Pay As You Go

by Eskor David Johnson

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

New to town and delusionally confident, Slide imagined himself living in a glossy building with doormen and sweeping views of the skyline. Instead he’s landed in a creaking, stuffy apartment with two roommates: a loping giant who hardly leaves his room, and a weight-obsessed neurotic who keeps no fewer than forty-seven lamps throughout the house, blazing at all hours.

Unwilling to accept this fate, Slide—a barber with an opaque past—embarks on a quest for the perfect apartment, pinballing through the sprawling, madcap city of Polis and its endless procession of neighborhoods. As he bounces from foldout couch to disaster-relief tent, falling in with some tough types, Slide begins to realize that he’s going to have to scratch and claw just to claim a place for himself in this world—let alone a place with in-unit laundry.

An exuberant, fantastical odyssey, Pay As You Go wonders if what we’re searching for is ever really out there. Its pages—surreal, biting, and teeming with life—announce the startling talents of Eskor David Johnson, who knows that all any of us really want is a place to rest our head.

 

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Release date: October 24, 2023

Publisher: McSweeney's Publishing

Print pages: 460

Sample

MIDDLETON

(in which the Polis is first exposed as an infernal dead end
and—in a midnight tale—a prodigal daughter
returns, to the detriment of high-story hopes)

 

ELECTRIC DAY

My first apartment in Polis, it was shit, complete shit. I used to say to the man Calumet, Hey, Calumet, how come we’re here living like shit, huh? Calumet would say, What you mean “shit”?, and I would say, I mean shit shit. I mean: look: the toilet isn’t flushing properly, and this shitty paint job, it’s peeling in all the wrong places. I swear, sometimes at night, pieces of paint are landing in my mouth and I wake up choking. There’s never any juice in the fridge. And I don’t like the sound of the doorbell, when the doorbell rings it makes me jump, we should get a gentler doorbell is all. The windows are dusty and they don’t look out onto anything. It’s like the sky’s never blue when I look out any of these windows—they’re filtering out all the hope. The one in the living room looks out onto a wall. The stairway smells. There’s that woman next door who hides when you see her and I think she may be a fugitive. We only have one chair. If I’m sitting in the chair and someone else wants to sit we have to argue about it. I’d like a few plants for the countertops if that’s not too much to ask, an orchid or something like that. Have you ever smelled an orchid, Calumet? And why is the TV remote always dead? I swear it was just Tuesday that I bought new batteries for the TV remote and now it’s dead and I have to get up if I want to change the TV channel like I’m some kind of a savage and by the time I do that someone has taken my seat in the chair. All the mirrors lie. The floor creaks. We have carpet instead of rugs. The microwave never heats up my food. I used to think, Fine, it’s not heaven or anything, but it’s where the heart is. But here in this place, Calumet, it’s like I can’t quite hear my heart anymore. It’s like my heart isn’t feeling very welcome and it’s getting quiet like a guest who doesn’t want to bother anyone. I feel meek. What’s going to happen in the winter when the frost comes for us? I don’t trust the radiator. Are you ready to lose a toe? You down for that, Calumet? What kind of a life is this...? And then Calumet would say, “Ooh-wee, for fuck’s sake, man, you’ve only been here for a week.”

True, I was no expert, but it doesn’t take a whole week to recognize shit. I was tired already. I didn’t like that there was no elevator and we lived on the ninth floor. I didn’t like that we had to wash our clothes at the laundromat where the orphans stole my socks. I didn’t like that we were so far north in Middleton that the rest of Polis could forget us there, and that every dozen hours it seemed another body whose soul had abandoned it was pulled up from the piers. I was tired of the June heat that wrapped our throats like pythons. I was tired of the one thousand lamps on in the middle of the day just because Eustace had a few phobias. My eyes were tired.

“Seriously, Calumet, what’s the big deal if we turn off just a few of these lights?” I said.

I was out in the living room suffering beneath the glare. Lamps were on in every corner, bunches of them plugged a dozen at a time into struggling surge protectors and shining on the walls such that they were extremely bright. Two small ones on the kitchenette countertop, and another on the stand next to me in case you needed some extra light for reading. There were forty-seven lamps in that apartment, I’d counted. I had to shout for Calumet to hear me because his bedroom was the last of the three, all the way down the hall.

