CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER SEVEN

sloegin (gb0720@cnsvax.albany.edu) has joined #life.

****Users currently on #life: @Pillbot @Pillbox @crydydian @Camille

****Topic on #life: Happy 1999!!!!!!!!!!!! (Pillbot, 22:16)

****04:04 Friday, January 1

<Pillbot> Happy New Year sloegin!

<Camille> well i wasn’t going to fall off the face of the earth eric

<sloegin> gee thanks Pill

****mode change +o sloegin by Pillbot

<sloegin> hi Cam! happy new year!!!

<crydydian> look Karen

<sloegin> that’s all i get? :(

<Camille> you’re too much eric

<Camille> thanks jeen. it sure looked like one

*crydydian sulks

<Camille> :P

<crydydian> you’re not listening to me

<sloegin> you stayed in?

<Camille> mmhm.

<Camille> i’m depressed and ill and broke

<Camille> i did get to watch it on tv tho

<Camille> and oddly enough cry kept me company

<sloegin> so i see

<sloegin> curious.

/msg crydydian why aren’t you answering?

<Camille> he’s terribly lagged. he’s answering things i said five minutes ago.

<Camille> it’s funny

<crydydian> I do love you

<sloegin> !

<sloegin> so that’s why he’s not answering my msgs :)

<Camille> :)

<crydydian> it never had anything to do with that

<crydydian> hi gina!! happy new year!!

*sloegin waves and smiles

<sloegin> he never did sulk in front of me ;)

/msg Camille so how are you two? what happened tonight??

*Camille* we’re fine. we’re trying to resolve things. the denise thing came up again tonight.

/msg Camille uh oh

/msg Camille she’s not back is she?

*Camille* hahha oh no i brought her up

/msg Camille but why?

*Camille* Hm... I dunno

*Camille* curiosity? self-destructiveness? paxil withdrawl?

/msg Camille withdrawl?

*Camille* two weeks. i flushed them and replaced them with vitamins

/msg Camille really?? that’s great!! you should have told me earlier

*Camille* I would if I could pry you off reed

/msg Camille oh cam i’m sorry

/msg Camille i know I’ve been an idiot

****crydydian has left #life (04:44)

<Pillbox> hmmz....

<Camille> !

<sloegin> !

<sloegin> hi pill

<sloegin> happy new year

<Pillbox> it’s eleven am here

<Camille> was it something I said eric?

<sloegin> is he pissed off?

crydydian (crydydian@suplex.uchicago.edu) has joined #life (04:45)

<Pillbot> Happy New Year crydydian!

****mode change +o crydydian by Pillbot

<Camille> I don’t know. I never can tell with him these days.

<Pillbox> ?

<sloegin>...

<crydydian> karen

<Camille> re eric

<crydydian> karen

<Camille> what?

<crydydian> cmon

<Camille> ?

/whois reed

****reed: so such nick/name

<sloegin> !seen reed

<Pillbot> sloegin! I last saw reed 12/31/98 at 8:15 p.m.!

<sloegin> i hope you’re having fun

<Camille> argh

****Camille has left #life (04:54)

<crydydian> shit

<sloegin> what happened?

<crydydian> I asked her if she was upset

<sloegin> and?

<crydydian> she keeps asking about denise and me

<crydydian> she thinks I dropped her for denise

<sloegin> you did vanish eric, for a while

<crydydian> I want to try and be her friend

<crydydian> since the whole thing with denise ended she’s been lurking around me, asking me

questions about the whole denise thing and to what extent it had anything to do with

our problems

<sloegin> well from what i know you met denise and wanted to meet her in real life and while

you were considering this in your head you shied away from cam

<crydydian> but it was more than that

<crydydian> it was like the two things happened simultaneously. Cam and I started having problems about our being unable to see each other and then all of a sudden I meet

this woman who is interested and lives not five minutes from my apartment, probly.

<sloegin> you met her on irc eric!

<crydydian> gina i think karen is great, really great, wonderful, and i’m sure that if we lived in the

same area we would have a great shot to be a couple.

<crydydian> but the reality is we can’t be together.

<crydydian> i can’t ignore something possibly great right here for something so far away

<sloegin> that’s not what you said when I was first starting to talk to reed :(

<sloegin> you convinced me that it was possible!

<sloegin> I can’t believe you would back down from it!

<crydydian> i don’t think this applies to you

<crydydian> this is my shit, these are my issues at work

<crydydian> you’re more stable.

<sloegin> ... :(

<crydydian> give me a sec....

<crydydian> ok

<crydydian> all personal shit aside

<crydydian> knowing her without knowing her face became unbearable

<crydydian> when I met denise i was at a really low point as far as my own confidence in my

ability to see this love with karen through.

<crydydian> I got sick of the struggle, sick of not being able to have what was right the way

it was supposed to be

<crydydian> when I was leering around my lectures, when I was going through class attendance

sheets, taking any little clue about who she was, trying to figure it out, who she was...

<crydydian> it was exhilarating...

<crydydian> office hours became nerve racking, thinking she could walk in at any moment

<crydydian> almost unbearable

<sloegin> crydydian

<crydydian> hell!!!

