by Nino Cipri
The day that changed was not very different from the preceding ones. Not unseasonably cold, nor warm. Nadia was still divorced, childless, an immigrant who lived in an enclave of other immigrants, who understood the true value of things.
Had she slept poorly the night before? Nadia rarely slept well, with vivid dreams that routinely woke her before dawn. Was her back bothering her that day? Yes, but not as much as her knees; her knees were her real problem. All that time spent scrubbing floors, all kinds of floors, tile and linoleum and bamboo and one man who had furnished his children’s playroom with a floor made of pennies. It was ghastly, a nightmare to clean, and she had Abraham Lincoln’s face permanently embedded in her knees now.
On that day, Nadia arrived at the Swedish assholes’ apartment at her normal time. Nadia dropped her purse, then her bucket of cleaning supplies, and then her coat. The stupid cat watched her from the kitchen counter where he was surely forbidden to sit, and she watched him back. Then she strode into the living room, hauled the couch away from the eastern wall, and stared down at the small ocean that hid beneath it.
It looked like the Black Sea, she decided. Not the sea of her memories, with its dirty-colored sand and leathery old men leering at bikini-clad girls, but the sea of her dreams, with dark water that contained shipwrecks and other unknowable things.
Nadia shed her clothes, placing them on the back of the couch: the old, stained jeans; the cheap and scratchy T-shirt emblazoned with the name of the cleaning company; her threadbare bra; her soft panties with the torn lace at the hem. Then she stood at the lip of the sea, of her sea, and dipped in a toe. She knew that the best way to get into cold water was not to hesitate, not to shriek and fumble, but to steadily allow oneself to be submerged.
Rather than letting her sink in, however, the sea rose to meet Nadia, spilling out over the stingy inch of sand that formed its beach, lazily spreading across the floor of the Swedish assholes’ fourteenth-floor apartment. It quickly submerged the mohair rugs and the lower bookshelves, the white lacquer coffee table littered with fashion and design magazines. It rose higher than the air vents of the designer vacuum, until salty water began leaking down the pipes. Wavelets lapped against the cream-colored walls.
The Swedish assholes’ stupid cat leapt up onto the couch, perching on Nadia’s clothes. He watched the water with fascination, but no real concern. He raised a paw as if to swat at something under the surface, then brought it to his mouth and licked it instead, as if that was what he had meant to do all along.
As for Nadia, she placidly watched the water rise to her ankles, and then her knees. When it was just about thigh height, she took three deep breaths, and then dove in.
PRESQUE VU
Five rides, Clay told himself after he gagged up that morning’s haunting. He’d pick up five rides today, and then he’d call it quits.
He’d woken up choking on house keys nearly every morning for the last two months, a curious sort of morning sickness. Today’s was brass with a hexagonal head, old and scratched. Clay caught the haunting before it fell into the toilet, warm from his body and sticky with mucus. He washed his hands and the key, dried them, and then dropped the key into the jar he kept in the bathroom. It was nearly full; he’d have to get a larger one soon.
Five rides and no more. He’d do them during the day and be home before dark.
He thought of his last passenger the night before. Halloween had ended weeks ago, but people in town still wore cheap masks and polyester and satin costumes, more of them out on the streets every night. She’d been dressed in a brown onesie, with a plastic monkey mask too small for her face.
“It’s Halloween every day,” she’d slurred as her friends poured her into his backseat. “There are ghosts everywhere, see?”
She pointed out the window at one of the wraiths twisted up in black scraps of fabric, bleeding purple light from its eyes, mouths, and fingertips. The wraiths dotted the street, wandering in and out of traffic and bars, standing sentry atop bus shelters.
“I hate them,” the girl said petulantly, leaning her head against the window. The plastic mask squeaked against the glass. “They’re awful, the way they stare at you.” He’d left her on the curb after she demanded he pull over so she could puke.
Clay pulled on a hoodie and a pair of jeans before stumbling to the apartment below his. Mari, in 2B, was infinitely generous with her cheap coffee, and she was sometimes his only human contact outside of driving for Flock.
