Heaven and Hell
The pink sunrise alighted on N's closed eyelids. Though the tide was low and far off, its sound still permeated his dreams in bits and pieces. Slowly and all of a sudden N opened his eyes and was awake. He sat upright and dusted the sand out of his curly hair, and before he could notice the wind or the salty air the thought entered his mind: K was still living at his place. K was still sleeping in his bed, and therefore he would stay at the beach a little longer. No use in rushing.
N wore rubber slippers, jeans, and a thin sweater which, as the sun was beginning to warm him he removed, revealing a gray tank top underneath. He then pulled his phone out of his pocket and for a minute or two stared at pictures posted on Facebook of an old college ex’s wedding. She was getting married before him despite the fact that N was two years older than her and she’d never even held a job before. Well, since the other week N was also jobless, but that was different—it meant something entirely different to quit. Either way K was sleeping at his place now and K was an angel and N was in love. And how could he kick an angel out?
Salt filled the pale-blue sky and N folded his legs into a cross-legged position. He rolled his neck in circles. The gods had been favorable to him overnight—he hadn’t slept that poorly. At least compared to the past three nights when the sand was too hard and the wind was biting and N couldn’t stop rolling around long enough to sleep. Last night he had really slept, though; he even dreamt.
But now he was awake, as much as he wished he could go back. N took a long look down the length of the beach, where far off in the rose-colored dawn he could already spy people setting up beach umbrellas. Then he stood up, dusted off his clothes, slugged on his backpack, and spat out a few grains of sand. As he walked towards the boardwalk N said a brief prayer:
“Thank you god for waking me up this morning, and thank you for bringing me here before you to pray once again. Thank you for K, whom I love dearly, and thank you for the ocean.” A seagull dived down in front of him from his right and landed on a log. It pecked at a hole in the wood and then immediately lifted back off into the air. N laughed. “I agree. Thank you for seagulls too, for the way they always bring me back.”
N took off his sandals to climb over a wooden fence that separated the beach from the boardwalk. He climbed it handily though the jump down onto the boardwalk was higher than he expected and he needed to use his hands to brace his fall. As he remained there squatting on the ground, N meditated on the dull pain in his ankles and wrists and took note of how it dissipated. Then he put his sandals back on, clapped his hands together a few times, and walked up the boardwalk eastwards towards the rising sun. He put on a pair of dark sunglasses and a baseball cap.
“Where was I—thank you god for this new opportunity of today, and thank you for every chance you’ve ever given me. Please give me the strength to say everything I need to say.” Then N looked over his right shoulder back towards the ocean. “And please let today be hot enough out that I can go swimming. Amen.”
N turned up a beach block onto Rockaway Beach boulevard. Mostly this early in the morning the sidewalks were empty, though when the city buses passed him by he could see the faces of the early risers headed to work. There was one tanned lady whose face was sagging and beautiful, and she looked like she was staring directly into the sun. N stopped to watch her as the bus turned a corner and eventually disappeared and after a few more blocks he turned into a bakery.
The woman behind the counter had a round face and was covered in tattoos. She wasn’t very beautiful or sad-looking, though not everyone should be, N thought to himself—it was a full time job to be sad and beautiful. She was round-faced and practical and woke up every morning to bake samsa filled with ground lamb and N was deeply envious. But she nodded politely at him from behind the counter and N simply smiled and said, “a coffee and the pumpkin samsa, again. Thank you Ann.” Then he walked into the bathroom and locked the door behind him.
N sat on the toilet and scrolled on his phone again for a minute, once again returning to the Facebook post of his now-married ex-girlfriend. There were pictures of her under the chuppah and being hoisted up on a chair and she looked gorgeous in her wedding dress. Meanwhile her new husband was as gaunt and lanky as a zombie and he was probably rich too. N imagined briefly what it would feel like to punch him in the stomach.
Then before he knew it he was watching an AI-generated video of a woman playing Philip Glass on the piano with four arms. “Fuck.” N turned off his phone and slid it back into his pocket. He got up, washed his hands, and then took his toothbrush and toothpaste out of his backpack. Forcefully he brushed his teeth in the mirror while reading the ingredients of a bottle of air-freshener; after a minute or two he spat out a bloody foam into the sink. He rinsed out his mouth, exited the bathroom, and sat down at his table which had the coffee and pastry waiting there for him.