<sloegin> eric

<crydydian> GINA

<crydydian> I felt ALIVE for the first time in months!!!!!!!!

<crydydian> :(

<sloegin> :(

<crydydian> gina still there

<sloegin> yes eric

<crydydian> tell me you understand... it was flesh and blood versus bits and bytes. I made a choice.

<sloegin> you could say that

<sloegin> or you could say you gave up

<crydydian> gave up?

<sloegin> oh c’mon now

<crydydian> oh please gina

<sloegin> she told me about how you stopped calling her, how you invented excuses to get off IRC,

how you stopped thinking about her...

<crydydian> we were having problems anyway!

<sloegin> sure. problems stemming from you being afraid of having to test your words

<crydydian> Bullshit. My words were true

<crydydian> ARE true

<crydydian> *sigh*

<crydydian> I love her gina

<sloegin> but...

<crydydian> you need to see

<crydydian> you need to be with someone

<crydydian> off this thing

<crydydian> meet someone.

<crydydian> you’ll see

<sloegin> I love reed

<crydydian> love? you’ve told him this?

<sloegin> yes and he said it too

<crydydian> he TYPED it

<sloegin> Eric I love him and I’m not afraid of meeting someone ‘off this thing’. It’s different.

<sloegin> I’m not going to meet anyone anyway

<crydydian> you will and we’ll see

<sloegin> i love you eric but you’re a miserable bastard these days

/quit happy new year, eric

****sloegin has left #life (happy new year, eric (05:39))

<crydydian> *sigh*

Nick Kohl was looking at the first page of his January 1999 calendar, and couldn’t believe it. 1999, he thought. Ho-leee shit. Only two and a half weeks into it and it still seemed kind of off to him. It seemed to him like it had gotten here so fast but at the same time it felt like it had already been 1999 forever. He wondered how many other people out there had the bug: the eager excitement at the forthcoming change of millennium. He knew, like everyone else knew, that the millennium wouldn’t officially start until New Year’s 2001, but he figured that nobody cared. 2000 was simply, in his opinion, a more striking number and a number that signified a change more than 2001 did. All those zeroes. And humanity, celebrating its first global holiday, would act like every Westerner celebrating any Western holiday, of which Anno Domini was one: by sneaking down the night before. Like opening Christmas presents on Christmas Eve. Like tracking down the Easter eggs the night before Easter. They would celebrate it this year.

He was firmly planted in the cold of the city. Because of the harsh winters, Albany pretty much went into hibernation for a few weeks after the December holidays, the stillness of the snowy roads at night highlighting the flatness of the terrain. Division Street was right by the river and the highway exits, so Nick’s neighborhood at night mostly consisted of cabs and a random wanderer or two, homeless guys fishing through dumpsters for returnable bottles, spilling the last sips of bent soda cans on the curb. It had snowed six times since December first. Division Street, being right by the river and highway exits, would turn into a surreal landscape of shadows and streetlamps and a solitary pair of footprints that had marched its way through the crisp snow. It felt like a very lost, dark corner of the city. With the city’s tallest buildings raised on the hill in front of him like a facade, and the long-since-dead docks and polluted Hudson trying to pull him in like undertow from behind, his environment (which Nick noticed, with the bar and the apartment being in the same building, he spent 90% of his time in) was constantly ominous and made him claustrophobic. But a fresh coat of snow on the ground made everything seem calm and steady.

When it snowed at night, he would usually go down to the bar to watch the storm from street level. Out the window he could see, on the other side of the Greyhound terminal’s parking lot, a Christian ministry/rescue home/way station kind of place that, from what Nick witnessed, mostly just passed out coffee, bagels, and pamphlets to the homeless people in the area. Hanging off of the front of the building was a giant neon cross. Nick could see the cross by pressing his head against the corner window near the door. JESUS SAVES glowed down the middle of the two planks that made up the electric cross. Saves what? or whom? thought Nick. He didn’t know. He only wondered if they were watching the 2000 thing with the same wary potentialism he was.

Nick, in his room, looked across the snowless street. Johnson Trevor was watching television, picking his nose and scratching his balls occasionally. The girl, the redhead, wasn’t over tonight. She had only come over once, but Nick often saw Johnson Trevor, on the phone for long periods, smiling and looking very relaxed. He also never smoked cigarettes (or weed, for that matter) while he was on the phone during these sessions, and would usually light one as soon as he dropped the receiver. This led him to believe that it was a woman, but he had no way of telling if it was the same woman, the redhead (he couldn’t remember if he smoked when she was over that once).

Nick needed to see her again. The short, cropped red hair, the way he knew her eyes probably sparkled. He knew she was quiet; he would have seen the lips move. He had watched her the first night intensely, waiting for anything he might get off of her to prove to him that he might be mistaken, or just a victim of wishful thinking. But everything fit perfectly. She was a dead ringer for Kit, Nick’s last New York City girlfriend. He knew she didn’t have any sisters or cousins around her age, but the resemblance was remarkable. Right down to the way that she made him watch her and turned him inside out and left him empty when she disappeared from his sight.

