and lay in the gutter between the couch and coffee table—with a plop. Springing into action, and, after some straining, he got me up. He walked me to the kitchen and got me water. I tried to drink it, but the water tasted so good that I burst into tears and had to set it down or drop the glass. To lie on the floor. That was all I’d wanted, I realized, since talking to the doctor. No, actually, I wanted to lie on the asphalt in the sun and be baked into the sky, to become a lump of cloud, leaving behind an anonymous skeleton, but that seemed impossible. I got on my knees and put my forehead flush to the grimy linoleum. I rolled my forehead side to side. I clawed the tiling. In my head, it peeled back to reveal a new plane of reality, like the whole world was just a bunch of cheap props with outer space behind it, and I was dismantling the stage. K-lo knelt and stroked my arm, then put a hand under my head. He smoothed my hair. He told me it would be okay. His fingers were clammy on my body, but they felt so good. He asked me if he could take me somewhere. I couldn’t stop crying. He said he had a car. I said I had a husband. “Oh…” he said. Then he added, “That’s cool.” He said he would take me to him. “You’ll be aight,” he said confidently. Stillness and peace washed over me, and I tried to say, “Please say that again,” but I just spat mucous, so I stopped trying to speak. I pictured K-lo, determined, turning down our street in a beat up whatever he drove, parking in our driveway, walking me up the steps, delivering me—ghoulish, but unadulterous—to my home and husband on the doorstep. I found the notion of a hand-off perversely pleasant. It meant that at no point I’d be alone. It felt like a good little boring ending before the cosmic one, and I surrendered to it in my mind.
But when I finally was able to stand, K-lo put his hand on the small of my back, and something ancient leapt through me. Frog’s blood is what I’m calling it. Something shooting out of my heart to the ends of my fingertips. I turned him around and looked at his face. I held it with my hands like my mother used to do, like I was about to dab a napkin in water and aggressively wipe something away. He smiled awkwardly and I saw his front tooth was chipped. I felt like a reptile, like a wooden carving come to life in a story. A mermaid, but less cute. Lovecraftian. Pitiless. All-pitying. Beyond pity. Medusa. I put his other hand around me. I felt resistance in his elbow, but I held his palm on my back. His eyes were wide in fright. I told him I didn’t want to go.
“You sure?” he asked incredulously.
I nodded. “Sorry, I’m a mess. I’m not used to smoking.”
“You feel better?”
I let go of his arms to wipe snot-wet hair from my face. He took the opportunity to step back.
“What do you think about me and you,” I said. I swallowed hard and looked at him. “Right now.” I looked down the hall. “You got a room?”
He looked at me impatiently.
“Yeah, I got a room.”
“Where?”
“In there, but—”
“It’s okay,” I said, holding up a finger to pause our conversation. I glanced around for paper towels. Miraculously there were some. “It’s not a big deal,” I said quickly, grabbing and tearing one off. I blew my nose in it. I took another and wiped my face and looked at him. His lips were curled in perplexity. I looked around for the trash. He nodded, and I found it beside a shelf with an ancient microwave on it. The garbage was overflowing the receptacle. I wanted to smash it down but didn’t for fear of seeming imperious and instead gently lay the paper towels on top of a box of takeout. I took the glass of water off his table and took a sip. I smiled, pretending everything that had just happened hadn’t, and for a moment it worked. For a moment, I was a mutant whose indifference to anything remotely resembling a reasonable perspective on her own situation was her ineluctable power.
“We could hook up,” I said. “That’s what I’m saying. I like you.”
He looked like a pet when you try to speak to them, stuck in simple incomprehension.
“If you don’t want to, that’s fine.”
“I didn’t say that,” he said.
“Well, do you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why’d you bring me here then?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
I cleared my throat and walked toward him, trying to unbutton my top button at the same time, but my fingers were too shaky, so I stopped.
“You want me to leave, don’t you.”
He didn’t do anything, then he shook his head.
So I went back to working the button. When I got it undone, I tried the second one down, but it was even harder.
I finally lowered my hands and stared at him. “Little help?”
He was a statue.
I frowned. I pulled my shirt apart. Some buttons bounced on the floor. We both heard them roll somewhere.
Standing there facing him, I imagined my blouse like petals of a giant rare flower, and I felt like a crazy forest spirit in human disguise, trying to be plucked, and he was a dumb, illiterate farmer who still somehow knew better than to tangle with a goddess.
“I’m serious,” I said gently.
“I would,” he finally said. “I mean, I would, is what I’m saying.”
I lifted my eyebrows impatiently.
“But you were crying.”
“C’mon,” I said. “You never fucked somebody who was sad before?”
“Jesus.”
“I’m sorry. That came out wrong. Everyone’s sad. That’s all I meant.” I sighed. “Look, I had a rough day, and I’m kind of in a hurry. Do you want to or not?”
“Do you?”
“Yes!”
My voice seemed to startle him. He glanced back at the door.
“What?” I said.
“Nothing.”
“Are you expecting someone?”
He shook his head.
“Then what’s the deal?”
“What about your husband?”
“He’s fine.”
“Does he know where you are?”
“No.”
He still didn’t seem satisfied.
“We have an open relationship,” I
lied.
He frowned. “What is that?”
“Nevermind.” I stared at him as I took another sip of water. My hand wasn’t shaking. I felt like a human. Maybe he could tell, too, because when I set the glass back down, it was like he’d teleported to me. Face to face, he finally looked at me liked he’d looked at me when I’d first walked in the arcade—like a hunter only with kindness and intelligence in his eyes. I felt a pang of guilt for what a different me might have considered sexual tourism, but then I felt that flame-licked, medieval feeling when you like the guilt, and then I felt the guilt return heat to my skin. We leapt into each other, hard and soft. Our teeth hit and everything felt like the past only plastic, like a bad vacation, like tedious poetry. Like we were both inhabiting minor roles in a fairy tale, people soon to be destroyed by the machinery of the plot. But it still felt blessed. If I was smashing into K-lo, how I could have mattered to anyone or anything. It was freedom from mattering. Then the freedom faded and I started to feel what I guess was something like love. Like it was seeping through our ill-fitting skin. It was too passionate. It wasn’t gross, it was tender, which made it even more gross, which made it even more tender. I hated it and loved it. It was impossible not to feel saved, for a moment, by the bristle, by the hard, busy tongue. He tasted like failure. Kissing him felt like falling off a cliff. It felt like wasting three wishes. It felt like being in a hot air balloon being blown into power lines.
K-lo’s room was so depressing that, walking into it, my stomach turned. There were rags on the floor, and it smelled of old fruit. A window unit pumping cold air seemed to intensify the odor. I asked for the bathroom. He nodded down a hall. I staggered off, holding myself up with a hand on a completely empty bookshelf in the hall. I stopped short when I heard him rifling for something in his room. I turned and watched him searching desperately in the dim light. He looked up and whisper-shouted that he didn’t have a condom. His unexpected conscientiousness was pathetically touching, and I decided I didn’t need to see the bathroom. My body felt like a heap of fine sand tossed into the air, and the wind blew me into his bed.