“Don’t,” said Calumet. “Believe me.”

“I can’t just believe you over something like that, Calumet. This is unnatural. What about the bill?” I said.

I heard him rustling as though he was coming over. But maybe he changed his mind, for he just yelled again instead. “Eustace pays the bill,” he said.

I said, “He’s not even here right now, Calumet.”

“Slide,” he said. “Please, just stop bringing it up. Reread the rules already.” I turned to the big poster on the wall. Okay, okay: I’ll reread the rules.

RULE 1: SHOES OFF AT THE DOOR.

RULE 2: ONE FLUSH PER BATHROOM USE.

RULE 3: FAMILY DINNER ON SUNDAY EVENINGS.

RULE 4: LAMPS STAY ON.

RULE 5: NO COOKING FISH IN THE OVEN.

RULE 6: RECYCLE.

Oh Lord. That whole thing made me want to cry.

Eustace’s name was the one on the lease, so Eustace got to make rules about lamps being on and to have the big bedroom at the start of the hall; mine was in the middle. He was an unlikely tyrant. Every evening he burst through the door as if escaping an ambush and headed straight to the bathroom, where he groaned in delight while showering. The trail of his multicolored uniform lay in a line—I think he worked at a toy store assembling robots. He never got fully dressed after; he’d come back out into the living room wearing a pair of white briefs and blend himself a glass of milk, raw eggs, and cinnamon, part of some liquid diet he was on. He was a fat man who had lost weight, with flaps of loose skin, transparent hair, and wet, unblinking eyes. I’d never seen anyone so pale. He seemed some kind of a deep fish from those parts of the water the sun cannot reach. After finishing his milk in the kitchenette he’d inspect all his lamps, then come stand beside the chair I was on and try the same shit (Eustace, he was always trying the same shit): he’d say, “I think there might be a game on,” which was a trick to make me get up and change the channel so he could take my seat in the chair. I’d fallen for that once. He never even said what kind of a game it was. Now all I did was tell him I wasn’t interested. I had to double down on whatever I was watching, even if it was shit, and he would start fidgeting in all manner of ways. He cleared his throat, he took two-steps-here two-steps-there, he went down the hall to ask Calumet if he wanted to watch the game, he swapped in a new bulb on a lamp (that made him hold his breath for a few seconds), his allergies kicked in and he sneezed sneezed sneezed, he donned a mask and gloves and sprayed bleach in the air, he decided right now was a good time to vacuum on the loudest setting. Geez already. Fine, I got up. He’d settle between the arms with a satisfied squish. Once, when he took the seat, he retrieved a pair of batteries from beneath the cushion and popped them into the remote to change the channel to what he liked, documentaries about aliens. Storming off to my room—it didn’t help: I’d hate the place all the same: the green of the carpet was faded and dingy, the cheap furnishings gave the impression of termites. For all my time there I never once slept properly on that skinny bed. And every morning my door was a little bit open even though I’d closed it for sure.

“You know, Slide,” Eustace said one time in that needling voice of a TV commercial, “I’ve been putting some thought into why you don’t sleep well.”

“Who says I don’t sleep well?” I said. I was pouring cereal for dinner. We were quite close in the kitchenette and the lights lit up the veins in his arms.

“I see that you sleep on your back and have a hard time turning.”

“You see?”

“Perhaps a simple remedy of spinal alignment might help. It’s a problem with evolution, really, fascinating stuff. If you’d like—”

“You been opening my door at night, Eustace? You come in and breathe over me on some sick shit?”

Right away he lifted his shake to his lips and finished the rest of it in three glug glug glugs.

“No.”

“I’m serious, Eustace,” I said. “My room is my room and that’s it. Something in here has to be sacred.”

“Well, of course, Slide,” he said, running water over his glass. Then added, “But it is very dark in there.”