Nick Kohl grew up in Albany fully knowing that he wouldn’t be staying there for very long after he had to. He waded through crowds at Albany High School, smoked pot with all the wrong people, smuggled Mad Dog 20/20 into the gym locker room, and eventually, with the help of his classmates, constructed a safe plan for smoking in the stairwells and outside the back of the buildings, taking into account teachers’ schedules, who they knew did rounds and actually gave a shit if the kids were smoking, and estimated, on an hourly basis, their windows for successfully avoiding them.

Nick knew from a very early age that he was intelligent, and although the fact seemed to thrill his parents and teachers, Nick never really was very impressed by it. He never thought that there was anything his teachers tried to tell him that he wouldn’t be able to handle eventually. It injected him with a swagger that, according to some authority figures, should have been injurious. But Nick excelled anyway. He did the minimum amount of work for his classes but managed to walk away with A’s and B’s. His teachers were confused how someone with seemingly so little interest in academic subjects could do as well as he did.

But he did have interest, mainly in the sciences. He tended to ignore English, history, and related topics when not under verbal duress; however, when it came to whatever natural science he was enrolled in, he would study and read on his own, often reading ahead in the textbooks. His science teachers gave him glowing reviews on his lab reports and tell the other baffled faculty members how he would seek them out to talk about one aspect or another of chemistry, biology, or astronomy. He was apparently fascianted to see how the basics worked and loved mathmatical proofs. They’d say he’d want to talk about how one thing led to another, how this fact necessarily followed from the one before, and in what way they did. These were things on which he would ramble sincerely. As he entered his senior year of high school, his guidance counselors would feign interest and try to tell him that even someone as intelligent as he would eventually face discipline problems in college, where professors demanded attendance and work and attention to detail, especially if he intended to go into the sciences. Nick told them not to worry, as he had no such intention. His desire to go to college centered on the experience of being there, not on keeping up with what the rest of his peers were doing. He’d say he wasn’t about to commit to a way of changing the world without getting a taste of what everything was about. His counselors said “Prove it” to his face and “We’ll see” to each other when he would be gone.

He eventually got his act together (though some teachers whispered through smirks that it was only for the recommendation letters) and applied to several liberal arts colleges in the state, eventually choosing to attend Ithaca and study, to his parents’ raised eyebrows, literature. Nick had, it turns out, been reading Pynchon and Barth behind everyone’s back and had found something there that high school english, Wordsworth, and Catcher in the Rye hadn’t offered him before. He sensed a connection. He’d be taking an equal number of science and english classes for the time being but told his parents that he was going to concentrate on literature for a while.

He had wanted to go somewhere far enough away from home that he wouldn’t feel obligated to call his parents every day but close enough that he would be able to go home if he needed to. Ithica seemed perfect. And although he knew that his leaving for college would mark the first time since Denis’ birth that his parents would have the house to themselves, he wasn’t worried about any empty nest syndrome. Denis only had one year left at SUNY Albany, and he planned on staying in the area afterwards. Besides, Nick found, soon after returning to Ithaca after his first “visit home” for Christmas, that the time apart actually improved their relationship which had been, over the years, rocky and at times, overwhelming. Nick found that having to create his own sense of responsibility actually gave him a workable framework of self-esteem in which he could mature; his experimentation with marijuana and LSD and magic mushrooms and his focus on literature gave him motivation and confidence to throw himself into something that he could get passionate and excited about.

High school English, with all of its Shakespeare and endless picking apart of Lord of the Flies, bored Nick to tears and just about killed every literary instinct in him. He wrote a lot of poetry that should have been but didn’t come out good. He would write stories in his head that he couldn’t start on paper. Science and math became easier as he realized that that was where there were definite answers. He found he could do it well with minimum effort. So he stuck with it through high school, so he would have a safety net in case he fucked up real bad grades-wise in other subjects. But he still wrote anyway, when nothing else would do. So the writing thing stayed in his head.

One night while writing college admission essays, he became overwhelmed and sought out Denis for advice. Denis sat him down over the chessboard and explained to him that first of all, everybody has at least three hundred bad poems that they have to write before they’ll every produce a good one, and secondly, if Nick was going to do it, go away from school, that he sure as hell better go there to do exactly what he wanted to do because, Christ, well, that was the point. Denis checkmated Nick mercifully quick that night and Nick went back to his room and wrote three mediocre poems about his girlfriend, that he would have to be leaving behind at the end of the summer. If they were still going out by that time, that is, which ended up not happening.

Nick partied himself out of Ithaca midway through his sophomore year. The classes he took bored him, and the lack of a social scene outside of the college campus led to drinking every weekend, then every night. He fried his mind out on pot. He avoided his classes until he absolutely had to. He managed to get his professors to slide him out of his freshman year but eventually his academic record collapsed under the weight of his inability to reconcile the Incompletes that they had given him. He briefly considered staying in Ithaca with his friends and getting a job but in the end decided that his only realistic option was to go back home with his parents.