N ate and sipped his coffee mostly in silence. He scribbled a few reflections into his journal as well as recording a fragment of his dream from the night prior. Then running out of anything else to write he watched Ann scrape samsas off of the inside wall of a domed brick oven. A flame shot up out of the center of the oven and she was already sweating through her t-shirt. N approached the countertop after she’d finished sticking a fresh batch of pastries onto the inner oven wall. “How much for my coffee and samsa?” N asked.
She punched a few buttons into an old-fashioned cash register. “Seven fifty.” She said with a Russian accent.
He handed her a ten and while she was doling out his change he asked, “say—are there any jobs in the kitchen here? I’m a hard worker and I can wake up very early.”
Ann smiled and gently shook her head. “No. No jobs here.”
“Alright,” N conceded and walked out back into the street. It was solidly daytime now though N knew that K would still be asleep. K didn’t work today—he worked only part-time as a front desk attendant at Lennox radiology—and there’d be the best chance that he’d be out of the apartment during the evening, when he usually left the apartment to drink. That’s when N would get back to exchange some of his things and pick up some new clothes. Then he’d be able to sneak back out of the apartment without having to confront K.
N made his way back to the beach and lay down in the sand. He opened up his book but watched the beachgoers instead. There were dozens of them in the very spot where this morning there had been only him; they ran about, tossed frisbees, and chased one another, all now in an overhead heat that made them sweat with activity and youth.
Knee deep in the tide were a couple—a young man and woman—playing with each other, screaming. The man was behind the woman with his arms locked around her, and he swung her side to side, pretending to toss her into the water and yelling all the while, “One, two—I’m gonna toss you Belle—one, two, three!” The sun fell almost vertically upon their deep smiles and his swaying shoulder blades.
N watched this activity for a while and then tried in vain to focus in on his book, which, as mere words on a page, had no place superseding the palpable energy of the beachgoers. So he turned his attention back to the couple, the woman now crying with laughter and the man breathing heavily from exertion with his hands upon his head. Their bright eyes were locked, and each of them were coiled up like a tiger stalking its prey, each carnivorous in his or her own way: he wanting her, and her wanting him want her, yet both of them blindingly out for blood.
She pleaded with him, “Ryan—I’m done; I’m done with this,” but he just bared his teeth. “Ryan, I swear to god if you—” Suddenly he charged with his hands outstretched. She screamed laughingly but with a hint of real terror, “Ryan no! Stop! Ryan stop!” They both ran down the shoreline and N watched them collide a while off, collapsing together into the shallow water in to a singular, sandy heap. A quickly-moving wave rolled over them and they tumbled like seashells up the shore.
N felt the desire for K surge through his skin and fascia. The two of them would have watched this spectacle together and felt its power act upon on them both; surely K would have found something profound to say about Ryan and Belle too, something that would mirror the state of the universe and—as if he had discovered a new natural law—would therefore create a new one around them.
Though all N had now was the knowledge that Ryan and Belle were happily together and that he was all alone. N found himself wishing simultaneously that K would be here right now and would also leave him be forever. He tried once more to turn himself into his book and again failed. The sun and his desire were too bright and hot to ignore. N stood up, placed his book, hat, and sunglasses into his backpack and took off his tank top. He changed under a towel into his bathing suit and walked down into the tide.
The cold of the water stung at his ankles, and then as he waded deeper in, his knees and groin. He exhaled everything in his lungs and refilled them, and then dove straight into the base of an incoming wave. When he resurfaced, glistening, he found the white-hot heat of his desire extinguished and his soul altogether tempered and hard.
Specifically his desire for K’s touch had left him; the space instead now was filled with the memory of their last argument and all of the resulting conclusions to which he’d sworn himself. N exhaled completely and dunked his head under the water again, letting himself sink on his knees into the soft sandy floor. As the biting cold of the ocean water slowly began to warm him, N recalled over and over again K’s last words to him. “You need to say what you mean, N. I’m done doing all of the legwork.”
What did he mean, ‘legwork?’ The thought that K was somehow carrying their relationship was almost laughable. N recalled how just the night prior K had gotten home from the bar totally stoned freaking out about death and N had to convince him that reincarnation was real just so that he would stop crying. And now K had the balls to say that he was doing the legwork?
Just then N’s throat began to spasm for air; he came up to breathe feeling waterlogged and burnt-out. N swam back to the shore, dried himself off, changed back into his regular clothes, and lay face down on his towel.