So that night I moved the dresser to block the door while I slept and that next week Eustace began inviting friends over from work for a tour of the apartment, stopping at my bedroom for a particularly long time to list the dimensions, as if it was up for lease. “Hey, Eustace, why’re you always showing them my bedroom like it’s up for lease?” I said. He laughed that off. Eustace, he was always trying to laugh things off. In his own room the door was forever open and the lights on even while he slept. His bedding was all white, a multitude of lotions arranged on the nightstand, and he had a stack of spare light bulbs in a neat pile in the corner. The whole place had a glow of unreality—just knowing it was so bright in there made it hard for me to sleep. You’ll have to excuse where the floorboards are a little bendy here, he’d be saying to whoever it was, it’s where I do my jumping jacks on mornings. Which was another thing: he wouldn’t shut up about all-the-weight he’d lost. He thought he was being real slick about it, too, bringing it up by-the-way. He’d ask, Did anyone notice the fourth-floor stairs are a little steeper than the rest? That’s why so many people have tripped on them, oh goodness, which used to happen to him, too, before he lost all-the-weight. Or: Oh, what’s in this jar I’ve been shaking for the past fifteen minutes? Funny you should ask, these are all the replacement buttons I used to keep around for when one would pop off my shirt before I lost all-the-weight, here, you can have a few, I don’t need them anymore. Also, was anyone else thinking of running the half-marathon in a couple months? The thought just occurred, is all. (That one I would have liked to see!) I was walking by once when I saw him tugging at the sides of his belly in the bathroom. He twisted and twirled before the mirror, then pretended he’d just seen me: “Oh my, Slide! I didn’t see you. Since you are there, help me with this one thing. People are saying I should get a tummy tuck now that I’ve lost all-the-weight. Well, I’m hardly taking them seriously. I think I’m just fine. In any case, I’m trying to see what they mean.” He reached around to his lower back and grabbed handfuls of skin, pulling it tight. “Here, would you mind?” he said, offering me the folds. He was already looking in the mirror to see the results. Me I’d just eaten. “That’s quite alright, Eustace,” I said. “I’m sure you’re fine as is.” Our eyes met through our reflections. He unclenched and let the skin drop. “Right, that’s okay, I’m not taking it seriously, of course,” he said, and clicked on the electric razor he used to shave. He hummed an oblivious tune while he worked and put on a face like he hadn’t a care in the entire world. But when I went to brush my teeth that night, I found all my toothpaste had been used up.

That’s how he was. A vicious coward. Nipping at the edges instead of biting anything. “Hey, Calumet,” I’d say, knocking on the wall between our rooms, “I’m telling you, if ever I turn up missing, Eustace is the one who did it.” I heard him moving over to the thin spot we used to talk, clearing his throat before saying anything. He said, “Learn to coexist, Slide,” in his sad cadence of a funeral dirge. I harrumphed onto my bed and flicked away some paint crumbs. Tired old Calumet. Easy for him to say, he was the smart one. He hardly ever left that room.

All that summer the subway up in Middleton had been under renovation and I hadn’t had a chance to use it not even once. Polis had sent a horde of buses to serve as a temporary fix, but they were janky and full of problems. The one time I’d tried riding one, it was getting harder and harder to breathe until a boy toward the back began yelling, “Smoke! It’s smoke! The engine’s melting!,” and a woman with a metal bar in her forearm used it to smash open a window. Everyone poured out, cutting themselves on glass and running to the front to curse at the driver and take pictures of her face. Well, that was frustrating. We hadn’t made it more than five blocks from where I’d had to wait in line a full hour just to get on. My only other options if I wanted to go anywhere were taking a taxi, which were as rare and expensive as amber jewels, or walking south through the stretch of neighborhoods where the gangs were in the midst of a spat. All day long they flew different-colored kites depending on their street and eyed the world with suspicion. I’d ended up there without knowing anything, one Wednesday afternoon, admiring the brownstones and looking like the perfect idiot. The houses had boarded-up windows and gardens of dried grass. A few people were out on the stoops calling to each other or playing music. At my side there appeared a black girl on a tiny bike.

“You with Ray and them?” she said, keeping pace.

I looked at her politely and said, “I don’t know any Rays, so no, I’m afraid not.”

She cut me off with her bike. She said, “Why you have to answer all complicated? I didn’t ask for a biography. Hey, Patricio, Steve, this guy is with Ray and them.”