As Nick figured, they were not happy to have him around the house. Denis had moved out with a friend of his after graduation, so the tension of just he and they in the house was immediate and overwhelming. He tried to placate them by staying out of their way as much as possible, but it seemed to him as if they went out of their way to bother and criticize him. They constantly threatened to cut him off monetarily unless he got a job, but never followed it up, which made Nick both apathetic to their threats and increasingly frustrated at his lack of desire to work. This, in turn, would make him even more moody and further damaged his already sour relationship with them.

His unemployment, though a constant source of stress for the house, was good for Nick in ways. For one thing, his lack of money and connections made him have to quit smoking pot. He still drank, though not as much, and usually only on weekends. He noticed himself feeling dried out, dulled around the edges, unmotivated, questioning. He had a lot of free time on his hands, much of which he spent aquatinting himself with an old high school classmate of his, Matthew, who was in the area, having decided not to attend college. The time Matthew had spent in Albany while Nick was away had made him very passive and sarcastic and it made a perfect fit for Nick’s exaggerated aloofness. They had run into each other while both at a local pool hall and ended up exchanging numbers and hanging out quite a bit.

Matthew was in the Albany Police Academy, by way of an ex-cop dad that had convinced him it was the way to go. He was still about a month or so from hitting the streets, but he invited Nick to come down to the APA and talk to some people, if he was interested. Nick had never really thought about being a cop, and he tried to explain to Matthew the irony of someone flunking out of college due to lack of discipline becoming an authority figure. But Matthew insisted, and took Nick to the APA the next day. Nick met and talked to a lot of cops that day, and found out, much to his surprise, that most of them seemed like really cool guys, and there were many not too much older than him and a lot who shared a similar story to his. And while Nick wondered briefly if it was a good thing that a large chunk of the cops in Albany were ex-fuckups, he found himself weighing the pros and cons in his head rather seriously.

On one hand, joining the force, even if it would be for five to ten years, would give him a solid financial base with which to work. Consistent, above average pay, great benefits. A chance to prove something to himself, and maybe get a little redemption along the way. And according to most of the cops, they only pulled their guns maybe once or twice a year, and very few had actually fired one. Nick didn’t meet anyone that day who had successfully shot someone. “Nothing major really happens in this city,” one sergeant had told him. “Seventy-five percent of the people you arrest will be drunks. That’s basically it. A lot of losers. Smart-ass SUNY kids. White-trash wife beaters. And over in Arbor Hill you may have to pick up a couple of crackhead niggers. Mostly cuffing and sweeping up losers. It’s fun.” It at least didn’t seem dangerous. It even felt honorable.

The idea of instantly becoming an adult fascinated him. And Matt was talking it up big time. Cops weren’t so bad, were they? What did they actually have to do? And there was such a sense of community in the whole thing. All of the cops seemed to get along really well. And they all liked the job. He would be able to get his own place. His parents loved the idea when he told them.

Matthew, once he became a uniform, talked to the right people and made it extremely easy for Nick to enter the APA. Once in, Nick met some of the greatest people he’d ever met in his life, and, much to his chagrin, some of the lousiest. It was a tremendously cliquey environment, something which Nick loathed, but bought into immediately.

Training at the academy was tougher than expected. The first time he fired a gun, at the range, was a mind-blowing experience. The power! He wondered if he would ever have to actually fire it at someone. The physical training was excruciating and draining. He had no idea how out of shape he had been. And the hours of videos and classes. By the end of it, Nick was at a loss as to whether he had made the right decision or not. But he was very taken in with the idea of finally ‘getting in’, and looked forward to graduation day as the time when he could leave all the academy shit behind and be out on the streets, taking care of business. He found himself looking at the people on the streets differently, looking for any kind of crime, waiting to be able to say something to them because he could, he would have to, that would be his job. The thought of enforcing in general made him anxious and thrilled and scared and pumped up beyond belief.

He was paired with an officer named Gus Hertzog when he got his uniform. Gus was thirty but looked much older. He had slick, thin, black hair with a comb-over that highlighted the arch of his forehead. His eyes were grey and distant, round and sunken, and surrounded by hard, stretched skin. Paired with an aggressive chin and broad shoulders, Nick noticed that Gus resembled his father as a young man, what he had seen in photographs and vaguely remembered from childhood.

Gus had lived in Albany all of his life. He had a wife of three years and a one year old son, of whom he kept a photograph on the dashboard. They lived in a modest sized apartment in Guilderland. Gus had been on the force for six years and had previously been paired with Frank McCurry, a ten year veteran who left the force to join the Albany Fire Department. Gus bitched and moaned about Frank quite a bit, calling him a traitor. Nick would sit in the passenger seat and just listen and chain-smoke, looking at himself in the side-view mirror, in his blue cop uniform, seeing KOHL on a badge, feeling the gun by his side, thinking about how absurd it all was, and how did he ever end up here.

For the first month, it went pretty much as he had been told. He started on the night shift immediately, the majority of his work being giving traffic tickets and summonses. He had helped bust up a couple of fraternity parties that had gotten out of hand. He arrested someone for drunk driving. That night, three days into his tenure, was the first time he had to handcuff someone. He went out with Matthew the next night, playing pool, drinking, and Nick confessed that even though the guy was obviously drunk and dangerous on the road, he couldn’t justify why it was he that was physically restraining someone. Matthew said he understood, that it was hard for him too, but cautioned him to remember that they were part of the force that made society safe, no matter if they had to be tough sometimes to get it done. It was just their job.