Clay could hear calm music and a British voice on the other side of the door, probably one of the nature documentaries she watched ceaselessly. He knocked loudly. When she opened the door, strains of oboes and violins washed over him, along with the smell of Mari’s apartment: sage and weed smoke, lavender, sautéed onions.
“Coffee?” she asked, speaking over the TV.
Mari’s living room was crowded with shabby furniture and mismatched pillows, potted plants and unfinished craft projects. Clay’s apartment contained his bed, a table with two mismatched chairs, and piles of clothes in varying states of cleanliness.
Mari had the coffee things out, the big yellow can of Bustelo and an aeropress. The little TV in the corner of the kitchen was showing clips of crows, and the noise of their cawing filled the apartment. They circled through gray skies and perched on telephone wires, calling to each other. They remembered people’s faces, the narrator said. They remembered what people had done to them for generations.
“So, Clay.” Mari didn’t seem to mind that she had to shout over the TV. “You’re queer, right?”
Mari had a briefcase full of sex toys with a Bisexual Pride bumper sticker on the front. He knew this because she had pointed it out in the living room and said, “That’s where I keep my sex toys. Most of them, anyway.”
Clay blinked and said, “Why?”
“What?”
“I said—” His throat flared with pain, and he gestured for her to turn the sound down on the TV. When she did, he said, “Why do you want to know?”
“I wanted to ask you a favor, but I didn’t want to presume. I kind of figured you were, because of that conversation about Terry Crews—”
“I don’t know anyone who wouldn’t want to get lovingly crushed between his thighs,” he said, an automatic reaction. “But yeah. Confirmed queer.”
“Cool. So Finn wants me to peg him, but he wants to know what bottoming is like from someone with a prostate. And I’m not presuming anything about your tastes and preferences, but...Your look of horror is pretty cute, for the record.”
“Thanks.” Clay ran a hand over his face. He had not been prepared for that conversational turn. He wasn’t sure he would ever be prepared for it. “I’m not sure I can talk to you about anal sex when I’m barely awake.”
“You don’t need to talk to me about it. I want you to talk to Finn.”
Finn was Mari’s boyfriend, and not that it was Clay’s business, but she could do better. The first and only time he’d met Finn, the other man pressured Clay to drink nettle tea and read Pema Chödrön, “To help keep your life in balance.” Mari, meanwhile, worked at a suicide hotline, spoke English, Tagolog, Mandarin, and Spanish, and freely shared her weed and bad coffee. Clay knew which of these things helped keep him balanced.
“Is there a reason Finn can’t just google how to take it up the butt?” Clay said.
“It’s Finn. He wants locally sourced advice about anal pleasure.” Mari plunked a cup of coffee in front of him. “I’ll cut your hair in exchange. And make you dinner tonight. I have people coming over anyway.”
“What’s wrong with my hair?”
“When’s the last time you cut it?”
Clay couldn’t remember. Things had been too hectic, too weird before he’d left the city; things had been too lonely and weird since he’d arrived.
“I’ll even set you up on a date,” Mari offered. “There’s a cute intern at the hotline.”
“I’m not fucking an intern,” Clay said, th
ough he wasn’t sure why he objected.
“At least let me cut your hair. It’s starting to look like a hockey mullet.”
Mari had her own inertia, and Clay soon found himself on her balcony, looking out at the abandoned construction project in the fields beyond their backyard. Billboards along the road still advertised new homes, built to order. But the project had stalled. None of the homes were built, and all that remained were enormous gouges in the ground where they’d dug foundations. A couple wraiths lingered by the edges, little blurs of black and purple gazing down into the pits.
Clay sat on a milk carton while Mari moved around him, combing through his hair with her fingers and snipping with a confidence that relaxed him. She pitched his hair into the wind. He thought about birds building their nests with it.
“What’s Finn haunted by?” he asked.
The movement of Mari’s fingers slowed. “Unspooled cassette tapes. He wakes up with the tape knotted in his hair.”