From a few of the stoops stood up a sudden group of nine, all in orange. They called to each other in bird noises and ran down the steps. Soon I was surrounded.

“You with Ray and them?” one of them repeated. I said, “I don’t know any Rays! I don’t have anything to do with Ray!” Another one nodded as I spoke, convincing himself. “Yeh, yeh, that’s just some shit Ray would have his people say.” “Well, who you with then?” said another. “You with Z-Town? With X-Block? With the Bam Bams? With Ghost?” I said no, no, no, and no, none of those either. “You a JagHead Boy? An East Town Shade? You run with Gulag? Uncle Death? One Shot? Diablos? Why’re you wearing shorts? Where’s your kite? You think we won’t know who you are? You down with Slice? The Pharaohs? You with Red Light? With Dwarf? You like all your toes, my dude? Which toe you don’t like? You have a favorite...”

They were teens and younger, their expressions varying from the brightly eager to the hollow, as if a wind flickered the candlelight of their eyes. They had dry, cracked lips, and the meanest looking of them all was a big-shouldered rogue whose tongue was a sticky pink for being so parched. In all their hands were the thin strings leading upward to a cluster of orange kites bobbing in the air like buoys. Me I was panicking:

“You have to believe me... it’s some kind of a mistake... give me a chance and I won’t come back... come on, I mean, please...”

“Listen, my guy,” said the girl on the bike, leaning in with a bit of pity, “you can’t just be walking all around like you don’t know anything. It’s a crisis going on.”

“A crisis?” I asked, stalling for time.

“That’s what I said. Don’t you know there’s no water in the pipes? Don’t you know my grandma hasn’t showered? Where you from? You with H-Zone? With the Destroyers? You can’t just be nobody if you’re walking around here. You can’t not know about the drought. It’s been months we’re talking about—what are you? The last person on earth? You up from a coma? Things is serious around here, you understand me? That hydrant by the corner is ours. We saw you walking for it. You with Bomb Teeth? You down with Sniper King? Tell them no deal. Tell them we still need the juice. Tell them End Times are moving in on the XGs and it’s about to get hot. I’m being serious now, no more playing. You with Yup Yup? With Ratatat? You rep for Ozone? For Karma? Why’s your face familiar? Why were your hands in your pockets? You know Plimpton? Mantis? Glass Jaw? Shortie? Du-Wop? Vault? Fifty Cal? Vamps? Phoenix? Marty? Red Bite? Rook? This ringing a bell, my guy? Gortat? Poison? Fried Blood? Mr. Midnight? Cheebo...” I must have nearly broken my neck trying to convince her, shaking my head like a maniac. Please, I was saying, I’m being serious, I was only here for a walk. She seemed to settle at last and consider me for the first time. In the sky above, sprawling toward the horizon’s every direction, a rainbow of dangling kites. “Fine,” she said. “Then take off your shoes.”