Nick settled into his new role, gradually adjusting to being referred to as ‘Officer Kohl’, getting freebies from coffee shops and delis (which he and every other officer took advantage of), and generally trying to be a positive force in the city. He enjoyed talking to random people concerning their complaints with the city, and finding out that he had the power now to do certain things to try and make a solvable problem out of these often intangible grievances. He still wasn’t completely sure if he liked the job or not, but he was trying to do the right thing, in his head, making an attempt, for the first time, to find out what he wanted.

One night, about halfway through his rookie year, he and Gus were driving around downtown Albany by the Plaza and got a call about a possibly armed robbery suspect running southbound on Madison Avenue. Nick and Gus, who were right in that area, drove over and saw a man fitting the description duck into a doorway when he saw their car. They pulled up in front of the building and went in. Gus, leading the way down the main foyer, drew his gun and called out, identifying himself as police. Nick pulled his gun without thinking about it, holding in up steady, trying to mirror Gus’ handling of it.

There was a blur from around the corner, and Gus’ hand was knocked up into the air, sending the gun flying. Gus fell on top of him. Nick hovered his gun over the two men struggling, and hesitated for a moment before deciding to jump in and try and smash the guy with the butt of his gun. As soon as he stepped forward, though, he saw a .22 at Gus’s throat and moved back, aiming at the man’s head.

Nick knew automatically that this man was a professional, a veteran, and that he also knew that Nick was a rookie; Nick had no doubt about who this man felt had the upper hand.

Slowly and gravely, the man holding Gus said, “Put the gun down, officer.” He enunciated each syllable, loading the statement with a universe of meaning.

“Don’t do it, Nick,” Gus said.

“Shut up!” the man screamed into Gus’ ear. And then, to Nick again: “Put the gun down, officer.”

“Backup is on its way; Nick, don’t put it down.”

“Put it down or I shoot you and him.” The man pressed the gun into Gus’ neck.

“Nick.”

“Do it now.”

“Gus.”

“Now.”

“Nick don’t-”

“That’s a good boy,” the man said.

Nick bent up from the ground and only saw the movement as a trail. It was a flash and then he was on the ground, not knowing where he had been shot, not knowing for sure why what just happened had happened.

Gus had come to visit him in the hospital, but they rarely spoke once he returned to the force on limited desk duty. The bullet had shattered his right elbow and left the arm pretty much useless for a good six weeks. Nick was told that it would probably never be one hundred percent, but it would more than likely be able to function normally within six months. The things that would remain would be, he was told, general stiffness and the occasional locked elbow. The first thing Nick thought after being told this in the hospital after the surgery was that it was his jerking-off arm, but soon found out it wouldn’t be a problem.

Desk duty, however, was a huge problem. Repetitively filing and typing and talking on the phone put enormous strain on his arm. In addition, when the leftover panic in his head over the incident died down, he simply didn’t see the point of being a cop anymore. He wouldn’t be on the streets for at least a couple months and then maybe only as a traffic cop. And he wasn’t sure he ever wanted the chance to be in another incident with a gun or even carry a gun. He would sit at his desk for hours, falling deeper into depression each day. He felt that the shooting had hit some kind of pause button for everything in his life, and because of this he left the hospital feeling that he was able to latch on to things in their paused state and, for the first time, see them as they really fit in his environment.

Also for the first time, during his stint on desk duty, he began to develop a loathing for the city. He was bothered all of a sudden by all of the politicians, all of the state offices, the governor. As he walked around town, giant slabs of concrete were raised to the sky and slightly bending over him, laughing. All the SUNY students were wearing fraternity letters and white hats and hemp necklaces. Every day, there was an extra layer of dirt on the ground. The snow came down to terrorize him, in particular. The rain was a little rougher on him. There were suspicious eyes on his back. Whispers at work.

It seemed as if the attitude of the city had changed. It seemed to let him know that it didn’t want him around anymore.

So Nick moved to New York City on May 1st, six months to the day after the shooting and four days after his 23rd birthday.

Having only moved down there with just over a thousand dollars, it took Nick a while to get a solid financial foundation. He found a share with a Columbia University graduate student on Manhattan’s Upper West Side and stayed there for about three months until he could find his own place. He was able to get a studio in Park Slope, Brooklyn for six-fifty a month, which, from the prices he was used to seeing, was a steal. He got a cat and an iguana and a cushy night job doing unarmed security for an office building on the East Side, where he developed a modest habit of drinking on the job. But he couldn’t bother to care or change. Between the hours of one and four in the morning the only people there were the regulars: Joey and Pete, the cleaners, Marv Gunther, the other guard, and one hippie looking guy that went out of his way to ignore them. Most of the time Nick would only catch him from the back, his long, curly blond hair bouncing off the shiny, padded shoulders of his Italian suits like a shampoo commercial. The first time he caught his face, Nick was shocked to see that he looked strangely like Michael Bolton. Marv, who had been there for six years, said his name was Herman Jones, but didn’t know much else except that he apparently liked both his coffee and his women black and that everything he was doing, though appearing shady, was on the up-and-up. There was the random panicy business guy who needed the office or CEO coming back with a ringless finger and a woman, but for the most part, the regulars were it, and were all down.

