I didn’t see Billy anywhere. I thought I recognized a few others, Wednesday regulars like us, off-night off-beat characters. None of the faces stuck. I weighed it again—I would go outside. I wanted to sleep tonight, I had that lunch tomorrow before my shift, another trip to the bathroom wouldn’t make those things easier.

  I stepped outside on the patio. It was cold but it did not bother me; my body accepted it without comment. I looked up briefly at the near-black sky and its fine dance of lights. I looked around and saw the groups of people; I picked three women sitting together, all leaning back on the benches and looking distant, rarely noticing each other except to lift an arm and pass a joint around. They looked like that Renaissance painting, women seated in various postures of repose. I sat with them and they all lifted their eyes to me, curious. None of them were young; they didn’t have that blinking enthusiasm. They weren’t trying to record everything. I turned and faced them. The bouncer was turned away, so I pulled out the baggie and put it on the bench next to my leg, pointing at the white square.

  “Trade? If I can sit with that for a minute.” And I nodded at the joint.

  The woman closest to me had amber hair chopped at her chin and a faraway calm in her reddened eyes. The eyes themselves were lined all around in blue. She looked down at the square and smiled at it, then at me. Her friends leaned forward and looked down at the bench beside my leg.

  “You can finish it,” the nearest woman said, handing me the second half of a thick joint.

  I leaned back into the bench. It was cold, but my body accepted it again. The woman plucked the square and put it into her pocket. Now the women were curious and amused by me; they all watched as I pulled on the joint, using my exhaustively trained mouth to blow an identical line of fading rings. They drifted sharp in the night air. Showing off in an innocent way, like a child—they accepted it simply as well.

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  I inhaled thoughtfully, I was high. I could have answered a million ways. I thought of my sister suddenly, her other names—Stasia, Stasi, even Stas. She had even tried Ana for a short while—her strong sense of self, her will to define and control it. It was tempting to be elaborate but at the last moment, I faltered; as always I was a child sitting in the sand, playing with sticks. I exhaled.

  “I’m Peter, I guess,” I said. “Anyway, that’s what they named me when I was born.” I rested the joint on my leg, red tip fading. “I never bothered to come up with anything else.”

  She was amused in her vague, big-eyed way. I started to notice things about her. I saw her long face as a carved wooden mask, drawn, detached from the inside, but with eyes showing everything. I started to feel sure of things—I felt she knew everything about me. I had split open, exposed like the jagged interiors of crushed fruit. This is how it felt sometimes, one inch deep on a second joint. I could be known just by someone looking at me; it was a relief, this idea I could be known, without the work. I could be seen, without asking. And another thing—that her knowing was not as witness to my life and its billions of tiny points, but instead because we were the same. And we both saw it. Knowing as a twin, as siblings, as children, the same flesh of one big soul, the same.

  “So hi, Peter,” she said.

  “So who are you?” I asked.

  Apparently she had not expected the question returned to her because her head tilted in genuine consideration. She paused on it, reflecting.

  “I’m Zari, but that’s not how they named me when I was born.”

  “Hi, Zari,” I said.

  The exchange made, she sat back and followed her own thoughts. I looked down and the joint was fading out.

  “So we’re the same then?” I asked, and after her eyes returned to me, I motioned for the lighter on the small table before her.

  “What?” She handed the lighter over.

  I wet my finger in my mouth and dampened the tip of the joint, running along the burned edge, then sparked it. It took the flame, reluctantly. “I mean, we’re the same people then.” I gave her the lighter back.

  “How?” Her tone was rising, curious, and her friends were looking at us.

  “I mean, we’re the same people. Only we had different parents, different timing, different experiences growing up.”

  She winced slightly, and I could see in her tightened mouth that she was trying to determine if this made sense and she was too stoned to understand, or if I was stoned and not making sense. The truth is I had never thought it through very far or talked it out with myself. I had a feeling about it sometimes and normally I would think it out on my own—something real or a tunnel to nowhere?—but now, on this smoking patio behind the club, in the bitter black cold, I had just started talking. But her face told me it was a mistake.

  “Well,” she started slowly, again checking herself to see if she had missed it somehow. “Yeah. But parents, experiences, that’s what makes you. That’s who you are. That’s genetics and, you know, childhood, so—” She stopped talking.

  “Exactly,” I said.

  This quick agreement blanked her because she thought she was disagreeing. I finished the joint. She was staring at me. I was trying to hold on to the part of my mind that could verbalize properly, but I was rapidly approaching the cliff.

  “So—” she started, unsure.

  “So—we’re the same people. We are the same except for parents, experiences.”

  She was suspicious of me now, and I knew it was a mistake, made no sense, I should not have wandered around with my lazy words and tilted mind. I don’t even know why I pushed it again. I should break and run.

  “Yeah,” her friend said, the one sitting next to her. “He’s right.”

  The two women looked at each other. I know the first woman was bothered that a stranger would offer anything in common, let alone that we were the same—it was too personal, too intrusive, it was not possible. Somehow I sensed that going in; I didn’t know if I was picking an awkward fight, or why. The second woman, I couldn’t read. But she was confident and simple with a wide-open face, long straight hair.

