CHAPTER THIRTEEN

            Lately I’ve started walking home at the end of every day at work. It’s a long walk but it’s not so bad, especially since it’s been doing the job. She hasn’t shown up in three days, or if I am guessing right, she shows up but leaves when she sees that I haven’t come home. And there’s only been one message on the machine, albeit a rather strange one, but that’s fine, as long as she doesn’t come over. The walk home usually takes me about an hour and a half. It would normally take me only an hour but I’ve been detouring down out-of-the-way streets, stopping on the overpass to watch the traffic and the beginnings of the sunset, though that’s getting harder now, especially since daylight savings time. For instance, it was only starting to get get dark when I got home last night, and I took an extra long time getting home. This has been going on for about two weeks now, my walking home. Sometimes I will just walk straight down Western Ave. It’s the most direct walk. It’s strange because once, this past Tuesday, I walked straight down Western, quickly. I got home in forty five minutes. I should have just taken the bus. And the whole walk home I was thinking that I just wanted to get home, just get it over with. It was honest of me, that night anyway, but I still let all the busses pass me. And I wasn’t even looking around, enjoying the nice day or the scenery or the hot women I passed on the road. I was walking home as quick as I could, wanting to get home as quick as I could, yet I wasn’t using the method I knew to be quickest. It was miserable. So now usually I just walk slow, and remind myself that I don’t care.

            But the thing is that she’s stopped calling me too. I wonder sometimes what if she found my shit? But I don’t think that’s what happened. A day or two ago I checked my shit for the first time since she’d started being all distant and there were no signs of it having been discovered. In fact that’s how I initially thought of it, when I took the shit out and noticed that it was the same as it was the last time I checked it. The socks on top of it had not been moved, it was sitting the same way on top of my underwear, everything. I was kind of more paranoid than usual that day, so I was checking. But everything was okay. So I think her absence must be due to the fact that my self imposed alienation of her from me and me from her is working. I don’t think it’s anything conscious, at least it wasn’t until I started obsessing about it, but it’s almost as if as soon as I started thinking about the possibility of a relationship, it started falling apart, started seeming more and more that it was not a possibility. The same way with her coming around. I started not wanting it to happen, and it happened. But at the same I actively sought out ways to make it appear passive, to make our meetings seem like an inconvenience. I think it would ultimately be appropriate to say that it was the initiation of the thought process that made the factors that would have needed to get involved get involved, and from there it was just the next step of being just passive aggressive enough to make it seem like it was something I didn’t care about, even though I did, care, that is, though about seeing it end as positively as possible.

            I don’t do anything at my job. This is the core of it. Every single day, from the moment I get there, I am waiting for the end. At eight forty five, nine o’clock, I am waiting for the cigarette break, which will then initiate the period of waiting for the second cigarette break, then lunch, and then the slate is pretty much clean, depending what time I get back from lunch (that depending on how late I took my second cigarette break, which usually depends on what time I took my first cigarette break, which more often than not but not enough to say with one hundred percent accuracy, depends on what time I came into work in the first place). But as soon as I finish checking my e-mail and finish my twenty ounce bottle of coke (and the subsequent cup of coffee) I am waiting for my next cigarette break, then the fourth (and usually final) cigarette break, which, when over, signals the beginning of the period of my waiting for five thirty. Not even counting well timed bathroom breaks and vending machine breaks. How many five minute naps have I taken in closed bathroom stalls, my pants around my ankles so anyone who might come in to inspect, care, manage (suspect suspect), would most likely assume that I was fairly engrossed in a large bowel movement? How many times did I fit my finger snugly in between the blinds and pluck the vertical pastel blue plastic up so it bends and I can finally inspect, not a street, I would never ask for as much as a street, but a corporate parking lot off of Fuller Road in Albany? May I please? I actually saw a car’s fender get bumped by one of the guys in HR and he just drove off. He smiles at me every day. He’s the guy above Sarah, who signs my time cards every week. He’s the one that calls my temp agency when they need me for yet another week. But I know he’s a hit and run. I wonder what Mrs Davies thought when she saw her tail light that night.