Stranded! I was stranded. Two months in and I hadn’t seenanything. All day long traffic jams clogged the streets of Upper Middleton and sometimes drivers fainted onto their horns just from the waiting. The rats had left for the sewers to try cooling off. Hot garbage flavored the air. Most of the buildings in that part were the hopeless brown of government concrete, none of the skyscrapers, none of the lights, the things you hear about. Stepping out of ours and onto Aramaya Street, you were struck at once by a brain-numbing heat that made everyone shuffle like zombies. Indigenous boys wove through the crowd selling spray bottles of ice water and fat people were catching their breath on every bench in sight. The hustlers on the corners had taken to holding parasols over their heads. Everything looked yellow. On my way back to work from lunch one day, I was walking past the protesters in front of the subway when a blackman on a cane stopped me. “Young blackman, you see it, don’t you? You see what’s happening,” he said. I didn’t know what that meant. The protesters were holding up signs like NO SUBWAY, NO PEACE! and trying to start a chant. As the man went on, his head doddered at an odd angle and a trickle of spit ran along his chin. “I’ve tried to be reasonable but they wouldn’t listen. Wouldn’t listen! Even when I laid out my concerns. Now, when you get home it’s very important that you transcribe a message. That way they’ll listen. We’re starting a petition. Linda, she never used to listen. What’s that? I’ve been putting on my shoes for sixty-five years, same as anyone, now let me explain...” Oh: he was just another crazy. I swear, there was no one there who wasn’t crazy. “Hey, man,” I had to cut by him and say, “I gotta be getting back to work...” Then at the barbershop where I worked the two other barbers Rex and Reginald mocked all the cuts I gave and people never wanted to sit in my chair! It was a long, narrow space with cream walls and pictures of great boxing matches hung up everywhere. The ceiling had two fans, one spinning above each of their chairs, mine was the chair without a ceiling fan. Rex and Reginald, they were both Jamaican, always laughing. They would have laughed on a sinking ship. Watch out! they’d tell people, New Boy couldn’t cut your head if you had five heads! Hya hya hya.Watch it! New Boy needs an instruction manual! Hya hya hya. He cuts hair from a stencil! Hya hya hya. Careful! New Boy only knows one kind of cut! Hya hya hya hyaa... Now, it is true I knew only one kind of cut, a bald fade with a line-up around the sides, but I knew that cut very well. I could go toe-to-toe with the best of them. Me what I liked to do was have a stack of clean washcloths chilling in a cooler with ice that I used to wipe everyone’s neck of sweat and hang around their shoulders before I got started. I’d gone and bought a mobile fan for my countertop that I’d adjust to their liking or even turn it off if that’s what they wanted for whatever reason. I did my business with a razor plus a comb and always made sure to say No-really-it’s-okay before accepting any tips. I looked very handsome in my black apron, my afro patted down. Still, everyone sat in my chair as if for electrocution. Rex and Reginald would warn them, Easy, easy, we only hired New Boy because he begged! We don’t know his credentials! The finicky Dominicans, the woman who came for her eyebrows, they were all nervous. One time it got so bad that a little boy in my chair started to cry.

“You two are not helping me build a clientele!” I told Rex and Reginald while sweeping up that afternoon.

“And you,” they said, “are lucky the client can’t tell what you ah do them!”

They spun in their seats, cackling, stopping only to open the little fridge in the corner, where they kept the black stouts to end their day. Rex he was very dark but had pink arms from burns; Reginald was short, with a clown’s agile face, and always wore a mesh shirt through which you could see his nipples. When they laughed it was as if their whole jaws came unhinged. They’d sit, sip, and look through the glass storefront as if it were a screen. Across the street was a hospice with a fenced-in courtyard where the nurses took the old people out to sun. Come afternoon, they wheeled them out and left them in a face-to-face clump, then stood to the side talking on their phones. Those old folks would remain endlessly slouched, stagnant as reptiles, watching the world in disbelief. That made me want to cry. Who had organized all this? Where was the planning? There was no planning. It didn’t matter if you went left or right: the drugstore was next to another drugstore, the United Arms High School was on the same block as a tattoo parlor, there were too many dry cleaners, every liquor shop had lines stretching outside, the gutters ran with sweat, sometimes we looked to the sky to see if any clouds were coming but they never were. No one cared anymore. No one bothered putting on their good clothes; phone-snatchers materialized from thin air; tired fights were breaking out, rabble-rousing, conspiracy theories; only one jogger remained, an erect woman who ran at night, talking to herself; and every, single, day, there was a new story on the front page of the Looker about some fed-up person who had gone a couple blocks north to the edge of the peninsula and dove headfirst into the rocky water below. I know what you mean, people would say, picking up a copy. One night an old Jew lost his mind and started throwing a barrage of china from his upper-floor window and calling to God. That one drew an audience of about forty people clapping their hands. I was next to a woman with braids who was narrating the whole thing as she recorded it on her phone. “Ooh there go another one,” she’d say, and trace the arc of a saucer until it smashed to bits. On the other end of the crowd I saw Soup-Eye and his friends trying to catch teacups and bumped through the crowd quick to get to him before he saw me. I snuck up close; he hadn’t seen me.

“Listen, Soup-Eye,” I grabbed him and said, “I know it’s one of you who’s been stealing my socks from the dryers at the laundromat. There are security cameras. You should know: taking innocent people’s clothes from the dryer, it’s a nasty way to start your life.”