Nick had been there for seven months when he met Kit. It was the first shift he had to be on guard solo, as Merv had some kind of vague family emergency and could not be there. By three-thirty he was sitting at the front desk playing solitaire and sipping cheap scotch out of a flask. It was a cold December night close to the holidays, and as he was by himself all night (even Joey and Pete, the cleaning guys, seemed to be hiding that night) there was even less excuse not to take a couple nips to fight off the chills. He blew cigarette smoke into the blue plastic portable fan he brought with him. He listened to the eager, abrasive voices on sports radio at a low volume. He would stare at the deck of cards laid out in front of him, and the fuzzy grey of the empty halls on the monitors. Everything seemed calm and spacious.

Nick looked up when he heard the sharp clicks of heels echoing through the dimly lit marble corridor behind him. His head leaned over a tiny bit and he saw her, through the monitor, coming down the main hallway, probably from the elevators to the offices upstairs. She did not look familiar, but the building identification she had on a chain around her neck told him that she belonged there.

He was expecting her to walk right past the desk, and was expecting to get a clear shot of what he figured would be a beautiful ass walking down the long main hallway to the front doors, clicking, echoing, nylons swishing, hair bouncing. But she walked right up to the desk as if she had planned it for a long time.

“Mr. Kohl?”

He read her tag. “Ms. Thompson?”

“Ugh. Toh-mah-son, please. And it’s miss, not miz. I hate that.”

“Miss Thomason? How can I help you?”
She eyed the flask and looked around. “You normally drink on the job?”

Nick took a real close look at her. She was probably three years older than he and was absolutely stunning; her shiny, treatment-free red hair curled around the bottom of her cheeks, reflecting the fluorescent like porcelain. She had clear, discerning green eyes that seemed to dance and just the right amount of freckles. She was dressed in a very expensive looking, fitted gray business suit but had no piercings or jewelry, giving her a fresh, natural beauty that filled the space within the dark, swirling marble walls and mocked the gold-colored decor.

“It’s apple juice, Miss Thomason.”

She smiled wildly, throwing back her head, laughing without sound. Before Nick could react, she reached over his desk and grabbed the flask. Nick noticed she was only wearing a bra under her blazer. She unscrewed the cap and sniffed it. “Cheap scotch,” she said. Nick shrugged. She took a swig without flinching and capped it. “Here,” she said. She threw it at an unsuspecting Nick who managed to tap it into the air and catch it before it hit the ground.

“Impressive,” she said, winking. Nick placed the flask on the top of the desk, directly between them.

“Listen,” she said. “Have you seen Mr. Jones?”

The hippie guy. “No, not tonight,” Nick said.

“Shit. Do you know what time he leaves?”

“Hm?”

“Herman Jones, my boss. I know you have to know him.”

The hippie guy, right? “Long blond hair?”

“That’s him,” she said, tracing her index finger around the top of the flask. Nick noticed she was not wearing a ring. “Do you know how often he is here late?”

“About twice a week.”

“And you didn’t see him tonight?”

“No,” said Nick.

“See anything at all tonight, Mr. Kohl?”
“No,” said Nick. That’s right, he thought. My last name is on the building log.

She wrapped her fingers around the flask, this time deliberately showing him that she had no ring. Nick took the bait and rested his eyes on her finger, waiting for her to take notice.

She noticed. “What are you doing here, Mr. Kohl?”

“I don’t understand.”

“Yes, you do.”

Nick looked at her pensively.

“C’mon, now.” She took the flask off the top of the desk and walked around, taking a seat in Merv’s chair. “Here,” she said. “Let’s play some cards.”

Nick started his life story with dropping out of college and scattered it over five hours, finally finishing it at her apartment, the largest and most luxurious apartment he had ever been in, on 80th and Park after breakfast at a local restaurant. When Nick took his shirt off, he noticed that the first thing she looked for was the scar. It was still pretty large and hostile looking. She laid him down on the bed, took the cigarette out of her mouth and kissed it gently.

“I’m not going to tell you it was brave or noble or anything,” she whispered. “And you don’t want to hear it. But leaving that horrid city was.”

“Have you been there?” She was hovering over him now, her legs squeezing his like bookends, breasts frozen and shining, rising...

“I lived there for six months.”

“Why?” Her lips drawn, the brief smell of burning filter, the sweet hiss of ashtray, his back, arching to meet...

“You’ll find out eventually, I’m sure. Now let’s not talk.”

Afterwards he held her like he had always intended to hold a woman, if he ever managed to find one. He lit her cigarette and played with her hair because he wanted to.

She was gently running the tip of her red index-fingernail over his scar.

“You know there’s still bullet fragments in there,” he said lightly.

“Are there?” she asked, finishing with a small, delicate laugh.

“Mmmhm. Four little pieces.”