              How many times have I employed strange and unusual tactics in order to stay awake and not be caught face on keyboard, napping, drooling? Biting the inside of my cheek until I feel that another, harder, bite will mean blood, slapping my cheeks, drinking obscene amounts of coffee, purposely buying sour candies in the vending machines so I’ll squint my face and be jolted awake, endless cigarette breaks, masturbating in the men’s room, shaking my leg up and down, feeling myself up under the desk, walking down halls and running down stairs, conversing in conversations I don’t want to have with people I wouldn’t remember tomorrow if I knew I wouldn’t see them, trips down the street, long walks home?

            She can’t come over anymore. I’m about to lose it if she does. It’s the same conversation over and over. It’s kind of similar to the Rachel situation but the thing that’s different is that Rachel I knew from the beginning wanted to have kids. It didn’t strike me until that final night that she pushed it on me, not to have kids, but to want to have kids, and this after six dates, not to have kids with her, and I thought to myself why am I even going out with this woman? Why did I go out with her in the first place? I don’t want to have kids, don’t want to want to have them, don’t think I would ever change my mind and someday want to have them. I knew she didn’t. Therefore the relationship would have to end someday, and there seemed to be no point in not only continuing the relationship another hour, because it was a relationship that would have to eventually end and how can that help anybody involved, but I fell into a huge depression over it and couldn’t really understand, or get over, the fact that since this knowledge (that she wanted to have kids and the logical next step, being that because of that information it was a dead relationship from day one, a relationship doomed to die, had to) was available to me, I had committed some kind of enormous mental treason against myself and needed to pull back for awhile and figure out why I had done this to myself.

            Well obviously I didn’t, we never do, our type. I met Kat soon thereafter and she hadn’t told me her opinion on the kids thing either way. I’m walking home still, knowing that this is an excuse. I’m at the point where I usually get tired, secure in the knowledge that I’ve wasted enough time to be sure that Kat won’t be at my apartment when I get there, and only about fifteen minutes from home. It’s the worst part. And she told me she might want to have kids. She’s entertained it. So have I but the difference is is that she’s entertained it without rejecting it. That’s a problem. I wish it could be reconciled. I know it can’t, but I wish it could. I’m almost at the State Street hill, this is real close. Real close to a lot of things. One consequence of my walking home everyday (and as a psychiatrist might say, one cause) is that I get a lot of these random memories back. I used to live over behind Washington Ave behind the Education building (Cait’s too young, she knows but doesn’t remember) and I stop by there a lot. Just walk by the house, I mean. Tonight is not one of those nights (I’m tired) but sometimes if I’ve been in an especially sentimental and melancholy mood I’ll know that the house is coming up and I’ll have had sufficient time to consider dropping by, and once in a while I’ll have thought myself into thinking I should, or may have the time to and why not, stop by.

            But I expect discipline, I expect order, I demand stability don’t I? Out of my family and my women and my self and my job? Why is this the only thing not to fall in line? It’s close to sunset but it’s bright as hell. At the bottom of the hill, caked in sunset sunshine as it has been for the last two weeks now, the clock reads 6:13. I’m right on time and if I can speed up a little bit an not concentrate so hard on not concentrating on not thinking about walking on those cracks, not stepping on them and how stupid that is and how could I have ever believed it? The old man I catch sometimes walking in the bar across the street from me. He must get off work the same time every day. I probably won’t catch him today but if I had been five minutes earlier. He must work at the Knick, the Pepsi, or whatever the powers that be are calling it these days. I can see him coming down from the hill sometimes. Or he might just live up there, but he’s usually got that just got off work look to him. I don’t dare stare at his face. I usually have other things to worry about so I don’t mind, but not these days with Kat gone. Now I just have my four walls, my lungs, and a prayer I don’t melt down this summer. It’s the second summer I’ll have spent alone.

            I keep imagining myself falling down this hill. It’s an angled street and a rather long one. If I try to run, or walk fast, as sometimes I do, I become a bit airborne, as everyone does. If I’m running down the falls will become more and more awkward because not only is the ground falling away from my feet but it’s doing so unevenly, as my right foot, when forward, will hit the ground from a certain distance away and the left foot, upon moving towards the front in the natural flow of the run, will hit the ground from a distance that is hard to judge because I lose sense of to what degree has the concrete has been paved down, what’s the angle, just how long my stride is, combined with the fact that almost the only time I’d be running downhill is say for a bus or cab or something and I’ll usually have my eyes on the bus and not the ground, combined with that fact the angle and length of stride become almost impossible to judge because the only way I would be able to judge it would be to watch the ground and my legs, or just basically be looking down, having my field of vision be aware of depth perception from the best possible view, and I don’t want to run with my head down. Cause imagine if I hit another person, or worse, a pole or a sign. It’d be worse than falling down.