Though Ryan and Belle were gone, the sun was high and the beach was still swarmed with throngs of half-naked, beautiful people playing together in the quivering heat. Suddenly a man passed by with an ice box slung over his back. He was calling out, “ice cold frozen margaritas!” and N flagged him down and bought an unlabeled little juicebox for ten dollars. He downed a large mouthful, finding it so strong that it was almost nauseating. Still he drank it in the heat of day, watched the beachgoers play, and slowly once again passion took hold.
N watched another young couple toss a football back and forth for a while. He was tall and muscular and had a barbed wire tattoo run down his entire left flank, and she was short and dark-skinned with straw-yellow dreads. The man wore nothing but short swim trunks, she wore only a small yellow bikini to match her hair, and both of them were shining from the inside.
When they finished playing they embraced and held a long kiss. Then his arms flexed around the small of her back—a movement which lifted her feet ever so slightly off of the ground—and her face and torso pressed tightly into his chest. N watched closely the seawater evaporating off of their skin. He finished the last of his margarita and realized he was drunk.
There rang a woman’s voice from far off, “Carla! I think that guy lying down over there is watching you two!”
The man dropped the woman and she stumbled briefly. He spoke. “What guy, him?” Though he didn’t wait for confirmation before yelling in N’s direction. “You watching my girlfriend?”
N blushed and sat up into a cross legged position. “You two are just so beautiful, man. Have a nice day.” He feigned a return to his book.
“Don’t give me that bullshit. I caught you staring at my girlfriend, freak.” He left Carla and walked up to N, swinging his arms.
N remained seated. “Listen man I wasn’t staring. I was just looking. What—I’m not allowed to look at people on the beach?”
“Not at us, asshole.” He kicked up sand into N’s face. Meanwhile the other woman helped Carla up onto her feet and the two of watched the confrontation unfold.
Carla yelled, “Kick his ass, Sammy!”
N stood up and immediately Sammy pushed him backwards by his chest. “Relax dude,” N joked. “Let’s not start here.”
“Well you should have thought of that before staring at my girlfriend’s ass.” The two of them stood almost eye to eye.
But before N could walk away like he would’ve done otherwise, he felt the drunken spirit of K descend upon him. N smiled widely like K would with his wide-set teeth and said, “actually I was staring more so at your ass.” Sammy’s face went red and N nodded at Sammy’s waist, “does your tattoo end there or does it keep going?”
“You fucking motherfucker…” Sammy swung his fist and it landed square into N’s right shoulder. Then before N could respond Sammy charged right into N’s waist, bringing them both to the ground into a tangle of limbs. N landed directly on his back and briefly lost his breath, and when he regained it Sammy was freely throwing punches at him, uninterruptedly but inaccurately, as he was too blinded with anger and embarrassment to aim properly. Moreover N knew he had a few years strength over Sammy and so he held his own punches back and instead just kept Sammy’s wrists locked up while working himself out from bottom. Every so often though Sammy would wangle a wrist loose and get some kind of slap or scratch in.
N first worked himself onto his knees and then was able to plant one foot solidly in the sand. Meanwhile a half-circle of beachgoers surrounded the two of them with Carla and her friend leading a chant. Again N pictured K there beside him, specifically how K would relish the sight of the two men struggling against one another, each trying to exert himself over the other. N also knew that he couldn’t let a lifeguard realize that the two weren’t merely wrestling, and so in a burst of strength N planted his other foot on the ground and stood up fully.
In the excitement of the crowd and in the endeavor of standing up, however, N lost control of Sammy’s right wrist. The latter was able to swing hard into N’s face. The crowd squealed with delight and N stumbled backwards. The two of them stood in place now, separated by a few feet.
N’s left eye throbbed, and then running his hand over his face he felt a wet layer of blood covering his left orbit and cheekbone. The crowd cheered and Sammy puffed out his chest, his skin electrified with all the violent parts of manhood. He jeered, “you done staring at us now or do you want some more?”
N’s nostrils flared and his eyes deadened. The sight of his own blood was grotesque to him, though he had partially wanted to see it. He would take revenge, but also he would not make Sammy bleed—both things he promised to himself. He also knew he would need a good charge out of Sammy to take him down quickly. N’s countenance relaxed and he knew suddenly how. He smiled, “only if you’ll let me see where that tattoo ends.”