“You seem like you take your wounds with you.”

Nick stared at the ceiling in agreement. She stopped playing with his scar and lay her arm across his chest. He felt the cool white satin underneath him. He kept opening his eyes, expecting there to be a mirror above him. But he had to look to his side to see Katherine resting, eyes closed. He waited in vain for her to move, to open an eye to look at him, but it didn’t matter in the long run. He knew she wasn’t asleep.

Nick didn’t see her at work after that once and while he wasn’t exactly shocked about that, the fact that she avoided talking about her job in depth bothered him. By this time they had seen each other around four or five times and had gotten to know each other pretty well. Nick was actually thinking about positively the possibility of a long term relationship developing. He had never been much of a commitment guy (his longest previous relationship had been seven and a half months) but he constantly sought out women for intimate (though not necessarily sexual) company, a kind of kiss-first-and-ask-questions-later style. He often found himself in over his head before he knew it.

He was stable and satisfied going into their sixth date. But, that night, after Kit (as Miss Katherine Thomason became known to Nick) had just finished telling a string of jokes (and she turned out to be incredibly funny when she wanted to), he began to get somber and curious. He decided to ask her about the job thing and why she hadn’t come back to see him.

“I’m going to tell you everything,” she said.

And she did. She had been an administrative assistant for Mr. Herman Jones at Compread.com, an encryption software developer, for three years, the frst six months of which were company and customer servuce training at their Albany offices, She endured minor sexual harassment, though nothing truly violating (“At worst, disgusting remarks,” she said), and long hours for the great pay, the great apartment, and the great office. That particular night, she left the office at nine and got home to a phone message from her father telling her that his father, her grandfather, who had died three days ago, for whom she was still grieving, had left them (his wife and Kit’s father’s wife were both dead of lung cancer and Kit was an only child) a sizable inheritance to split. Nick asked how much was sizable. Kit said two million dollars. She got half.

“A millionaire,” she said. “I’m a millionaire at twenty-seven.”

She watched his face and paused for a sip before continuing. “I went back to the office that night and got there before you arrived for work, I guess. I spent a while in the office, making copies of disks I would need, collecting some papers, et cetera,” she said. “And I typed my resignation on his computer and left it on his desk.”

“And me?” Nick asked, tipping his scotch slightly. “Where do I fit in?”

“I decided that to celebrate, I would go out and sleep with the first attractive non-sleazeball I encountered,” she said, smiling. “And there you were.”

Nick looked at her blankly, not understanding.

“You have to understand,” she said. “I needed to make sure, before I told you.”

Then, after more silence from Nick, she said, “I wanted to make sure it would be more, enough so the money wouldn’t matter. And I got more, a lot more. I’m completely smitten.”

She explained to him that she took the whole sum and, after paying off all her credit card bills and her student loans, got together with a financial advisor and invested most of it, setting up a system that would give her one thousand dollars a week spending money. She also said figured she would start up her own business eventually, but for now she just wanted to be unemployed. She wanted to enjoy it, she said.

They dated about twice a week after that, with Kit making excuses to find herself in the neighborhood of her old job, and Nick finding reasons to be bored so he could call her. They saw a lot of movies, ate out almost every date, did a lot of wandering around the streets, Times Square, Battery Park at sunrise and Sundays by the river or at the beach. When asked by friends about this new relationship, Nick would say simply that they enjoyed each other’s company. But inside Nick something was growing that told him he may never need another friend again. He was beginning to feel the be-all-and-end all, the sacred finger touch, the giggle in their eyes, the unbearable beauty in the things they seemed to see and talk about. He had always told himself that what he wanted was someone who would be his best friend primarily and his girlfriend as an afterthought, as something assumed and not needed to be discussed, as it would be a given. And it was freeing, finally feeling it, finally calling himself on the fact that he wanted something and had gotten it and the secret joy... Nick was positive that he was having the best sex he would ever have in his life. He had never had sex that involved any kind of emotions, good or bad, so he was at kind of a loss to do anything but just ride the wave into the next meeting with her, whether in her apartment or under his desk, out of the view of the prying security cameras (he still hadn’t brought her back to his place and she didn’t necessarily seem to care).

They rarely brought up the money issue, but it brought itself up. It was usually in the form of a free night of drinking or Kit coming to meet him looking absolutely stunning in a new outfit. Nick was pulling in about four hundred a week, more than enough to support himself, and he knew Kit appreciated the fact that he didn’t need or ask for it. A strange, new calm began to manifest itself in Nick. He had never been dirt poor, but he had never really known the security of money not being an issue at all. He was unsure why it made him a little ashamed to think of it, but in truth it was a huge load off of both of their backs. Money wasn’t important to either one of them but not having to worry about it was important. Because that issue was totally taken out of the equation, it allowed them to focus on each other and enjoy a weekend in the islands or on the west coast every now and then.