            No it wouldn’t. Because falling down, running down a hill and having the ground fall away from me, and falling face first (from another hard to judge distance. It’d be hard to brace myself. And easy to fall backwards, roll over) would just be ridiculous. Everybody would point and laugh. Or worse just stare. Or try to help. If I hit something or someone, people would grimace. But they wouldn’t want to laugh, I wouldn’t want them to want that laughter. I’d just sit on the ground, and I’d be fine. I wouldn’t be hurt. Everyone just stops and they and I think: How ridiculous. I just fell. Well they think He just fell. How ridiculous.

            It’s not even close to late and already I can’t believe I have to get home. I will not do anything. I will not want to do anything. What if I can’t want to do anything? I haven’t been able to do anything. I will not watch television. I will not listen to the radio. I will not drink a beer. I will not call her. I will not read. I will not stare at anything for longer than five minutes. I will not time it. I will sit in a chair and I might smoke a cigarette, and it might drive me out of my mind.

                                                                        ~

CHAPTER SIX

            I was walking home from the train later that day, the same seven blocks as always. After Fenster and Rocco shorted me out, I wasn’t in the mood to deal with any other changes in the plan. I still hadn’t figured out a way to get to the girl and I was still feeling this was necessary, but I had started the preliminaries for a plan B. I had no idea what plan B would be; I could think of no way to get inside this guy’s head otherwise. There’d been a quiet drizzle about an hour or two ago, and the black pavement was shimmering with every streetlamp, every headlight. The cars rolled by, infrequent, with the doppler effect sound of a giant ssshhh. I remember feeling a strange melancholy; not the the melancholy itself was strange, but the fact that I felt it at all. I’ve never been a shoe-gazer, a wallflower, what have you, whatever the going slang  for it is these days. But that night with the quiet and the shining blacktopped streets, I walked the whole way with my head down. Sad. I couldn’t figure out why. I mean, it made sense that I was sad, feeling a great hopelessness at the current situation and the possibility of within the next week or so  being caught with my pants down, a debt to the wrong kind of people, and nothing but seven bags of dope to hold over their heads. Fenster and Rocco were already beginning to feel my pain, too. I got the feeling that they shorted me out of pity, that they knew I was high and dry and were shorting me to kind of let me know that at least they were on to me. So I could get the idea and stop fucking with them and give them their shit or give me time to split town. But no, like I said it wasn’t the fact that there was melancholy, but the fact that there could be any emotion at all, especially melancholy. Had I been a different kind of person, I could have forgiven myself the melancholy or at least understand it. But I was not used to it so it hit me hard.

            I know he’s in some shit. So I know he’s vulnerable. That’s the only fact. I suspect large quantities of smack and or cash, or the people to buy me a ticket out. My plan was to get to the woman, give him even more reasons to be paranoid by planting ideas in the girl’s head (yeah baby I heard… I know this guy who says… no, you can’t say anything…etc.) and getting him to come to me (eventually) so I could either put him in my strings, under my influence, make him a satellite. I could use those guys in the Buick too, point them out to her, have her point them out to him, and so on. But all this shit, mostly due to my wasting time, was fucking everything up. But he couldn’t not know about the Buick. I know he looks out the window for god’s sake. I’ve seen him do it. Sure, they’ve never been outside when he came home or left (I thought this was slick work on his part, and sometimes even got the urge to clue them in, but now I know it can’t be an accident), but I would think that that fact would have made him even more paranoid.