“It’s too hot for socks, fool,” Soup-Eye said as he shrugged me off. He was big for a ten-year-old, extremely stocky. We had started off on good enough terms until I saw some of his friends wearing my favorite pair as headbands. The old Jew chanted a loud Yiddish curse and threw something else, then Soup-Eye and the other orphans ran to where it might land, only to lose their nerve at the last moment and jump aside, giggling.

I said, “Whatever, Soup-Eye. One of you is going to cut yourself. And why isn’t there a curfew at that home? What if someone comes to adopt y’all in the middle of the night and you aren’t there?” A teacup smashed to the ground.

“Motherfucker. No one’s coming for us,” said Soup-Eye, facing the sky.

*  *  *

That night I walked up and up and up, beyond the fracas and all the way to the piers where the boats came in. It smelled like dead fish, lazy gulls floated overhead. Even at that moment another ferry was coming in from across the ocean with a fresh cargo of faces. I went up on the wooden pier and watched as the ferry docked and a team of men in gray overalls tethered it with ropes. A drawbridge lowered from the back, and after a few loudspeaker commands from the captain, everyone started disembarking in single file. They were carrying bags and holding on to loved ones. Children on shoulders squealed in delight. Everyone had the dream of Polis in their eyes. Those dummies: that’s how they get you. You catch a glimpse of the skyline rising from the water’s horizon and you’re finished. Just looking at that beat-up boat made me feel like I was back there again, climbing onto the deck railing with my arms wide open, as if it hadn’t been three months already—a salty wind whipping my hair, a thousand and one promises titillating my soul, a mighty woo-hoo! escaping my chest until a crewman in a white hat had to come say I wasn’t allowed up there, for liability reasons. That should’ve been a clue.

“Don’t even bother!” I yelled to the newbies from where I was standing now. “It’s a fucking conspiracy! Save your money, go somewhere else, invest in stocks or something.”

But none of them were listening. I might as well have been talking to an echo. A woman in an official uniform approached me gently. “Are we feeling alright today, sir?” Geez. You seriously couldn’t stand around anywhere without someone thinking you weren’t okay. I felt exhausted; my throat hurt. I moved from the edge and started to walk away.

“You don’t have to worry about me being one of those jumpers, ma’am,” I told her as I shuffled off. “I’m not sure it’s any better in the next life either.”

Then all the way back: past the side streets where ancient grandfathers sat outside and smoked long pipes, past the machos arguing in nine kinds of Spanish, past the bodegas where the fruit wilted outside, along Aramaya Street, swollen with traffic, a stop in the deli for a greasy dinner sandwich, then to our building, through the lobby door, up the eight flights of smelly stairs, past the hooded woman who was always just turning the corner, and into that apartment where it was daytime even if it wasn’t daytime, where there was no juice in the fridge, where every night on that slim bed my teeth fell out in my dreams.

“Hey, Calumet,” I’d say.

“I know, I know,” he’d say.

A DOOMED SEDUCTION

Fine, there were some good days. One time a girl in a bar said she liked my ears, Reginald had food poisoning and I got half his customers, Calumet would come out of his room and we’d get to talk for once. But my life was a two-mile radius shrinking every day, and I could think of nothing else to talk about. I’d hear the slow croaks of him leaving his room and scramble from my bed, where I’d been trying to touch my toes or something, poking my head out just as he locked his door with a small key. Seeing him outside, it never ceased to amaze me. Calumet was one of those loping giants the world does not make anymore. Looking into his eyes required you to tilt your head back, and even then you were met only by the morose gaze of a doe. He had a gaunt face, jowls for a neck, limp black hair. A long-gone beard had stained a shadow onto his cheeks forever. And something about the mechanics of his gait, it gave the impression of slow motion even if he had somewhere to go. On the Sunday I am talking about, he had on a set of denim overalls so loose he seemed naked, and greeted me by shyly tapping my shoulder as he headed toward the kitchenette. I followed him in quick steps, hovering about his elbows.