  My hands were suddenly seizing, and I realized they were painful with cold.

  “We’re the same,” the second woman said, standing up and stretching her back and arms. She showed no notice of the cold. “All of us. Same thing, just variations.” The third woman, who hadn’t spoken yet, also stood, and then the first one as well. They were leaving. “Pretty simple, actually,” the second woman said as they filed around the small table. “Bye, Peter.”

  “Bye,” I said, not looking at the first woman’s face. I had walked into it stupidly, stoned, and did not want to see her eyes or mouth twisted in annoyance. Maybe they weren’t, I didn’t know. I waited until they went inside, dropping the end of the joint and grinding it into the ground, then standing up and going inside to be absorbed into the heat and noise of the club—the last ten minutes obliterated by the shock of this second world.

  I looked around and didn’t see Billy or Alex; it was late, I could just leave. The crowd was swaying, lights were arcing in a gentle half-spin across the ceiling and walls. I had an ending feeling in me. Everybody looked blurry, happy, and far away. I couldn’t quite place the music or how it sounded, only how my body caved inward as the sound came outward, the exchange of it. I wanted to talk to Billy maybe, I should have asked him first—were people the same? I felt he could go either way. But I felt they were. I felt that believing people were the same was important to me, like a small red stone I wore around my neck.

  I remembered a story Billy told about some photog-raphy he had done after leaving his career. He had bought an expensive camera, took photos of the streets, thoughtful portraits of strangers, but then he put up a website and had a few requests—would he shoot people’s events for money? Sure, he tried a couple, they went okay. But the last one was some house party; a rich teen had several classes worth of kids over and wanted professional images of their epic night, a crowning jewel for extensive online personas, permanent records of greatness. Billy’s words. So he showed up and walked around and saw a bunch of kids getting drunk, and whenever he entered a room with the camera they all exploded in postures of adulthood, the boys loud and goading, the girls jutting their chins up, everyone thinking the camera was focused on them. Billy got depressed—a middle-aged man with a gut, and having just left the corporate world for somewhat related reasons. He brought the camera up to his eye and pretended to shoot, and after about barely an hour and a half, all the kids were too wasted to notice he had located a large bottle of expensive cognac from the father’s wood-panelled study and just fucked off home. Kids were allowed to be dumb, he reasoned, but he didn’t have to participate. He had taken no photos. Later, when the girl contacted him for her photos, Billy gathered up 250 images he had found online and sent them to her—250 pictures of squirrels. Jumping, hiding nuts, sitting on tree branches, clinging to tree trunks, staring at the camera with their blank black eyes, grey and brown and red ones. Fucking. Squirrels. She flipped out, threatened him, threatened to get her dad to do something legal to him. Billy reasoned the father would be uninterested at best—that type of parent seemed like the kind to produce this type of girl. And he was right. No rich dad ever came crashing into his life with lawsuits or anything else. Billy was done with paid gigs, though.

  Would he think people were the same? Those kids, and whoever was sitting in the yellow chair in an empty field? I thought Billy would say no. But I could also see that he would say yes. The hippie in him. He would have noticed the shy kids who winced and turned away when he walked in with the camera. In the other kids, he must have seen vanity as the hard, thin shell that it was—protecting something vulnerable and unformed. And I knew how invigorated he was by strangers, new people, endless sources of new recognition and understanding—there had to be something beyond who your parents were, and the enormous but tiny personal cosmos of things that had happened to you. Maybe none of that mattered—the only things we knew about ourselves, they didn’t even matter.

  I didn’t see Billy around. Or anybody else I knew. My body was tired and confused, both up and down, my mind mostly down.

  I went for my coat and called a ride, standing near the front of the club, remembering so many rides home in a silent car through empty streets, lulled into another ending with smooth rights and lefts, street lamps and headlights blurred into lines. And then I would be home, familiar and alone, and into bed, alone and familiar. It was an important ritual for me, after this one. The ride home and the bed.

  I got my coat back and, as the throbbing music receded behind me, stepped out into the night.

  EARLY NOVEMBER

  I attended the meetings and looked around at circles of turtles. Sara and I had done our one-on-one chat, that quick necessary thing between a winner and a loser, acknowledging what had happened and confirming our willingness to ignore it in our future interactions. She must have known—with any shadow of intelligence she may have possessed in that expensively educated mind—that I had been screwed.

  We made women’s and men’s apparel, mostly women’s. Our men’s collection was half-heartedly launched and frankly uninspired, more of an add-on for our female customers who, while shopping for themselves, charitably thought to pick up something for their partners too. Lazy in concept and execution, our men’s line was never really our focus, and the sales showed it. We were started twenty years ago by a petite wisp of a woman, an artist who printed her own fabrics and started selling shift dresses. She had a keen eye for pattern and the instinct of a seamstress for flattering cuts. I was just out of school and joined her for sales and marketing when it was barely a full-time role. Everything blew up three years later when we landed our first national retailer. We hired sewers and kept production local, and that angle was a hit at the exact moment the market was asking for it. The artist had a musician friend; we made her a dress for her album cover and it was a breakout record—another bump for us. When an imitator showed up with similar patterns, we knew our narrative was pushing the market now.