            The one thing I was not prepared for was for turning the corner and taking my head off the ground for only the second or so time, and seeing her standing outside my door. She was a bit off the curb, and for a moment I thought that maybe she was crossing the street, but when she saw me turn the corner she walked nonchalantly back to the sidewalk, back to the stairs and leaned against them, staring at the building across the way. I walked towards her (my apartment building I mean) and was looking right at her, as I had every right to do, hot woman standing in front of my building, just looking at someone outside my building that I should have never seen before. Nothing! But she turned her head to me and looked right at me, RIGHT at me, and I paused my step for a second. As soon as I did that I knew I was caught. She took a step towards me. Shit! She looked back up towards his place. Was he home? Were they both waiting? They couldn’t have known it was me that’d been in their place. I got all defensive, and braced myself.

            She approached me and when she did I must have looked like I expected it. I didn’t expect her to bullshit me. Kit never would have.

            “I want to talk to you,” she said.

            “About what?” I said. I was getting nervous, another alien emotion for me. It didn’t mix well with the melancholy. I wanted to mix it with a scotch and see how that went. I saw her look at the apartment again. I looked too, long, so she would notice I was looking. The light was off. She frowned a bit at me, scowling. But oh god she was beautiful. She was wearing black jeans and a brand new leather coat that covered her ass. It was buttoned, so I couldn’t see what kind of top she was wearing. I hoped none. Her red hair glowed, like a television commercial, with the shine and the bounce, all over her shoulders. You can imagine the shine from the streetlamps. Her skin was pale.

            “You’re not in with them.”

            I nodded. This was true. “I am not,” I said.

            “Fuck!” she screamed. “Why should I believe you?”

            “Let’s go inside,” I said. “If you want to talk.” Her looking at the window, even with the light off, was making me nervous.

            “Forget it, he’s not home, we’re not after you anyway. It’s about the Buick. You know.”

            “I do.”

            “What do you know?”

            “What do you know?” I asked indignantly.

            “Look,” she said. She seemed on the verge of tears. “He thinks you’re in on it. I think you’re just a pervert. I saw you watching the other day, you know. So easy. I know you’re not a professional, I just think you’re a sick voyeur. But I also think you know about the Buick. You have to tell me if you know anything.”

            I weighed my options, looking at her real hard. She was a mess, you could tell, she gave up all that info too easy. Unless she was lying… but that didn’t seem as probable. I’d have to think about that a little more.

            “Or I’ll call the cops on you,” she said. And it looked like she knew it was ridiculous the moment she said it. I’m terrified of many things, but never ever have been afraid of cops.

            “No you won’t,” I said, deciding to take the route that I knew that they were in some shit and that there was no way they were going to call the cops on me with all their shit going on, anonymous call or not.

            “Please,” she said, finally.

            “Look,” I’d said, “Come here, it’s okay. You know more than you think. I will fill you in on it but not tonight.”

She nodded, detecting sincerity in my voice. I was really playing it up but it was fine because I really did want her left out of this, as far as the details were concerned. But I also knew that the only way to do that was to hold her close to me and my circle, put her under my influence. It’s like the thing that’s on your nose, you can’t see. If she got close enough to me, she wouldn’t be able to tell what was really going down. Because she would trust Johnson Trevor, because he’s her man, and she would trust me, because one the seed of doubt has been planted and two because I seem to validate her feeling that something is wrong because I fill in the other half of the story. I fill in, or will do my best to appear to fill in, what happens when she’s not around. Women like this like being able to have eyes on all fronts. Hell, men like it too, but I think that men like it from a business standpoint, whereas women like it because from an emotional, a personal standpoint don’t care if their man is shady in business, as long as he’s not betraying her by it, not necessarily cheating. They just want to know.

“And another thing,” I said. “We  can’t appear that we know each other. Chose a public place.”

           “The Buetentoch Lounge,” she said.

I smiled. So inconspicuous. Almost professional. “Okay, and when? Time? Gotcha. Listen, do you want a cigarette? Here. Have one of mine then. It’s going to be okay. I don’t think anyone is going to get hurt, especially not you.” I said a bunch of things like that until she left and I knew I’d won, because when I initially saw her in front of my place I knew it would be a victory if she ended up walking away and I ended up walking up to my place alone, and confident. I had to feel confident in order for it to be a victory, and I did. Feel confident. But there’s something else that makes me feel that way. Something I hadn’t expected. I thought about this as I watched her cross the street and turn, not to the stairway of Five Division

                                                            ~

            Fuck, thought Nick. What was it again?