I said: “I don’t know about you, Calumet, but me I’m heading out of this dump, I swear. I’ve been saving up. As soon as I get even half a wind I’m out of here, so long, sayonara, I mean.” He was reaching for the good glasses so I turned on the faucet to help him rinse them. In his hands the glasses looked like toys for a tea party. “You might want to get your goodbyes in now is all I’m saying. You’re going to be missing ol’ Slide when it’s just you and Eustace again, I’m telling you.”

He said: “That’s very brave.”

“Someone here has to be. All I’m waiting for is the trains to open and that’s it.”

“And then what?”

“And then what?” I said. “You got to be kidding me, Calumet.” I went on telling him that there was more than this, that life would bloom only if you watered it, that Polis was a gauntlet brimful with nectar but here where we are we’re getting only the dribbles running down the side, I’ve been hearing things, Calumet, there are rumors of better happenings farther south, if only we could go look, but what things like this take is a Leap-of-Faith, a Seizing-of-the-Day, if you will, chutzpah, I mean... Yet from his great height the only thing Calumet did was shake his head. He considered me with the regret of a watchman who cannot help the strangers below. “My days for that are gone,” he said.

I decided to switch the subject.

“How old are you, anyway, Calumet?” I said, taking a seat on the counter. He finished with the glasses and tore off some paper towels to dry them.

“I am thirty-four years old.”

“What!” I said. I got off the counter. “Geez-us, man.”

“Ah, so you thought I was your peer?” he said, smiling behind slabs of teeth.

“Peer? Man, I’ve been here thinking you were my uncle or something. You don’t look too good for being in your thirties, Calumet. You need to get out more and that’s the truth.”

The glass had started to squeak, it was so dry already. I looked in a cupboard and took out four plates.

“Thir-tee-four! Damn, you really had me fooled. I really had you on some uncle shit, Calumet. What’s it that’s so great in your room that you don’t get out more? When’re you gonna let me see inside like you said?”

He readied his face for a joke. “Something in here has to be sacred,” he said.

“Look, he has quips now. The eavesdropper. All this privacy, gosh, I could be living with spies for all I know. You have the right idea, Calumet, but I wouldn’t worry if I were you, even Eustace knows better than to bother you. It wouldn’t be fair.”

“Fair?”

“Yeh. Me on the other hand I get all the bad stuff. Nowadays when I come home I feel like he’s tried on my deodorant. Things of that nature. You have the right idea though, staying indoors. I wouldn’t leave my room either if my clientele wasn’t growing. I’d find something online like you.”

“I see,” he said.

Everything he did looked like he’d thought it over ten times. When the towel fell from his hands he gave a tiny oh and bent all the way down to pick it up between his thumb and forefinger. Poor Calumet. He walked through life barely touching it.

“You know, Slide,” he said. “It’s all out there, everything you mention. Just not in the way you mention it.” And before I could ask what he meant by that Eustace exploded through the door in a series of jostling steps and ran straight for his shower while stripping bare. He groaned. That put me in a funk right away. Calumet went on, “And when are you going to tell me what was so bad before that you had to come here at all?”

“Come on, Calumet,” I said as I looked for coasters. “You know that stuff is private.”

“Oh, I see,” he said, and continued to set up.

