He appeared one day at the end of my street as I was carrying Japanese takeout back to my apartment. Tall, thin and light in ways that made everything else dark, we made awkward eye contact while waiting for the walk signal. He looked down at my takeout bag and told me that he had grown up by the sea yet never had sushi.
I loved that he called it the sea.
He explained that his father would wake him early to go fishing on weekend mornings even though he knew he hated fishing. He would eat cold hash browns and draw in his notebook while his father swapped stories with other men about forgotten times when people still listened to the radio and there was such a thing as God. Reeling striper after striper, his father would toss the fish into an orange five-gallon bucket where the fish would thrash until they didn’t anymore. He said he once asked his father if he thought fish contemplated God in their final moments. His father responded by slapping him across the face. He then told me his name was Alejandro. We missed the walk signal.
A week later, on our first real date, Alejandro talked little and ate even less, which made me want to know more. We covered the banal: he worked as a graphic designer for a small boutique firm, was newly single, loathed the color green. I told him I was a nurse, dated rarely, loved just about every color in the world. It wasn’t until the food came that we shifted. Unexpectedly, he picked up sashimi and mouthed what seemed like a silent prayer before placing it on my tongue. After making the sign of the cross over my head, Alejandro watched me eat while I watched him watch me. Just like that, the world was ours.
Like we could afford it, we went apartment hunting by buzzing different buildings until someone would finally let us in. Waiting in tiny hallways, we would judge whether to live there based on the people who came and went. We liked stout women who weren’t afraid to wear fur and disliked their investor husbands who never said hello. We tolerated the trail of children that usually came somewhere in between. Without either of us recognizing it, however, Alejandro had moved into my place. Still, we pretended like we were looking for our future one building at a time.
I don’t know why I never told my parents about Alejandro. Despite his quirks—leaving all the cabinet drawers open, spending too much time contemplating how to make calligraphy a thing again—he was pretty easy to live with. His worst habit, other than smoking, was indulging in conversations that should only happen at three in the morning on foggy college nights. My father always said that a measure of a man was whether or not he could carry a conversation. I knew that he and Alejandro could debate nonsense subjects for hours like if Adam Smith was worse than Hitler or whether John Lennon was more influential than Jesus. Yet, when my parents would ask about my love life, I would tell them that I was playing hard to get, which is what my mother always said was the real way to a man’s heart as she would read me Grimms’ Fairy Tales before bed. Alejandro never talked much about his mother.
During our fictional apartment quest, we came across Marguerite. She lived on a quiet street in a part of town that was trying to be something it wasn’t. Among the bodegas and cafés and stores selling artisan soaps, there were cash for gold shops and off-track betting booths. It was one of the things that I loved most about this city: the feeling that no matter how hard it tried, deep down it could never really change.
Alejandro was wearing his father’s old fedora when he pressed the button labeled Marguerite S. Through the intercom, a woman asked who was there, her voice heavy with life. He inquired if she needed her carpets to be shampooed. She responded she only ever used conditioner but buzzed us in anyway. We walked up two flights of stairs that smelled like boiled potatoes. When we got to the door, Alejandro took off his hat, slicked back his hair, and lit a cigarette. I was so in love with the moment that it scared me: the way that his cheeks thinned as he inhaled, how perfect his nose was, the look in his eye that he could do anything, wanted to do everything, with me. My hands began to shake. My eyes watered. The woman started to yell at Alejandro, but all I heard was black.
I woke up to the sound of Marguerite pressing lemons in the kitchen, a stiff couch underneath me. Alejandro was nowhere to be found.
When I asked what happened, Marguerite responded that I should never trust a stranger to tell me what I needed to know. She gave me some lemonade with paper thin hands that shook as she held the glass. She had dyed black hair, olive skin and looked like she could have been anywhere between forty-four and four hundred. The apartment was lined with stacks of yellowing newspapers, but she didn’t seem like a hoarder, just the type of person who simply liked to know things for the sake of knowing them. She told me that that was why she let us in, because she had to know what type of people went around buzzing the apartments of strangers with phony offers, even if, deep down, she already knew.
