SOME NIGHTS WHEN I’M ALONE, I look for solace in the phantom arms of an old flame. Lover from my past, she is no longer here. She is somewhere in Japan and we will never meet again. Whatever, I’ve moved on anyway.
But on nights when the apartment is quiet and the air is unusually cool, I sense myself drifting back to an old familiar place. The scent of crushed leaves hangs in the air, and somewhere in the distance a line of fire separates sky and earth. From where I’m standing, I can make out her khakied bottom drooped over a swing. I run towards her but she won’t greet me just yet. She simply returns her crushingly coy smile. When we collide I take her in my arms as she sinks her tender head on my chest. I am sedated by her soft, pliant cheeks but being kept awake by the cold sledgehammers hanging from her side, disguising as arms. We are baptized anew, here in this sandbox garden, in the bright blues and reds of the swings and slides and jungle gyms. She still exists here in this place, and if our vows held true the memories would have remained until my cerebrum failed me.
But she left. Not long after, the finer things began to melt away. Things like her moles ... did she have six or seven? Was the last one above her rook, or was it the tragus? I used to run my fingers over her face as if I were connecting dots on a map, and now for the life of me I couldn’t remember where or how many. Then again I ask myself, what are memories? They dwell but for a time, and without something to stoke them they become like shadows, and shadows more like whispers or uncertain dreams until they are abandoned like old dusty saloons by the roadside.
So, on a night when I’m sweeping the balcony for used matches and puddles of ash and paper, I froze. The unwelcome chill stung the hairs on my neck, and the matter was not the cold but where it led and what it meant. I decided quickly to settle upon a diversion—Saints of Bovine. It was a local watering hole that sat a few blocks from my apartment. It’s been years since I’ve gone, but I figured I could use a drink or five.
I walked several blocks following the haunting glow of the moon, shining like a pearl loosed in the sky. I passed a dead section of financial buildings with series of tents stretched across the sidewalk. They served as temporary asylums for protesters looking to occupy another night. Upon turning a corner, I saw homeless laid out on the pavement. Most of them were sleeping soundly while a couple sang something like church gospel. They struggled to keep pitch but their voices carried hope down from the corner into the hopeless street. Two blocks later I had arrived at a bar hugging the street corner. Two impossibly dark windows flanked each side of wooden double doors. I stared up at the top of the entrance, fixated by a flickering neon bull with emerald green eyes. I entered into a dark foyer whose walls were lined with several old Cubist paintings. They looked Spanish but not quite Picasso. At the end of the narrow hallway, a solid six-four with a soul patch stood guard over the entrance. He looked me over slowly, he had a lazy eye. He nodded and opened the door.
The room effused a devilish charm I hated but could not deny. Large fluorescent red bulbs illumined the room through fleur-de-lis patterned covers. On the wall opposite the bar protruded three bull heads, the middle enshrined in bronze. Beneath, a modest fire emanated from a black stone hearth. I made my way through the pockets of thirty-somethings, some possessing the look of lawyers, others actors. Their voices spilled over their drinks, and when a story was especially amusing, they would slap each other’s backs like old bunkmates. The suits had a way of holding their glasses that made them look good, that made you want one, too. A puncher’s chance I’m mistaken, but I’ll be damned if they didn’t know how to talk their way out of something or at least look good pretending. To tell you the truth it felt very Hollywood. But here’s what I knew: thirty minutes earlier I was nothing if not expired. But with his neon pupils, the devilish bull had somehow galvanized me, as if he had knowingly lured me into his sanctuary.
I pulled up to the counter and noticed shelves stacked with bottles high to the ceiling. I could drown myself in this library of liquor, I thought. Down the counter I spotted an attractive brunette standing indifferently with her drink. Her gaze was fixed on the decor but I could tell she was tending to something else. “What would you like?” The bartender possessed a sharp nose and good hairline. I felt like a gin and tonic but asked for a vesper instead. In the minute it took to prepare the drink I had stolen several glances in her direction. She caught me once but quickly looked away, shifting her eyes with indifference as if to say she was comfortably alone and adamant on not being bothered. But I had decided on the matter.
“Open or close?”
“Open.”