                                                            ~

the street and turn, not to the stairway of Seven Peece street, but almost trot, towards Butentoch Ave. What I thought was that I thought I saw something in her eye when she realized I thought the BL was a perfect place to meet; she knew I was impressed, it was almost as if it was a mutual understanding; the BL was the place to get things done. After she said it we both knew that we both knew that fact, and I have the hunch that it will make things a lot easier from here on in. But my emotions run pretty high, and I have to be a little wary about reading into things like that, especially when I know I have the upper hand regardless. No need for my confidence to get promiscuous. I’ve got it in the bag.

                                                                        ~

            I’m stupid, stupid, stupid. Just look at me. I’m in my apartment. I should be fucking glad I made it this far. And now I’m saying all this shit to myself when I know the worst thing that could happen to me right now is for me to get down on myself regularly, whenever I have these kind of swings. I’ll get caught on something and it will just get out of control. In my head that is. I see a particular situation in my head and it just stays there. And when I can’t stop thinking of its relevance to myself and the normal flow of my life, I start to become dependent on the idea, the thought, as if it were a drug. If it’s not on my mind something will be wrong, because the subjects of these thoughts are the things that are essential to my equilibrium. They are things that I enjoy, things that enjoy me, the things that when I use them, when they use me, form an ideal situation, bring harmony to the immediate situation.

            One of these things is smoking cigarettes. I have been addicted to many things in my life but the nicotine addiction is without equal. It is pure, distinct, and utterly sublime. Dangerously so. This is why I’m stupid. Because I didn’t start smoking until I was 21. Sure, I smoked the occasional cigarette during  high school, at bars and shit, the occasional pack, but I didn’t really start smoking regularly until 21, a time when I was actually hanging out with smokers. My girlfriend at the time was horrified, knowing that I should know better. But I didn’t care. I tried to quit one summer for her but I snuck them and she didn’t really believe me anyway, when I’d said I wanted to quit, and she was right, I lied to her about that. She dumped me and I went back to smoking. I was at a pack a day after that.

            It wasn’t until I had smoked for about two years that I realized how bad it was. I mean, I knew how bad it was. I’d read the literature, I’d seen the white, clean non-smoker lung and tar-black smoker lung pictures, I was under no illusion that they were anything but teeth-staining, lung charring cancer sticks, but I found I didn’t really know until I experienced it. Running for a bus, walking up several flights of stairs, exercising, stuff like that started leaving me winded. Panting at the top of the stairs was particularly horrible if I was going to see someone because they’d open the door and I’d be huffing and puffing, trying to hide the fact that I was as winded as I was because I knew it was because of the smoking and was embarrassed.

            I eventually tried to quit and it didn’t work. I went four weeks with out a smoke, really, not even bumming, before I broke down in my apartment one night and went out to get a pack, thinking, There’s nothing wrong with it. I don’t have any moral problem with smoking. I’m just going to get a pack. I’m just going to smoke a cigarette. I’m not doing anything. And I smoked that pack in two days and was back to a pack a day in a week. I’ve tried to quit a couple times since then, but I always start again like I know I will. Now for about six months I’ve cut a lot out of my life, by this new necessity, with some things easier than others. But cigarettes are the last thing that has to go. I’ve been smoking five cigarettes a day. One when I wake up, two at work, one when I get home from work, and one right before I go to bed. I don’t think I want to have to smoke them. I never have any problem with the one after I wake up. I just do it as soon as I’m up. The one at the end of the night is horrible because sometimes I’ll smoke it and then not be able to fall asleep, and the nicotine will wear off and I’ll start to want another if I’m awake for long enough. But the worst is when I have a really good day and think that I can go without the final one. I’ll lie in bed and feel all good for a while but then I’ll think about how I would normally feel at this point of the night, about twenty minutes after I actually place myself in the bed, and I’ll start thinking that I should just go ahead and smoke it, I’ve rationed it to myself, that it’s allowed. I remind myself that I want it and it’s okay to want things. But I’ll fight it because I know I can go without, I know I don’t have to, that it’s simply a matter of choice. Nothing is going to make me move my arm to grab the pack. I’ll hold the pillow or the blanket, grip real tight, and fight with it for awhile. I’ll get half asleep, have my eyes closed for so long that I forget I’m awake, but always get a good jolt and be fully alert again. I repeat these things over in my head, I don’t have to, I don’t have to, so many times it nearly drives me crazy. Sometimes I weep. Choking, tearless.  But I’ve never gone to sleep for good without that cigarette.