As their relationship progressed and as they got to be bigger parts of each other’s life, things just merged as they slowly became part of each other’s atmosphere. They celebrated their one year anniversary in Las Vegas (after agreeing beforehand to bring sick amounts of money but under no circumstances end up in a chapel). They had an absolute blast. After that first crazy night at the casino, all Nick remembers is driving out to the middle of the desert with a case of champagne and getting drunk and making love under the stars. Nick, dizzy and barely able to comprehend what he was looking at, turned on his side and watched Kit’s naked body rise and fall with her breath, the cigarette, the joint, whatever it happened to be, her back draped in sand, her wide eyes raised to the sky. He said to her that he just realized that it was the first time he was staring at a full sky of stars, unimpeded by city light or dust in the atmosphere. She simply smiled and said yes, the night was perfect for so many reasons.

And Nick remembered shaking under her while she carried this sound, his name, through the night and it hit his ears like that, after a moment’s pause. But just a moment. Nick, his naked and still body stretching across the dry earth, felt Kit’s body fall down on top of him and the boundary between them had dissolved and he felt his cum and her cum united, breathing in the space between his shaft and her caress and she slid him out of her and their hips swelled and pressed into each other and nothing separated them out there, the eternal pulse of the Milky Way revealing itself over them and the arid space pressing into them, warm, generating, they in the night and the stars and the excited shiver of their bodies.

And Nick felt the first twinge of the fear.

It grew for a year. On the night of their second anniversary they went out to dinner and she proposed to him. As they stepped out the restaurant, she pulled out a thick gold band and held it up to him, the streetlights shining all distorted in the perfect curvature of the ring. Put this on, she said. I love you and want to make sure I’m with you for the rest of my life. I don’t want to marry you. I want to be with you.

Nick reacted with a pause, a pause, and she saw his silence and understood, nodding, past the point of no return, wishing things could be different.

They stopped officially being a couple not too long after that, but continued to see each other off and on for the next year, continuing to bookend wild animal sex with discussions of the potential to save the relationship. They met infrequently but their get-togethers were always intense and emotionally excessive and often too involved for either one of them to be able to handle it without one or both of them coming out of it feeling drained or questioning. He ended up spending a lot of time alone. The majority of his time out of work and home was spent with Merv in bars where they would get wasted and talk about anything and everything. But often the subject turned to Kit, for no other reason than Nick had absolutely no one else to talk about it with. He avoided it as much as he could out of respect for Merv but it didn’t always end up that way.

“I don’t know what to do,” Nick volunteered one night, slurring his words after a few drinks at the Rusty Nail, the only place with a bar that would serve them when they got off shift in the morning. “I love her so much but-”
“Listen,” Merv said. “In love there ain’t no buts.”

“Sure there are,” Nick said. “Love is built and nurtured with and centered around buts.”

“What do you want, man?” Merv asked. “Where are all of your buts going to fit in her life?”

“I want to feel like I made a difference,” Nic said.

“Shit,” Merv groaned. “You can’t make a difference from the sidelines watching. It sounds like you’ve been just letting this shit happen to you.”

“I just first want to make sure I’m loved.”

“She loves you, man, she really loves you.”

“I know she does,” Nick said. He shook his head. “That’s not the problem. I know that sucks as an explanation. But I can’t explain it. I know and believe her love. And I know she feels it because she’s the only one who really knows who I am. She sees who I am immediately.”

“Isn’t that the ideal?”

“But how could I be expected to deal with it, in the long run? It’s rare that you meet someone who can know you like that. It’s a different experience, a different sense of reality around her. Because absolutely nothing can be hidden. Without a sufficient foundation of time and experience dealing with that reality, confronting it, I wasn’t ready, I wasn’t prepared when I got into it, I couldn’t deal with what it was. It was the closest I’d ever gotten to something sacred. The first time I really understood what the word meant. It was too much over my expectations, too much over what I needed, and it got to the point where once I realized what was actually going on, it became so as I was intimidated by trying to bring this newly found internal concept of the sacred and try and apply it to something that would necessarily be bigger than me, have to transcend me, that I would have to remove myself from the equation and forget...” He trailed off.

“Nick, man, you’re losing me,” Merv asked, a bit wide-eyed with a touch of concern in his voice.

“I’m trying, Merv. But it’s hard-” a brief moment of eye contact here, letting Merv see the paranoia- “I just couldn’t do it. The thought of being married, even in love with someone, I couldn’t see past the duality. I can’t see the love. I could only see the forever.”

Nick closed his eyes and cupped his hands around his nose, and sighed as if in prayer. “The relationship and my desire for it became incompatible with the freedom that only it could have showed me,” he said, and couldn’t believe he had gotten to the point where that was the truth.

Things climaxed with Nick learning, during the peak heat of that summer, that not only was his older brother, who had since opened a bar in the downtown Albany area, gay but had been hiding it from everyone. He came out of the closet to Nick first, telephoning Nick’s apartment while he was at work when he had just gotten back from the doctor that day and his worst fears had been confirmed. He had late stage AIDS and would probably not live to see the new year. He died three weeks after the phone call, the day before Nick was intending to visit him for what he expected would be the last time.

Nine days later he was on a silent Greyhound bus ride to Albany, to mourn with his family and iron out the conditions of his taking over the bar for a while. New York City had kicked his ass good. He had no idea whether he wanted to come back. At least any time soon.