I took the drink in one hand and channeling my newfound courage, snaked my way through the crowd. I had a better handle on her as I drew nearer, looking about thirty with slight circles cupped under her eyes. She wore a black decollete blouse that fit snugly on her chest and her bangs swept lightly across her left eye. Her looks would not command this place but she was doubtlessly pretty.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hello,” she said, stirring the ice in her drink.
“How goes your evening?”
“I was just about to leave.”
“But if you resist me now, then you won’t be able to resist me later,” I said. She scoffed, putting her half-empty glass on the counter. She asked if that was the best line I had because it did not amount to a favorable impression. Yet I insisted: simple conversation was what I really came for, and I’ll have you know that I didn’t do any lines except for coke. Judging by her pause I had counted my joke worse than the plague. As I was about to leave, I hear, “Anya. Nice to meet you.” She raised her pinky as the glass met her lips.
Odd. There was a hint of something foreign in that name, in her voice. Polish? Hungarian? She seemed to grow more offended as I delved deeper into the Eastern Bloc, before dropping a bona fide fugetaboutit.
"Wait, Brooklyn?”
“Well, it’s a tough one," she says through a mischievous grin. "Brooklyn, by the way of Kiev, after a brief childhood in Moscow. Try spending 7 years in Williamsburg getting into trouble with girls your mother had warned you about."
I discovered that her father had dabbled in some business for a pharmaceutical factory, which led them to the states when she was thirteen. She abandoned her dreams of being an Olympic archer when her family had originally moved, but somewhere along the way picked up architecture, which she studied for a few years before settling on the family business, I think—it’s hard to piece this together on alcohol. I asked her if pharmacy was code for drug trafficking, whether her father was really involved with the Russian mob and that I should fear someone sneaking behind and cutting my throat. This would indeed be my fate, she confirmed, if I did not buy her another drink.
I came back to the good-looking bartender and asked for another round along with shots of tequila. Anya was starting to come around, I could tell by her loosened neck and shoulders. Her eyes danced mischievously, as if pushing us to be bolder. The shots ran down my chest like a burning river. After a few more sips she drew in close and our mouths met, my hands landing clumsily on her side. Her lips held a subtle trace of peppermint. Anya withdrew for a moment, as though to decide whether she really wanted this, then leaned in again.
We cut out into the streets, my arms around her soft shoulders as she leaned in for balance. She didn’t live too far, I hoped. We hadn’t crossed the block before my cheeks felt pricked like a thousand needles. The air was still cold, but it was no matter. My desire for her felt something like fire pulsing through my veins. I wanted to stroke her cheek and caress the small of her back and meet her brittle neck with my lips. To know what a real woman felt like, once again, it was almost too much. I quickened my pace—anything past Main seemed cruel.
Rounding the corner we passed a dilapidated pawn shop. The advertisements on the windows were written in a mustard yellow that was familiar: We buy gold ... Anything of value. I stared through the dark windows but couldn’t make anything of the store. Memory soon sets in—rebooting the outlines of random tool kits and dusty guitars and blue stained carpet. I’m combing through old radio units in the midst of modest aisles and she is there to meet me once again with her dimpled cheeks and long strands of black. Her eyes were attached to the lens of a white wiry beam.
“Broken,” she said.
“Let me see.” I stared into the eyepiece. Pitch black.
“It’s just like us humans.”
“To make crappy telescopes?”
“No, not that,” she paused. “I’m speaking mainly to the human condition. The idea that humans can be both so brilliant and foolish. We can measure the distance of galaxies far away and make a telescope to feel so near to something as distant as stars. Then we’ll turn around and make bombs to argue about who did it first.” Her mind worked like a six-barrel revolver. I never knew exactly when she’d shoot or what she was trying to aim for, but I had always admired the explosive wit packed in her synapses.
“Well, you have to consider your options here,” I said.
“Which are?”
“One, eliminate the entire human race because we’re obviously the problem. Or two, broker world peace, and we can all share the telescope.”
“Sharing? But this is Amurrica!” she exclaimed.
“Well, there’s always a third option.”
“Which is?”
“We can just make out here in the aisles.”
I turned her around for a kiss.