“What type of music?” Clay asked.
“We don’t listen to them,” Mari said. “I get postcards.”
Clay had seen Mari’s hauntings, since all of their mail was mixed together. The postcards were vintage, with terrible puns and bland innuendo: the one he’d seen had a naughty librarian with stacks of books propping up her cleavage, and beneath it the words Interested in a thriller? On the other side was a spidery scrawl in faded brown ink. He’d slipped it under her door without reading it and washed his hands after. It felt terrible to touch someone else’s haunting.
“Mine are house keys,” Clay said. “I wake up with them stuck in my throat.”
“Do they unlock things?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t tried.”
Mari fished a pair of clippers out of her bag and plugged them in. Clay shivered as she touched them to his scalp.
“Cool,” she said a moment later, tilting his head up. “You look slightly less like you’re about to murder a cabin full of teenagers.” Clay shook his head, marveling at how light it felt. “Thanks.”
“So?”
“I’ll talk to Finn about taking it up the ass. Although I don’t know when—”
Mari waved a hand. “I’ll set it up. It’s not a pegging emergency; you can take a couple days.”
***
Clay’s phone pinged as he was pulling out of the parking lot: a ride request just a hundred feet down the road, from a user named Natasha. She’d uploaded a picture of herself, an olive-skinned woman with long brown hair, smiling in nostalgic, filtered light.
Clay saw a figure by the abandoned construction site, perched at the edge of an unfinished foundation. Was it a wraith? Clay had picked up wraiths before, though he worried about being seen with one in his car. The wraiths weren’t bad customers. They tipped. They were never drunk or obnoxious. And they didn’t talk, though some of them sang in low, mournful voices. If Clay wasn’t in the mood to listen, he just turned the radio up. They were easily drowned out, unlike some of his living passengers.
Clay pulled over, rolled down the window, and called out, “Natasha? Going to the Riverside apartments?”
The figure waved, though Clay wasn’t sure if it was in affirmation or negation. As she came closer, Clay realized she was human, not wraith. She had a hat pulled down to the rim of her sunglasses, a scarf wrapped up to her nose, and an overlarge jean jacket that draped over her hands. A few strands of brittle black hair stuck out. She limped up to his rear door, opened it, and carefully folded herself into the backseat.
“Natasha?” he asked again. “Riverside apartments?”
“Yeah.” A hoarse voice: it sounded like fabric being torn.
“All right.” He hit ON ROUTE on the app and started driving.
She had brought the smell of the outdoors with her, rotting leaves and salt and mud, and her presence seemed to fill his car. He didn’t dare turn on the radio—it would have felt like listening to music on the way to a funeral—so the silence lay heavy. It was just her labored breathing and the engine, which seemed too soft in comparison.
“Do you live around there?” he asked. “Near the construction site?”
Natasha shook her head.
“What were you doing out there?” What he wanted to know was what she’d been doing so close to his house.
“Looking,” Natasha said.
“For what?” Clay asked, then realized he might not want to know. “Sorry you didn’t find it, whatever it was.”
They drove again in silence. The houses and subdivisions, like his and Mari’s building, gradually gave way to apartment complexes, Wal-marts, and Targets.
“Do you really want to know what I was trying to find?” Natasha asked.
“No. Not really. That’s fine,” Clay said. He pressed down a little bit harder on the accelerator. He was going to count this as two rides, he decided. Two of the five he’d allotted himself today.
They passed into the quaint neighborhoods nearer the center of town, old houses with wide front porches interspersed with newer, uglier condos. They were almost at the Riverside apartments when Clay caught movement out of the corner of his eye: Natasha leaning forward, swaying closer to him. The car swerved in the road.
“My skin,” she said in her harsh whisper. “They took my skin. It’s always so cold now.”
“Sorry,” he said, and turned up the heat in the car. Both of these, he knew, were meaningless gestures.
“Why?” she asked. “They took something from you, too. I can tell.”