  But we blew up again when I pushed for patterned handbags and that, right there, was my ownership on the VP role. The artist had sold the company, we had new owners, and Sara was a well-bred corporate player who had just jumped from one big company to another; she never worked from the artist’s basement, she didn’t drive out samples. Her face was too smooth for her age, and I sensed manipulation in her, a cool blood, an eerie absence of any human anima. A showpiece, fine. Private school, MBA, with a WASPy last name. They bought her like a horse.

  I ate lunch in my car, sometimes vegetarian food and sometimes a burger or shawarma; I knew eating meat was not the worst thing I did, and it was an occasional, greasy pleasure. Primal—accessing a private satisfaction I knew nowhere else. I started gaining weight but I lengthened my runs, waking up earlier, changing my alarm but not telling Christopher—I gained a bit of muscle. I still looked good but resented my body in the mirror, betrayed by how truthful it was about itself, showing everything. The physical life does not lie; bodies were the last honest things. You only had to learn how to read them.

  Sarah had a mean teacher at school and that was taking up some time. She was anxious in the evenings, thinking of school in the morning. Sleep was getting hard. Sunday night was a wreck. I knew all this already—the brittle and tenuous connection to life, easily broken and betrayed, her fineness and open eyes and ears and skin and heart processing the world. Me, Peter, Mom, Grandpa. We all lined up for our whipping by the shouting beauty and tender traumas of life. All of us so sensitive, and now this beautiful girl, with soft brown hair that was shot with gold in the sun. Another one of us starting to stumble. I could find that teacher and crush him with my car, in deep and sudden spurts, back and forth, as I imagined vividly many nights—or I could let him tell the truth to my daughter: the world was cruel.

  And I carried that knowledge for her, waiting. The world was cruel. I had to watch my daughter find it herself, and the weight of that guilt or helplessness or complete and airless inevitability was a whole new body, one with its own energy, its own movement in my life. All of us so sensitive, almost dying of it. All of us moving through this sleepwalker life, fully awake.

  Christopher was out in the yard. He was wearing a cotton shirt, but it was cold outside. He was never cold, his slim figure ran on a hot current of energy. It was bright outside, the sun low in the sky, and sometimes I thought he took in some of that light through his fair skin.

  “The lasagna tonight? It’s easy,” I said.

  He turned around. “Yeah that sounds great.”

  “I’ll put it in.”

  I went back in the house and got the box from the freezer, opened it, removed the plastic film, checked the box for the temperature, then slid the lasagna into the oven before it had started to preheat. One of those vegetarian ones with zucchini in it, weeknight cuisine in a domestic, child-rearing environment. Sarah was in the living room in front of the TV. I went to my purse and rummaged to the back, through the lining; I pulled out the phone, walked to the bathroom, locked the door, and turned on the phone, waiting for it to start up. I waited another two minutes, breathing. Nothing came in. I turned it off again.

  I came out and slipped the phone back into my bag. That was my last chance to check tonight and there was nothing. The night ahead took on a different colour, but I was used to it, I would adjust—this was, after all, everyone else’s life. No messages from the outside world.

  I went back to the yard where Christopher was finishing his gardening, pruning and bundling up some of the bushes, his bare hands going pink, his breath lifting into the air, silver when it hit the sun. It was very pretty out. There was a quality to the air and light; my thoughts drifted back to Mateo, lazily, dreamily, seeking a small spark of arousal. But I closed it quickly. You had to close them quickly or they eroded everything else. You had to find a way to survive all the rest of life; there was so much of it.

  The lasagna was not very good—we finished it quickly. Outside the windows, it was already dark; night was coming faster and faster now.

  We put on an educational show about marine life, and I slipped outside to have a cigarette. Instead of remembering a coat, I had grabbed a throw blanket from the sofa and, struggling briefly, threw it across the back of my shoulders. I smoked like that, with the thick blanket across me, a ridiculous mane. The door opened and closed, and Christopher came out—I bristled, caught.

  “Well,” he said. “Found you.”

  I didn’t say anything at first. He had put on a coat to come out.

  “Sarah probably knows too,” I said.

  He didn’t say anything to that. His hands were hidden in his coat pockets. “How is therapy going? We don’t talk about that much.”

  “That’s true,” I said. “We don’t. It’s going okay, I think.” He could have said something about the throw blanket across my shoulders but he was choosing the serious moment. “I was so angry at first and I wanted to control it, so it didn’t get worse. I wanted to talk it out.”

  “You gave a lot of years to that company. A lot of weekends.”

  “Yeah, Sarah’s youngest years too. We were really taking off—we were landing national retailers, had to triple production. I built that company. The founder had zero business skills, she was an artist, she sold quickly.”

  “I remember.”

  I took another pull and exhaled. “But now it’s mostly about family. Mom, Dad, Peter. I guess therapy usually goes that way. Can’t seem to quit the cigarettes, though.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

 

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