She smirked. “It’d be nice if you could fix it, though.”
“What? The human condition?”
“No, silly. The telescope.”
She was a natural, the way she would misdirect me. I spun the telescope around and examined it in detail. The mount was shaky and the finder scope cheap.
She turned to the clerk. “How much is it?”
“Ten bucks,” he returned.
I turned around and whispered in a voice below the clerk. “You’re joking, right?”
“Why not?”
“Because who the hell would pay ten dollars for a telescope that doesn’t work?”
“You would. Someone who can obviously fix it.”
“If you really want a telescope, why don’t we just look for a new one?”
“Because this one is quite handsome, in the old Robert Redford charming sort of way,” she said. “Any fool can go and buy a telescope. What’s so endearing about that?”
I paused. “If I buy it, will you make out with me?”
“Maybe, if your lips weren’t so gross and chapped.”
“You’re such a tease.”
I left the store ten dollars poorer that night, but at the time it seemed the only thing to do. Of course, I was never able to fix it. The main parts were broken, and I knew this, but for her I would have tried anyway.
I snapped back into the steps of cold concrete. I was still keeping pace with Anya. But as hard as I tried I couldn’t recall the last block since the pawn shop. I don’t even remember Anya muttering a sound—she could’ve been telling me all the things she’d do to me and it wouldn’t have moved me an inch. Put it out of your damned mind, my inner man shouted. While it is still night, and there knocking a girl who would have you however you like. Across the highway overpass her complex glistened under the lamps projecting from the garden. We walked through a dank lobby, up a flight of stairs and made a left at the entryway. 251. She unlocked the door, threw her bag on the hardwood and told me to wait as she went to the bathroom. Her furnishings were trendy: black and white stills of metropolises hanging on grunge olive walls, and a bookshelf that doubled as a social mixer with bottles of merlot, vinyl records and books on Gehry and Wright. I sat uneasily on her couch, trying desperately to wade against the rushing loss of desire.
Anya came out looking brighter, more flush to her cheeks.
“Would you like something to drink?”
“No, I’m okay.”
Anya pulled up next to me on the couch, and smiled coyly. She seemed much more human now, not like the doll I had imagined at the bar. Her face came at me slowly, tilted at an angle to meet my lips. But I felt stiff, eerily tense.
She pulled back. “Something wrong?”
I looked away, silent.
“Girlfriend? Wife?” Her eyes were scanning hard for a read. But what is there to tell her? That I wanted her, no, that I wanted something more than her? That I was hoping I could get back what I once knew? That I desired to come to a place where joining our bodies would mean something because I had discovered her irrational fear of pigeons or learned about her deepest longing to have somebody recite Murakami at her funeral? Perhaps Anya could tell me something about Tolstoy or the Orthodox Church or why the cold war was so, you know, cold—but alas, it occurred to me that with such thoughts I had painted a desire to make love, to rediscover a soul and know her in the truest sense. But Anya was not in the mood for such things. She just wanted to fuck.
I tried mustering words but my lips didn’t comply. I simply shook my head and said, “I can’t.”
She spoke firmly. “Well, then. You should leave.”
I nodded.
“Go, get out.” Her eyes shot out onto me like dark hellish marbles rolling against the cold canvas of my soul. She marched to the door and threw it open. Deciding against further commotion, I got up and made out the door.
It was a long dreary walk back home. It hadn’t occurred to me the distance between our apartments, how opposite our directions, until I noticed Bovine again. The moon was hidden in a strange purple haze of clouds, and the air no longer felt challenging to my lungs. In the extra miles lay a time drawn out to ponder my emotional incontinence.
I came back to my apartment and shot straight for the balcony. I overheard the television coming from next door, tuned to some late night talk show. I thought about how nice it’d be to take a hot shower and turn in for the evening. Or maybe a bath where I can just soak, unmoved. The sky now seemed rather sublime, as I studied the contours of her violet clouds. If I looked hard enough, I could separate the stars from satellites. I blew into the cold air to mask them, blowing deep breaths against the black canvas. There was strange comfort in how the plumes enveloped me, in circles going nowhere, before vanishing into the dark of night. ⏹