Natasha leaned back, and Clay let himself breathe.
They had stopped at a light, only a few blocks from Riverside, when the door opened. Clay twisted around to see Natasha step out of his car, adjust her sunglasses, and shut the door softly behind her. She limped past two lanes of honking cars to the sidewalk, and then turned and started walking in the opposite direction. Clay put the car in park and was about to unbuckle his seatbelt, full of vague thoughts of chasing after her, when his phone pinged.
Natasha had marked the ride complete.
Natasha had tipped him six dollars on a ten-dollar ride.
The light ahead turned green, and the cars in front of Clay started to move. Clay followed. She’d marked the ride complete. That meant she didn’t need his help—or at least, didn’t particularly want it.
Clay turned down a ride request to the airport, and another that originated from one of the frat houses. He killed time by the downtown strip of cafés and brunch spots, waiting for the lunch rush to get out, by trying to imagine what he would tell Finn about getting fucked. Bottoming, that sounded better—specific but not graphic, less likely to trigger the ass-related anxiety that seemed to be the resting state of most hetero guys.
He texted Mari: What exactly have you done to Finn’s ass before now?
The answer came immediately. Exactly?? A winking smiling face followed. Mari was fluent in emoji.
God no, just generally, Clay replied.
Peach emoji, pointer finger. Some touching, not much penetration. He’s butt shy.
If he was butt shy, why did he want to get pegged? Maybe he wanted to prove he was secure enough in his heterosexuality that he could unclench his sphincter and let his hot girlfriend fuck him? Who knew why straight people did anything, really.
There had been a period where Clay had been using the Flock app for hookups. He hadn’t meant to, but one day, he’d met the eyes of a passenger in his rearview mirror, and the man had said, “You’ve got a nice mouth, anyone ever tell you that?” A terrible line, but it did the trick. The weather had still been warm then: bad ideas seemed worth exploring, consequences minimal. The town had shut down its only gay bar a few weeks before Clay arrived—legal troubles, supposedly. Mari had said, “Oh yeah, the city was really concerned about underage drinking. That’s why they shut down a single bar mostly patronized by old men and married lesbians.”
Clay had pulled into a parking lot, and they’d fooled around in the shadow of a pickup truck with a
confederate flag sticker on it. The act was defiant enough to make the otherwise mediocre sex hot.
He’d stopped after letting a guy take him home and fuck him. That guy had done it like a porn star, like it was a performance for an audience Clay couldn’t see and wasn’t included in. Seven different positions over the course of an hour, a stream of filthy invectives in Clay’s ear; this was a hero’s journey, but Clay was just the mountain being climbed. The guy cried after he came, and that wouldn’t have bothered Clay, except the tears, too, felt like performance, like pageantry.
He’d noticed the framed pictures on his way out the door: the guy dressed up in a suit, shaking the hands of other men in suits. One of them looked like the governor that everyone hated, who’d still managed to get re-elected.
That had been the end of hooking up with his passengers. He hadn’t had sex since.
He imagined relating this story to Finn, and the other man’s delicate look of distaste—or worse, fascination—as Clay described how sex sometimes left him feeling hollow and more alone than if he’d just jerked off in his room to porn gifs on Reddit. Isolation was easier. Keep your eyes on the road and your thoughts to yourself. Don’t look back. Don’t think about what came before, what was lost, who was gone, who had disappeared. Don’t wonder what doors the keys unlocked; don’t ask why they haunted you out of everyone in the world.
***
His second ride that day was two middle-aged men. He nearly didn’t pick them up: one was dressed in an ill-fitting cop costume, with a fake handlebar mustache and aviator sunglasses. But the other, dressed normally, had spotted the winged Flock decal in Clay’s rear window and waved him down.
“Nineteenth and Stein,” the normally dressed one said to Clay.
“Got it,” Clay said. Short ride, just a couple miles. He could do this.
“I’m telling you, man, it’s awesome,” the dress-up cop said as they got in.
“I don’t care. You look like one of the faggots from the YMCA song.”