Marguerite relayed that when I collapsed, Alejandro told her he was going to find help for me. She said that he could just call, that she had a rotary phone on the wall in the kitchen. He responded that the past can never save the present and walked down the stairs without looking back. I had a fleeting feeling that I would never see him again. Although, I knew there were some people that you could never really shake yourself free from, even if you should.
Marguerite must have sensed this because she went to her liquor cabinet and poured us each a small glass of Strega. She said chin chin and downed hers without waiting. She poured one more, downed it again, and told me she’d be dead drunk if I didn’t do something about it.
The liquor tasted like the bottom of a grandmother’s pocket and made me dizzy instantly. Alejandro rarely drank, but when he did, his face would flush, and he would turn sullen as the alcohol transformed him. He would ask esoteric questions about time being a place that shaped us in ways we could never realize and then would want us to sleep naked together without touching to learn that life was just a series of endless temptation.
When she asked how I was feeling, I thought she meant about Alejandro leaving me. Before I could answer, she stood up and put her cold hands on my forehead. She smelled of salt and rosemary, and told me that when I thrashed on the ground, it scared her for the first time in a long time.
I told her that I hadn’t had a seizure since I was in middle school. Amanda Martindale had kissed me on a dare at a birthday party, and I didn’t hate it as much as I thought I would. The next thing I knew her mom was helping a paramedic get me into an ambulance, and my tongue was sliced in two. My parents thought I was epileptic, but doctors diagnosed it as a psychogenic nonepileptic seizure brought on by but a sudden increase of emotion. My mother spent weeks getting fourth and fifth opinions to make sure that this was actually a thing. I was hooked up to electrodes and endured so much magnetic resonance imaging that I thought I’d become a superhero. When I didn’t have another seizure for years, they thought I was past them. Even if they didn’t see it, deep down I knew that there was a part of myself always lurking, like parental guilt, or herpes. Telling this to Marguerite, it was the only time I ever made her laugh.
When I was finally feeling better, Marguerite told me that it was almost sunset and that vampires would soon be out. She made me promise to come back if I could and to be careful for what I can’t see. On my way out, she grabbed my arm and kissed my hand. She told me not to worry about Alejandro, even though she knew I would anyway.
Alejandro wasn’t at the apartment when I got back, but I could tell that he had been. I didn’t want to admit that he was the type of person that would just leave his lover in a stranger’s house, even if I knew deep down that was exactly the kind of person he would always be. I lay on our tattered futon that was still warm with what felt like his sleep. Instead of dancing with the thoughts that Alejandro had abandoned me, I looked up a recipe for pierogis. I had visions of surprising him wearing nothing but an apron and fell asleep trying to masturbate. When I woke up, I wanted to send a picture to him of me sticking my tongue out because he once told me that he liked the way my morning breath smelled, but the only phone he had was an old flip phone that chimed the Jeopardy theme song when it rang and couldn’t receive photos. Instead, I decided to clean the apartment.
I lived in a squat one-bedroom in a brick walkup that my parents had co-signed for me only because they didn’t know that a boy like Alejandro was ever going to be living there too. When he found out they were on the hook, he wanted to put up some digital currency as collateral, as a show of good faith. I told him that my parents didn’t believe in anything more than cold, hard cash. He appreciated how retro they were.
In the kitchen, I found a half-eaten breakfast burrito congealing to a plate. I wondered how I could have missed him coming home, and I pushed aside the hurt of him not waking me. I half-expected his possessions to be gone. He only had one pair of Doc Martens that he wore to every occasion no matter what. It always surprised me how much shorter he was when he didn’t have them on. A few of his sketchbooks were missing and his computer, but his box of vinyl records was still in the corner of the bedroom even though we didn’t own a record player. He told me they were the only thing that he wanted from his father when he died.
I opened the closet to make sure his flannel shirts and tattered black jeans were still hanging there. His clothes from last night were balled at the bottom of the hamper. I took them out and smelled their smoke before grabbing a fistful of his and my clothes to bring down to the basement so I could watch them toss around together in the dryer.