Instantly Sammy charged—a spray of sand picking up behind him—and caught N by the chest. Though at the same instant, N hooked his bare right arm underneath Sammy’s left shoulder and clasped his left hand around Sammy’s right tricep. Every junction was tight and spaceless. Skin met broad skin, muscles cinched over each other like rope, and N’s bloodied chin smeared into the side of Sammy’s neck.
N tightened his torso and dropped the ground out from underneath his left side. Then the whole world sank and twisted, there was a loud thud, Sammy was on his back, and N lay on top of him with their arms still locked up. Sammy groaned.
The crowd gasped in horror, but N felt from the impact that Sammy would be okay. Not immediately so, however. Sammy would need a minute or two to get his breath back. So N stood up and grabbed his things while the crowd stood silent. They all rushed to Sammy’s side and N stole away to the boardwalk before anyone could stop him.
On his way to the ferry he stopped into a few empty churches and a surf shop to muse at the wares and symbologies therein, and once he was on the ferry he bought a bottle of seltzer water, climbed to the upper deck, and took a seat near the back of the boat. In front of him stretched a dozen or so rows of people and to his right stretched all of Queens with its apartment buildings like giant jetties.
Mostly he spent the ride with his head cocked back scanning the passing clouds and thinking about K. Occasionally he dabbed the blood off of his face, blood which was still trickling warmly from a gash across his left eyebrow. His tank top and jeans were spotted in a mixture of blood and wet sand and he shooed away two people who approached him for help.
The clouds coalesced into stripes, then into thin sheets, and finally by the time the ferry arrived in Red Hook the sky was already rumbling with a far-off thunder. Once on the concrete dock he felt the first drops of rain and smelled the rising asphalt and he knew he had no other option than to return to the apartment tonight.
But if he had to go back to the apartment and face K then he would need his clothes cleaned. K couldn’t know that he was injured or that he had been in a fight, and not because he would be upset—in fact K would probably be more awestruck than anything—but because he would put on his caretaker role, a role that N had learned from experience that he could neither oppose or resist. He would figure out how to cover the laceration later.
The people on the street and inside the buses were notably much livelier than those this morning. Everyone seemed to be scurrying somewhere, whether because of the quickening hour or the impending lightning storm. N too scurried to the laundromat with his head bowed to avoid suspicion.
A chime marked his entrance to the air conditioned store and he turned to the attendant behind the desk. N’s eyebrow had since stopped bleeding, but not before his entire face and arm had been painted red. The attendant raised a set of thin eyebrows. “Are you okay?” She asked.
“I’m fine. I’m fine, thank you. How much would it cost to clean my clothes right now?”
She scanned him vertically with her gaze. “I cannot just clean one outfit, sir.”
“Why not?”
“Well—we just, we cannot do that here.”
“How much would it cost?” He looked down and noticed that he’d drawn streaks of blood all over the countertop. Quickly he pulled out his towel and wiped it up.
“Are you sure you do not need to go to the hospital, sir? You do not look so great.”
N realized that he hadn’t seen himself in a mirror yet and put his hand up to his face. His entire left cheekbone and brow were hot and painful to the touch. “Shit. No, I’m fine. Listen—how much would it cost to just clean my clothes?”
“If you wanted to run a whole load you could buy detergent for six dollars, a cycle for two fifty, and a dry cycle for one fifty, but that will take you a whole hour.” She continued to stare worriedly at his cheek. “But I cannot have you standing naked in here for an hour.”
“Fine. Can I at least use your bathroom?”
“We do not have a bathroom here sir.”
“Fucking hell.” N sighed. “Alright, thanks.”
“Thank you sir, goodbye.”
From there N walked to the nearest Target. Inside he picked out a pair of basketball shorts and another gray tank top and walked straight into a dressing room where he undressed fully. Before he could pull on his new clothes however he saw himself in the mirror. The whole left side of his face was a blue-green color with several deep, red gashes and welts; the deepest of them was the one through his eyebrow and he winced from just a slight touch over its surface.
The sight of all the swelling disturbed him the most, specifically a grape-sized welt over his left cheekbone that was nauseating to look at. And so still naked he closed his eyes and sat down on a bench to cry, the tears stinging his cheeks as they fell.
N took a few breaths from the very bottom of his lungs, stopped crying, and looked at himself in the mirror again. Everything could be fixed, N thought; nothing felt broken. Therefore he pulled on his new clothes, tossed away his old ones in a garbage bin, and exited the changing room.