       It was easier when she was here. When anyone was here. That would give me something to put my attention on. But K is just another thing that gives me equilibrium. As is the relationship. And K wants to stick around because it’s the same kind of situation for her.  Okay. Because K is using me to bring out some kind of emotional response in her and she knows she’s doing the same to me and this notion of a singular relationship we have, that becomes an entity. Something to be considered, taken in to account, fretted over, etc. And I have these difficulties comprehending the importance of this. So by her using me, I become a sort of  non-agent creator, of an emotion that is I suppose pleasurable to her, but not to me. Yet if I am to remove myself from this relationship, am I to remove myself in the sense that I am no longer concerned about this abstract entity relationship and advise her to make of that what she may, or am I to remove myself in the sense that I am no longer around her? Which is the best way to destroy this entity of relationship? Because it has to be destroyed eventually. There’s a balance of power but relationships are generally not zero-sum games. Someone’s always giving more, getting more, making more use of it. Maintaining that situation is critical but not impossible. So how I maintain an evolution? By proclaiming that I have no more interest in the relationship I am declaring it, as we knew it, dead. I am sealing it off and from that point on nothing that happens can be added on or in. I can’t do that for one because it isn’t true and two because I’d make her doubt certain things about herself, though indirectly. On  the other hand if I remove myself from her, even if she lives for another sixty years it’ll always be open, unresolved. And since you can’t take it with you when you go, it will remain forever as it ever was: existing and happening. I don’t know how much I can get from just knowing that, but I can come as close as it gets to seeing it as it really is. Because it’ll never be finished for me either.

So it will always be developing, even after we’re both sealed off. I have then maintained it as its zenith of functionality, by not allowing closure, so to speak. But she wants to stick around to see it happen. How is that possible? If she sticks around then it’s still going on.

            But I am home now and I haven’t seen her, which is good. She wasn’t waiting for me, but that could just be because I came home a little late. Later than she could have expected me, though these days… Sometimes she waits for me and we have to talk and it’s the saddest thing you can imagine. We talk of nothing. She’ll come up and I’ll beg her to leave me be, she’ll smoke cigarettes… Another thing that makes me feel good is that she has left no messages on my answering machine either, though she hasn’t done that in a while. So I don’t know how good I can make myself feel about that. I am smoking the cigarette I have allotted myself. I just lit it and got it over with. While this is not a problem, it leads to all other kinds of shit. Am I getting enough nicotine with each drag so that I won’t want one earlier than I expect to? Every second of the duration of the cigarette I will notice how the smell will linger, and will that have an effect on my desire to smoke, maybe tonight, even though it hasn’t so far? How important is it that the routine is kept up? See, smoking being the last of it, I don’t know whether the ultimate goal is to rid myself of smoking or to keep it at this level. I assumed that what finally would give me peace would be to be rid of all the toxins, but the more I keep this ritual up, it seems like the perfect blend of medicine and waiting room. Use one to understand and appreciate the other. It seems complete, total. All-finishing. The giant coda. See, the ashtray is to my left, and my right arm is slightly out of reach. This forces me to think: would it take more effort to reach out my arm, pick up the (admittedly lightweight) ashtray, bring it to me, ash the smoke and return the ashtray, or move my body and stretch over and ash the cigarette and then stretch back? But what I do is decide to transfer the cigarette to my left hand and then reach out and ash then with my left. I am supposed to leave it in my left hand and smoke off of it even though with the cigarette that closer to the ashtray the risk of leaving it in the ashtray grows, but I end up leaving it in the ashtray anyway. Is it closer for me. To do this. Is it either or?