Before I knew it, the sun was setting again. I checked my phone for nonexistent missed calls. When I dialed, his phone didn’t ring, but I kept dialing to hear the way that Alejandro said his name when his voicemail came up, like the beginning of a Ramones song without the music. We would go to karaoke on Monday nights and sign each other up for songs that we didn’t think the other person would know the words to. One time, when I was in the middle of singing “God Save the Queen” by The Sex Pistols, I caught him looking at me, the way that he did, all eyes and want, and I lost my breath and stopped singing. He pretended to boo me off the stage. We made love in the bathroom against a graffitied stall, and then I signed him up for “Round Here” by Counting Crows, and he sang better than I’d ever heard before.
When Alejandro didn’t come back a second night, I felt the tide pulling at the floorboards, waiting to wash them away in its teeth.
I was supposed to pick up a shift at the hospital. Even if the thought of sitting alone in an empty apartment depressed, the thought of changing bloodied dressings and swapping out IVs depressed more. Not knowing what else to do, I felt the pull of Marguerite; she was the only other person I knew who also knew Alejandro existed.
In the months that Alejandro and I dated, the concept of other friends never really came up. I didn’t have many outside of work. I rarely went to bars, wasn’t into yoga. I liked that the city provided me a chance to be anonymous. Nowhere else on earth could you do nothing yet still feel like you were doing everything. My parents didn’t understand how a place could cost so much yet leave you with so little. I tried to explain that it was precisely the little that mattered most. The wide-eyed doormen I’d pass while jogging before sunrise who never covered their yawns. The homeless woman speaking French while bartering hugs for change.
I convinced myself it was enough.
Until it wasn’t.
I hadn’t pressed Marguerite’s button when the buzzer went off to the opaque glass door to her building. The smell of potatoes was replaced by pickled cabbage as I climbed the stairs. The door to her apartment was cracked open, and when I entered she was sipping tea and reading last week’s news.
I said hello trying to force a smile but couldn’t. Marguerite responded in some dizzying language that I didn’t understand and smiled for me. Not knowing what to say, I asked if she had seen Alejandro. Answering in English, she told me that she hadn’t had her eyes checked in years then served me poached eggs with caviar. We talked about things you normally wouldn’t talk about with a stranger: the time in third grade Jennifer Murphy poured glue in my milk because she found out my father was sleeping with her mother, the time that Marguerite toured with a cabaret company because you could charge for sex without people calling you a whore. She said she had been in the city for as long as she could remember. She lived by herself, mostly. The only time she came close to marrying was shortly after she had arrived as a teenager and met a married man that paid for her first apartment whom she only wanted to wed because she knew he wouldn’t.
I stayed until lunchtime as she read her old news. I kept calling Alejandro. Each time that I did, she would pause, look over the top of her newspaper and silently swallow before returning back to her article. When she fell asleep in her chair, I felt like I should wait until she awoke. I put a blanket over her while white spittle formed in the corners of her mouth. I tidied up the kitchen and tried hard not to look through her cabinets, but when I went to the bathroom, I cracked open the medicine cabinet and found her pills. I’d known before I worked in a hospital which were the fun ones and which were the not-so-fun ones. I took a bottle of both and scribbled a note for Marguerite that if she missed me, to call. I left my number on the pad she kept on the desk underneath her rotary phone.
On my way back home, I thought I saw Alejandro eating tapas at a Spanish bar that had its windows opened, but it was a man much older eating patatas bravas in quiet solitude. He had paprika aioli clinging to his mustache. I went to the florist next door and paid the clerk extra to deliver a bouquet of larkspur and baby’s breath before the man left the bar. I didn’t wait to see his reaction but marched home popping a few of the fun pills to keep my tears from falling.
Walking into the apartment, I could tell that he’d been there again. He hadn’t left a note or straightened anything up, but his presence hung like a ghost’s. The lampshade was bent in a different direction, a ceramic bowl left drying in the sink. I thought back to the conversation we had a few nights before, about how he said that the city was starting to feel too safe. I told him that was usually good. He paused before telling me about the time that his father dragged him cross country. They stopped at different lakes, rivers and estuaries so his father could fish. At night, Alejandro would cook rice and beans on motel stovetops while listening to his father talk about the reckoning that was coming for mankind. Alejandro told me he would lie awake and listen to his father pray for hours in the dark before putting on a record of some ancient folk singer he’d hum along to before eventually snoring. Alejandro said that his father’s faith in the end of the world was more powerful than anything Alejandro would ever feel; it was the scariest moment of his life.