Next he bought a bottle of hydrogen peroxide and gauze and locked himself in the bathroom where he washed his hands and face, soaked some gauze with hydrogen peroxide, and then slowly and piercingly wiped the inside of his cuts with the soaked gauze. When it came time to clean the slice in his eyebrow, he poured the hydrogen peroxide directly onto the wound. Then he dried his face with more gauze, threw everything straight into the trash, and looked back into the mirror.
“There. You look better already,” he muttered to himself. The swelling did actually look much better, though the bruising would only get worse from here and the gash through his eyebrow would definitely leave a scar. For the moment he could do nothing about either of the latter two, however, and he’d just have to let them be. K would react however he would react, and N would say what he needed to say. But what that was N still didn’t fully know yet. He continued to preempt their arguments in his head, though each successive argument veered further and further away from the root of it all. By the time he had bought an umbrella and exited into the rainy dusk, he was contemplating how K was really like a demon more than an angel, or like an angel of death.
The rain was now falling in white sheets and despite the fact that he had an umbrella, his feet and hair were soaked; fortunately his sandals were made of rubber and he’d exchanged his jeans for basketball shorts. Still, as he climbed an entrance ramp to the B.Q.E. and walked along the shoulder of the highway—a shortcut he’d found to save about twenty minutes on his walk home—the rain began to come down sideways and his umbrella proved nearly useless.
A highway sign read out in orange letters: “Don’t drink and drive. It’s not worth it!!” The final exclamation mark blinked on and off and N imagined someone behind the sign typing and deleting and re-typing the character over and over again. He sat on the concrete edge of the highway and watched it blink for a few minutes, feeling as if all the uncertainty in the world, all of the fickleness of emotion and desire, was all contained in this one exclamation point. N thought about how if the sign would just stop blinking, even for a few seconds, everyone would be able to make sense of it without any need for interpretation, and K wouldn’t have to do any legwork anymore because everything would just be so clear all the time. Angels shouldn’t have to work, they shouldn’t even need to lift a finger. Only N would work, and N would give everything to K. The rain came down even harder and N sat there wanting nothing more than to relieve K of everything painful, of anything that required legwork; he would slash himself and lie bleeding at K’s feet if it meant that K would get what he wanted.
But the rainwater reopened the cut in his eyebrow and N began to cry again. He was bleeding, yes, though he bled for nobody. Sammy had been the one to make him bleed—not K, not himself—and that was almost the most despicable part. Suddenly he was disgusted for being as fragile as he was, for having let Sammy break his skin, and he hated K most of all for making him weak like this. And to think that N had fled his own apartment because he was afraid of K—he hopped down and started back home, trudging through several oily puddles of rainwater just in order to get off the highway.
N tracked rainwater up to the fourth floor of his building and stood at his front door. He listened for a moment for any signs of movement, and finding only silence turned the key and slowly opened the door. K must be out drinking, N thought, though when he walked through the entranceway he saw K sitting at the dining room table with a can of beer. K set the drink down on the wooden table without a coaster.
“Can you use a coaster?” N peeled off his wet clothes and hid his face as he walked into the bathroom.
“Four days without a single text or anything and this is how you come back?” K’s voice was always deeper when he had been drinking and smoking.
“I’m just asking.” He yelled from inside the bathroom. “I have to pee, is all.”
“Okay so pee. I’m getting a coaster.”
Meanwhile N locked the door, turned on the shower, and checked his wounds while he waited for it to warm up. They were wet with rainwater but otherwise clean. Briefly he thought about covering them all with bandaids but K would want to take those off anyway. So he showered, dried himself, and came back out into the main room wearing just his towel.
A desk lamp illuminated a small corner of the room and the rest remained in the blue evening darkness. K sat at the border between the two at the table, though now with a coaster underneath his beer. He stood up when he saw N’s face. “Holy shit what happened to you?” He was about a head taller than N and had gray eyes, a buzzcut, and widely-spaced teeth like a Jack-o’-lantern’s. N could also tell from the red circles around his eyes that he’d been high, crying, or both.
N swallowed his tears. “Nothing. I got punched today on the beach.”
K had come close and was now caressing his wounds. “By whom? And holy crap this is bad, dude.”
N winced. “I know. Just—” he took K’s hands in his, “just stop touching it.” He let go of K’s hands, walked past him to his dresser and put on a pair of boxers.
K followed behind him, and when N stood back up fully K went again to his face. “Let me get something to put on that. Just stay right here.” Then he went into the bathroom and came back a minute later with a bottle of calamine lotion and cotton balls.
