“This is perfect,” she said. She sat him in the chair and unbuttoned his shirt, straddled his lap. It was, fortunately, an armless chair. They got it cornered between the desk and the wall so it wouldn’t roll around. She lifted her dress, slid her panties to the side, lowered herself onto him. He groaned and tugged her bra down, and very soon, alarmingly soon, they were both done. The whole thing had been a shudder, a sneeze, some quick and involuntary trick of the body. He wrapped the used condom in a sheet of printer paper.
“Don’t throw that in the trash here,” she said. “Walk it down to the street.” She was lying on the floor, stretching out her back. Jake put the paper wad on the chair and lay next to her.
He said, “Are you okay?”
“I just have strange ways of dealing with nerves.”
“Hey,” he said. He ran a finger down her chin, her neck. “Why do you think we met each other?”
“Because you were drunk on the airplane.”
“I mean cosmically. People don’t come into each other’s lives like this for no reason. Why’d the universe throw us together?”
“Did you say cosmically?”
“Don’t pretend you don’t believe in it. Nothing’s random, it can’t be. The people we meet, the people we’re smashed together with, right?”
“I’m not, like, ending up with you. This is not destiny.”
“I didn’t mean that. I’m being philosophical. Don’t you ever think about that stuff? Like, where we go when we die?”
“Christ, Jake, it’s two in the afternoon.”
“I think it’s like sleeping,” he said, “but you get to help dream up the world. So whatever happens here on earth, all the weird stuff that just happens, a volcano erupting or whatever, that’s the collective dreams of everyone who’s ever lived.”
“So these attacks—a lot of dead people dreamed them.”
“Right.”
“Huh.” She started laughing. “Yeah, no. That’s very wrong.”
“I don’t actually believe it. But it’s nice to think. And it’s just that the world is so weird sometimes, it’s the only thing that makes sense.”
“You think the dead control us.”
“Sure.”
“I’m gonna tell you a secret,” she said, and he rolled onto his side. She had fresh gauze on her hand, and she picked at the edge. “We’re in charge of them. I mean, my friend Julian? When I thought he was dead, all the things we’d ever said to each other, all my memories of him, they were mine. One of the weirdest things about seeing him again was that something left me. Some kind of energy. Like the air whooshing out of a balloon.”
Jake said, “Is it a relief, or are you sad?”
“Not sad, that would be ridiculous.”
“You lost a loss. That’s still a loss.”
Fiona sat up. “Thanks, Dr. Seuss.”
“What, did I hit a nerve? Hey, come back!”
* * *
—
Out on the street, when she turned her phone on, a message from Claire: Everything was fine. And maybe tomorrow, did Fiona and Cecily, together, want to meet Nicolette and watch her for an hour while Claire was at work and before Kurt could get across the city to pick her up? Her babysitting had fallen through.
1990
The broken rib prevented Yale from doing more in the apartment than he’d have liked. Teresa insisted he sit on the couch while she paraded box after box of stuff in front of him. Charlie’s clothes, which he didn’t want. Charlie’s books, which he didn’t want either. The kitchen things that had once been his, but which he’d long since replaced. Nico’s stripy orange scarf. Yale couldn’t believe it. He ran his fingers through the fringe. He rolled it carefully into a fat cylinder. He’d give it back to Fiona, finally. Here was his own Michigan sweatshirt, smelling like a crypt. He wondered if Charlie had kept it on purpose, or if it had just stayed buried somewhere, unnoticed. Here was the map of Chicago that Nico had drawn on top of, illustrating the places they’d all been together—a tiny Richard with his camera on the Belmont Rocks, a tiny Julian holding a tray of food by the sandwich shop where he used to work, Yale wearing a beret at the Art Institute. This, he would keep.
When he reached for it, Teresa said, “Don’t keep moving all over. If you don’t take full breaths, you’ll wind up with pneumonia.”
It felt good to be mothered. And with Charlie gone, he didn’t feel guilty taking up what little mothering energy Teresa had left. So he stayed on the couch that still, after all these years, softened itself naturally to the shape of his body, and he let her bring him tea with honey, and he let her fill two big boxes with things he knew he might never unpack.
The apartment was bizarrely the same. Charlie hadn’t redecorated even a little, hadn’t added anything to the walls. The same refrigerator magnets, same sad plant on the windowsill. Yale was glad. It would have felt bad, in some inexplicable, unjustifiable way, to see physical evidence of the ways Charlie’s world had moved on. Or maybe it was just that he wanted to believe in a world where this apartment still existed, where it was forever 1985, where the door might open at any moment and there would be Julian with a party invitation, Terrence with beer, Nico with a new comic for Charlie.
Teresa said, “You’re not going back to work, are you? Don’t even pop in. You know how people are, you check in and next thing they’ll hand you a mountain of papers. Tell me you’ll lounge at home and do nothing else.”
He assured her he’d take as much time as he needed. One of the great things about DePaul was how little emotional investment he had in his work. They were currently raising funds for a new parking garage.
Yale wouldn’t be able to carry these boxes home, even in a cab, so he promised he’d return next week when Teresa was here again from California. She’d been back and forth since Charlie died in December, though Yale wished she’d just go sun herself in the Caribbean for a month and sleep. “The fact that this plant is alive,” he said, “means you’ve been doing too much.”
He called Asher, who’d volunteered to pick him up. It would be the first time he’d seen him since the protest, since the kiss. Yale had been the last into that particular paddy wagon, so although Asher had been arrested a minute later, he never saw him—in part because, thanks to Fiona’s persistent screaming about lawyers, Yale was sent to the hospital rather than put in the holding cell.
Asher could be there in five minutes. Yale leaned his head back on the sofa, smelled the fabric. Teresa was going around with the Dustbuster. He said, “I have a story about the map.” The one Nico had drawn on. She stopped cleaning, sat on the floor in front of the couch, her knees tucked under her chin. “Okay, this little car he drew, way over here?” Yale pointed. “We were in our friend Terrence’s car, and we were supposed to head south on the expressway, but we ended up shooting off west on the Eisenhower instead. Terrence had no sense of direction. Which is odd for a math teacher, right? So we got off the highway and got totally turned around, and it’s this terrible neighborhood.” Yale remembered all of them slinking low in their seats, as if that would keep them safe. “But we went in a big circle and eventually we found all these streets named after presidents, which we thought was good, because they go in order, and they stretch all the way back downtown, to the lake. Charlie was always complaining he couldn’t find his way around downtown because he couldn’t remember the presidents. If they were named for the British monarchy, he’d be set. So we’re going back down through the president streets, you know, Madison, Monroe, Adams, Jackson—and just in that one part of town, before Van Buren, the next thing was this tiny street called Gladys Avenue. And Charlie goes, ‘There was a President Gladys?’ He was serious. Terrence never let him forget that, oh my God. He used to make up facts about the Gladys administration.”