I didn’t know how to respond so we lay silent in the slanted light from the streetlight until I heard Alejandro’s unsteady breathing. I curled up next to him with the faith that this was all I needed in the world.
After more fun pills, I paced around the apartment starting to feel buoyed by artificial lightness. I remembered I had left our clothes in the basement. Someone had taken our laundry and put it on top of the machine, which normally would have made me wash the clothes again except this time I didn’t mind because it meant that somebody else had seen a part of us still together.
I put on Alejandro’s black and turquoise flannel and carried the rest of our clothes back up to our apartment.
In the time that I was gone, the lamp was bent in the opposite direction, the bowl missing from the sink. I convinced myself he couldn’t have come and gone so quickly. I scoured the apartment looking for other clues. His toothbrush was there, his toothpaste, gone. A navy scarf no longer hung over the chair in the living room. I told myself that these had all been there before, would always be there, and buried my face into the pillow. I knew that no number of fun pills would ever make the world whole again.
Then, I remembered the not-so-fun pills in my pocket.
Swallowing them all seemed too slow, so I walked to the bathroom and lined them up on sink and crushed them with the bottom of the pill bottle. I used a credit card and made neat little lines that reminded me of ants swarming to spilled sugar. I convinced myself that if the darkness of my seizure made him leave, maybe darkness could bring him back. Even though I’ve never done so, I found a dollar and rolled it up and looked in the mirror. I was scared, but not as scared as I should have been. The dollar smelled like the subway and just as I was about to inhale, I felt my phone vibrate in my pocket. It was an old 212 number that I didn’t recognize and almost ignored it until I remembered. Marguerite.
She didn’t say hello but started telling me about the time she convinced a man to eat an onion at a party because he told her that nothing surprising ever happened at parties anymore. She said she’d sleep with him if he did, but as he choked down the last bite, his eyes burned and he couldn’t get aroused. My laughter came in that way laughing can hurt more than crying. I dropped the dollar into the toilet and wiped the pill powder into the sink and confessed to Marguerite that I stole her prescriptions. Even though she didn’t say, I knew she already knew, so I didn’t tell her that I was thinking of doing something foolish. She responded anyway that even fools need a friend sometimes. I asked her if she could stay on the phone for a while even if we didn’t say anything. She said that she hadn’t really said anything since the seventies. We sat in the silence of each other until I walked to the bedroom and saw Alejandro’s box of vinyl. I found the hunting knife he kept in his nightstand and pulled out a John Denver album. I unsheathed the knife and carved my name into the album before putting it back into its sleeve. Then I took out a James Taylor album and did the same thing before taking out another, and another, and another until I carved my name into almost all of them.
When I told her what I did, Marguerite told me she would like to hear what it sounded like to etch yourself into somebody because despite it all, she wasn’t sure she ever really had. It was the saddest thing she ever said to me.
I told her that I didn’t have a record player. She said she still had her old Victrola tucked under her bed. Then she asked me my name. It occurred to me that she’d done so much for me yet didn’t even know who I was. I told her Jacqueline as I carved a large J into Peter, Paul and Mary. She said she pegged me for Nancy but liked my version better before reminding me to watch out for werewolves on my way over.
I hung up and grabbed the box of records and headed into the night still wearing Alejandro’s shirt. When I walked onto my street, Alejandro was leaning against the building, smoking a cigarette.
Below his father’s fedora, he eyed the box in my hand with wide eyes and told me that he knew his apology would only serve as an empty vessel for the true emotional repentance that he had in his heart, but it was the best he could do. When I told him that wasn’t an apology itself, he kissed me. I thought I tasted fish on his breath. Pulling back, I told him that the scariest part about faith isn’t that it’s invisible, it’s that when you don’t have it, you really don’t have anything at all.
Before he could respond, I took out a Gordon Lightfoot album and dropped the box by his boots.
Clutching the album to my chest, I turned from him and headed toward Marguerite’s, looking forward to the moment when my name would make the music stop.