“That stuff is for mosquito bites.”
“You can also put it on cuts. Just let me do this.”
“Okay.”
“Who the fuck punched you?” K asked, daubing N’s face with the pink liquid. “Muhammad Ali?"
“Some jerk who thought I looked at him funny.”
“And did you hit him back?”
“Nah. But I lat dropped him.”
“Nice.” K bared his gapped teeth. “Did you look at him funny?”
“Maybe a little bit.” The lotion was cool and fragrant, and he shuddered when K’s fingertips and nails intermittently brushed up against his skin. “Everyone was so beautiful and naked and I—“ K blotted the side of N’s neck with a cotton ball and N’s eyes closed lightly. “I wished you were there so you could see all of it with me.”
“Mmm.”
“Or so I could watch you swim.”
“Yeah.” K assented again quietly. “That sounds nice.” K continued for another minute while they both remained quiet and then pulled away. He closed the bottle of lotion and rolled all of the cotton balls together. “Why didn’t you ask me then?” K sat back in his chair.
“Ask you what?” N replied.
“To come to the beach today.”
“I don’t know.” N’s cheeks burned. Why did he have to ask the obvious? Suddenly he felt that if K were to touch him again he’d knock his teeth out. Those stupid fucking Jack-o’-lantern teeth, he thought. He could so do it too.
K stood up and moved into the kitchenette. “Anyway. Did you even eat anything today? I have some leftover Thai from the good place around the corner.”
“I’m not really hungry.”
“You’re lying. Let me just heat it up for you.” K said as he put the Tupperware into the microwave. The hum of the microwave filled the space between them. “Want a beer?” K asked.
N said nothing and sat down at his desk. He stared out the window at cars hissing through the rain. “Yeah.”
K put the beer down onto a coaster on the table next to which he placed the Thai food. “It’s done.”
Once again a fire raged inside N’s face. “Alright. Stop treating me like a kid.”
“Really?” K said.
N immediately regretted his words. He turned around to face K, who now stood behind the countertop with his hands on his hips.
K continued. “Really. You go M.I.A. for a whole week and now you say I’m treating you like a kid? You know how many times I almost filed a missing persons report on you?”
“No.” N stood up from the desk, suddenly wanting to curl up at K’s feet.
“Well—really only once. But still.”
“Okay, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to say that.”
“So what did you mean to say?” K walked to the freezer just to open and then close it. Then he moved over to the sink and looked down into the drain. His arms were gripping either side of the sink and N watched his shoulder blades separate and widen underneath his gray T-shirt. It was the very same charge as before: here was K again, doing all the legwork. And yet while watching K’s broad shoulders and back, N only saw the beauty in it; he marveled at K’s ability to always say exactly what was on his mind and nothing else. Somehow he was much more spiritually crystalline than he, much clearer and direct in a way that N could not be. His holiness wasn’t just in the way he looked–and here again N watched K’s shoulder blades flex like wings—but in all the ways he moved and made up his mind and just told the facts. In precisely all of the ways that N could not. He wanted to cry for so much as questioning K’s perfect sense of reason.
“I don’t know what I meant to say. I’m sorry, K. Can we just drop this?”
“Clearly, I can’t do anything unless you tell me why you left the other day.” K straightened his back and looked N in the face. “What—was it because of the argument we had the day before?”
“Yes.” In the half-light N gazed upon K’s face as one would a Greek statue.
“Yes what, N?”
“It was because of that argument, yes.”
K turned back to the fridge, opened another beer, and set it back down on the countertop. His eyes grew redder and glassier. “So then here we are again.”
“Right.” N wished he had never left the beach. K was right; he would’ve laid there all day in the rain and slept there another week just to avoid this. “Why do we have to always talk like this so seriously?”—N put ‘talk’ in air quotes—“can’t we just go back to how we were before?”
“And how exactly were we before?”
“Peaceful.” N said softly, his breath full of air. He was now sitting at the table. “We never fought like this.”
“You’re right. We never used to fight. But that’s because we never disagreed on anything.” K drank his beer. “We never disagreed on anything.”
“Exactly!” N lifted his face. “We used to be like two angels sharing one mind.”
K waited a minute to respond. “You mean I used to be the angel who read your mind.”
N blushed. “You still do.”
“For fuck's sake, man.” K turned away from N.
“What?” The color drained from N’s face as he stood up. “It’s a compliment—you’re the best thing to have ever happened to me! You are perfect.” He walked over to K and hugged him from behind.