                                                                        ~

            Nick couldn’t get the scene out of his head and was really pissed. He was in the bar and it was slow as hell, and he knew he didn’t need to be there but was there anyway. He’d just written about ten pages the previous night that he felt were, while not quite there yet, some of the most lucid and well-developed pages he’d been able to come up with. He wrote what he wanted to say; he had his characters develop the plot themselves by just writing them. Putting them in situations and seeing how they’d react. He was starting to bring facts together. Plot lines were developing. For the first time he would know part of what he wanted to write before he even sat down at the computer. It was a breakthrough. But he needed to be patient. He needed to remember what got him writing in the first place. Careful digestion of his surroundings. Sufficient time to step back and watch, and the necessary time to analyze. He had to be at the bar right now. But still.every time he would serve a beer, or laugh at one of Chuck’s jokes, tsk-tsk Greg over some wacky comment or pun, he’d get a feeling of disappointment, of letdown, and would yearn to go up to his room to write some more. The night he spent with Caitlyn had set it off.

            For Nick it was without a doubt the best sex since Kit, absolutely amazing. He came twice, which, even he would admit, was unusual. It cleared his head. When she left in the morning he lay awake in his bed all morning, drinking coffee and watching television. He then wrote four pages and went down to the bar. He hadn’t written for a couple of days but in the following two nights did seventeen pages, finishing a major chapter. Caitlyn stopped by for a drink with her housemate Gina a few nights later. They shot some pool with Chuck and had a good time. Caitlyn and Nick fooled around a bit but she eventually went home with Gina. They’d been pleasant on the phone a few days later. Interested, but exhausted. Accepting a slow pace for the time being.

            Nick didn’t mind; the less time he had to think about Caitlyn, the better. He needed to stick to his writing. He liked Caitlyn, and saw her as, potentially, mutually casual and more or less regular summer sex. He liked the idea. He figured that was what she was thinking too, from her casual demeanor the last time they got together. But at the same time he couldn’t get that scene out of his head. He was briefly tempted to tell her that he recognized the guy in the picture but said nothing because he didn’t think, knowing what he knew, that it was the safest thing to happen, and, when it came down to it he didn’t know for sure. His doorbell had the name Gartske on it, not Avery. And while the photo certainly resembled the guy across the street it was entirely possible that it wasn’t him. This is what he told himself. And while he knew that it was all actually true, he knew there was some denial there. But he was wary of getting too involved with Caitlyn anyway, and felt butting into her life, especially about something as personal as that, could be disastrous for everyone if he overstepped.

At the same time, objectively, it was too good not to use. Her wait-and-see attitude towards her brother contrasted explicitly with Luke’s trial-and-error style (that character trait being just a manifestation of Nick’s wanting his narrator to be able to voice his own approach to writing the novel, thinking it would be easier to develop a plot that way) and this contrast would set up a nice conflict between Luke and Kit if Caitlyn’s approach were given to her, because Nick had begun to think that Kit’s coming to see Luke had been a watershed moment in her head, an absolute last straw, no longer being able to wait to see who would blink first. Kit blinked, of course, Nick thought. She would. Because an active mind can’t go too long without acting. Because wait and see becomes just that. It’s not wait and see, then act. It’s wait, and see. So the story became Nick’s, just by experiencing and then analyzing it in the context of Nick’s book being an interpretation of his experience. He said he would have used it anyway. He thought of it. He could use it.

            Nick looked up to see a man holding a twenty dollar bill and looking at him urgently. Nick had been wiping the counter, lost in his thought.

            “Can I get two Bud bottles?” the man asked.

            Nick nodded and got them from the bin underneath the taps. He opened the bottles and set them down on the bar and gestured at the man’s driver’s license. The man, who was obviously either a SUNY student or had graduated with the rest of them last month, nodded and tried to extract the license from his wallet.  

“Yeah, you’re fine,” Nick told the guy (ADAM S STERNS, according to his license), handing him his change. “You’ve been in here a few times before.”

            “It’s true,” Adam said. “Does that get me a free drink later?”

“We’ll see. I remember you. You might have used them all up when you graduated.”

Adam dropped two singles on the bar. “Hey, I deserved them. Bachelor of the art of History. How about that?” Adam said, almost joyfully. He was drunk. The university had held its 1999 commencement ceremony at the Pepsi arena, right across Nick’s parking lot. Nick remembered that scene. Greg had informed Nick that he wouldn’t be in until late that night, being part of the folding chair and cleanup crews. As if he were an employee. Nick opened early, expecting good business. They came, first parents and their new graduate for a scotch and a few slaps on the back and lots of real job and ‘your future’ conversations. A lot of them came. It died down at around five, when Nick figured that the parents who weren’t at dinner were on their way home, and Nick settled down a bit. But it remained steady all through the evening. Then Nick realized that the kids who’d graduated were probably still up in Albany. Then, around eight-thirty, they started pouring in. It was the busiest night since the first Friday of the Fall 98 semester, one of Nick’s first weeks at the bar.

“I haven’t seen many SUNY kids since then.” Nick said. “Most of them split right away.”

Adam laughed. “Most of the guys I know left on the first, when the leases ran out. So you’re safe for a while. I’m just a straggler.”

“Fuck,” laughed Nick. He flipped his hand, showing Adam the thin room and the general inactivity. “I don’t give a shit. I could use the business.”

“Life goes on, man.”

“Whatever you say. Listen. If you’re straggling for a reason,” Nick said, shaking his head, “don’t bother. Summers around here aren’t anything special.”

“Yeah,” Adam said, taking a pensive, nodding swig out of one of the beers. Its bitterness was visible on his face. “But my lease doesn’t run out until the semester starts. Unlike most of these guys that were going into senior year, I didn’t get into an apartment until I came back to Albany in late August. The guys that I ended up living with were all from around here, and were planning to stay here, in Albany, for at least a few years. So they were staying there that summer to job hunt before they looked for there own places. So, as I have no place else to go yet, will be staying as well.”

            Nick couldn’t help but grin and shrug.

            “No, it’s not like that,” Adam said confidently. “I’m not staying. I have some cash together now. I just don’t want to fuck it up when I do decide to pack up and go.”
            “Where’re you headed?”

            “L.A., baby.” Adam raised one of the beers and took a sip, tilting it a bit at Nick in an atta-boy way. Another white-cap, same age, came over and took the other beer out of his hand and walked away. Adam swayed a bit as he turned. 

            “Actor?”

            Adam swayed back. “Directing. I have a lot of gear, I just need to find a place to live. It’s all right here, for now. I can stay with my cousin and work while I find a place.”

            “When do you think you’ll go?”

            “Just waiting for the right moment. Staying here this summer is letting me make my move at the right time. This summer looks like a giant rest stop to me. I’m in no rush to get back on the road.”

            “In that case,” said Nick, “Good luck to you.”

“Yup,” said Adam. He saluted Nick with bottle and faded away from the bar. Nick walked away, moving towards the door side of the bar to see Greg, in a wife-beater and bakery style white shirt, tipping his derby at him, waving an empty pint glass. The crowd in the bar was small, true, but there were several conversations happening at once, a U2 song on the jukebox, and glasses dropping on tables. It was congested anyway, muggy, and there were no fans on. Nobody seemed to mind, really, and Nick sat back and decided he could be as patient as the rest of them, arms folded when not busy, watching, picking apart, letting himself be in front of it and on top of it. Scouting for what could he use, interpret, give his voice. Those which would use him back, advertise their importance, flaunting, the chips in the bar tables. How and at what angles the tables wobble, the rust on the bottoms of the ice bins, people rolling their sticks on the table before games. Who was coming and who was going and why. And what they said when they whispered. Who people waited for. The little bits of Denis he would find from time to time, a handwritten self-reminder note folded into the books, for instance, would leave Nick baffled late at night holding a pencil over a binder. But he was the one who chose. He gave them value. A used Q-tip, somehow buried behind Drain-O and Pine-Sol that also remained when he first moved in. His dead brother’s fingerprints on the mirror. He put them in, used them, not because they were great themselves, but because they helped. He could put them all together and get the whole scene. Cut and paste. The bugs that will flock when he leaves a beer quarter-way finished in the sink too long. Chuck’s laugh, which literally sounded like ha-ha most of the time. Stained, shriveled circles of now dried condensation on napkins left on the bar. Finding random phone numbers on the floor at closing. Caitlyn’s wall wrapping around him, drawing out. If he could see enough and put it together correctly he knew he could find out what it was all about. Sum of parts. The bar was as close as his hands now. It was writing.