“Not now,” K separated himself. “Don’t you see the problem here?”
“Yes I do see it—and I’m trying to get back to where we were, K. I don’t get what your issue is.”
K walked over to N’s desk in the dark half of the room and sat down. He finished the rest of his beer and set it down on the ground on the carpet. “You know I was going to move out the other day? I found a room in Chinatown that’ll fit me.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about moving out. The only reason I’m here right now is because you went missing the other day. I was just waiting for you to get back.”
“But I thought you were saving up?”
“It’s just a room with a few other guys—the rent is really cheap.”
The words echoed in N’s ears. A few other guys. He would rather annihilate himself than have K live with another man. “Why the fuck would you leave so suddenly?”
“Do you hear how ridiculous you sound right now?” K put his elbows up on the desk and sighed.
N’s ears burned. “Why do you want to move out is what I’m asking.”
“You are clueless, N. You know that?”
“I don’t get why you have to be so cruel all the time.”
K turned around in his seat. “Am I cruel or am I an angel, man, which is it? I can’t keep up with you.”
N froze in place.
“Because you know what? I’m neither. You call me all these names, N, and you think that they’ll help you figure me out,” K’s eyes were smoldering in the semi-dark, “or figure yourself out.”
“Well what am I supposed to do?” Suddenly N’s face began to throb again. “How am I supposed to say anything about anything?”
“I can’t answer that for you, man. But I’m not an angel, and I’m not god—”
“I never fucking said you were god!” N blurted. The more K talked the more N’s head felt like it was filling with lava.
“Well you know what? Sometimes you fucking act like I am, dude.”
“I do not act like you are god.”
“And you know what? I’ll tell you why you left the other day.”
“Shut up before I throw you over my shoulder.” N muttered.
“Just try me and see what happens to the other side of your face.” K said. “You left because angels aren’t supposed to need anything from anyone. And you couldn’t handle it when I did.”
N’s eyes steadied and he finished his drink. “This is so easy for you isn’t it? Telling it just how it is, huh.”
“Who said this was easy?” K cried.
N stood up. “And what, this is supposed to be easy for me?” N paced in a small circle around his chair. “It’s not my fault that I see you like I do. After all it’s not like you had a say in the matter.”
K wiped his eyes. “What are you talking about?”
“It was so easy to believe you at first, too; pretending that your shoulders were wide enough to carry everybody.”
“I never pretended anything.”
“And now you got high every night this week because you can’t even carry yourself.”
“Fuck you, man.” K stood up as well. “I got high every night this week because I was worried sick about you!”
“Well here I am.” N turned his back. “So you can finally leave for your new apartment.” The words tasted like bile.
“Fine. Maybe I will. Don’t fucking get punched again.” K stuffed a handful of clothes and books into a backpack while N stayed silent over his food. Then K grabbed an already-packed duffel bag and walked out, letting the door slam behind him.
The instant the door slammed N called out “wait!” but apparently K didn’t hear him as the door remained still. N sat back down at the table, twirled a fork around in his noodles, and stood up again. He opened the door to find only the empty hallway. He closed the door. Then he turned back to his room, still only half-lit, and felt in his bones the overwhelming stillness of his walls and furniture. As he walked towards his bed he ran his fingers across the stone of the countertop and then the grain of the dining room table: all of it was quiet and perfect unto itself, all of it pulseless. N wanted to set fire to his table just so that it would say something, but instead he just turned the lamp off and indulged in the darkness.
Suddenly on the countertop his phone brightly lit up and N jumped to check it. When he saw that it was a notification from Facebook he cursed and shut the phone off, and now his room now seemed even darker than it was a moment before. Meanwhile the rain had stopped falling and though some quiet sounds of the city filtered in through a small crack in the window, the room was well-insulated and nearly silent. N took off his boxers, lay back on his mattress, and closed his eyes.
Hot tears began to roll down his temples, and when he went to wipe them away his hand lingered on the dried layer of calamine lotion. His skin was cold, but if he was delicate enough, when he ran his fingertips across his cheekbone and eyebrow he could still feel the traces of K there like feathers. He knew that he would see K again; it was just a matter of time.
With that thought N’s skin went hot and his pain turned to ecstasy: K’s tight arms were suddenly around him, his broad back shifting, his gray eyes fixed. Then everything went cold again and then once more burning hot, and then N’s body went motionless with sleep, yet he dreamt.