Sunday was family dinner, which was another name for Eustace’s doomed seductions. Oh boy. He’d invite some girl from the internet over for the evening and spend the hours before making a whole production out of it. He’d order food from an Italian place, put wine to chill, play jazz on the TV, and all-of-a-sudden procure four plastic chairs and a table from his room. (The first time that happened, I looked at Calumet like What the Fuck.) The tablecloth was a blue-and-yellow paisley print with lace edges and the cutlery was kept in a mahogany case. There’d be a lot of fussing for us to help set things up and pick off pieces of lint. He even got a candle for the table and lit it. In all that lamplight he lit a candle. At seven the girl came, to the screech of the doorbell. Eustace, dressed in his tie and blazer, looking like a great baby, would grandly open the door, for her to step into the room and squint against the lamps. She was tall or short, black or white, sometimes shy, sometimes very shy. Invariably they were plump. They all had the stupefied air of having been invited for something else. “Oh, you’re here already?” he’d say, dabbing his neck with a kerchief. “We were just hanging around.” Eustace, he was always trying to hang around. He offered to take her purse only after she took off her shoes. There’d be a quick tour with a stop by my bedroom to list the dimensions as if it was up for lease, then during dinner he’d try cramming a week’s worth of friendship into a scant few minutes, asking me to retell that joke about the tulips that he liked so much or nudging Calumet on the arm like that was their thing. Really we were his hostages. If ever we spoke to the girl for too long, he’d panic, cut in quickly. Anything else you need, Marie? Linneth? Polly-Ann? Gwendolyn? Some garlic bread, perhaps? A warm towel? There’s sparkling water, too, there’s ice... Burying her in a flurry of suggestions until she forgot us. I don’t know what he was so worried about—from the time they arrived, Calumet only regarded them with a bird’s indifference, and I was too scared of anyone nuts enough to accept an invite from Eustace. Everyone ate, minding their own business for the most part. Then it always came: Eustace’s hand inched across the table toward hers finger by finger like a team of white slugs. The whole thing gave me the heebie-jeebies. I felt like we were extras in a perverse sort of play. Calumet and I finished eating quickly just to get out of there. From my room I could hear Eustace bumbling through a few more pleasantries, her hesitant laughter, the undeniable cadence of bargaining, and then the resolute steps of her departure. It was always the same. For the rest of the night he would make sporadic stops at my doorway, haranguing me with questions, finding meaning in anything. We had talked too much, we hadn’t talked at all, the room was too dark, Slide, you are always chewing with your mouth open, what did I think of the linguine? She probably wasn’t hungry in the first place, yes, she wasn’t even hungry. He wore a lightless sadness in his eyes and would have burst at the smallest of hugs. I could have cried. It was the same, I swear, everything in that apartment was always the same. But the evening I am talking about, when Calumet and I were washing glasses in the kitchenette, was the evening that Eustace had invited Monica Iñes over, a woman who would not take off her shoes, no matter how strong the suggestion.

She was a short tea-brown girl who arrived late and offered no excuse. She had hair to her waist, a cowboy’s way of entering a room, and the scandalous gaze of a tattletale. Eustace could hardly believe the buckled sandals in which she sauntered across the floor. “No, Eustace, I’d rather not,” she said, cruising past him in his ascot. “I don’t know what’s been on this carpet.” From there, he was forever two steps behind. She did her introductions herself, kept her purse close, and, when it came time to sit, replaced her plastic seat with the armchair that had been in front of the TV, dragging it. Up close, from my seat, I saw she wore a smooth mask of makeup; her face seemed shaped from a uniform layer of clay. The long forehead, her eyebrows frozen into an arch, lips painted a wet red. As if noticing, she turned to the lamp on the stand next to her and asked, “Are we under a microscope here?,” then switched it off. From the kitchenette came a tiny muffled yelp. Me I was grinning a little to see all the damage so quickly done, but Calumet had already fixed her with a look of disbelief. His lips tightened and his eyes seemed to sink farther back, peering out from a faraway place. Monica Iñes, who had not noticed, surveyed the neatly arranged food. That day we had risotto primavera with crushed walnuts, linguine in seafood marinara sauce, grilled lamb chops, baby spinach salad dressed in balsamic vinaigrette, garlic rolls, apple cider, and individual slices of tiramisu waiting in the fridge. She poured a glass of cider and dipped her finger into the marinara to taste it. Her clothes were all white, her earrings in the shape of golden dice. “Pagliai’s,” she said, naming the restaurant. “I would’ve hoped they’d at least have redone their menu by now.” It was a violet eve in the last days of August. Oh yes, she was putting on quite the show.

Even by the usual standards it was an off-kilter dinner. With each bite of food, her appetite for chatter seemed to increase. This began with her pointing around the table with a bread roll and asking everyone a little about themselves, offering quick appraisals. I was “not too bad-looking, even with your big ears”; Eustace was “too kind for organizing all this, too kind, really”; and of Calumet she said, “You are quite tall, I used to know someone that tall,” at which he clenched his teeth and looked like he was about to say something. In truth it was an opportunity for her to get going about herself. She lived down near Hempel Square, close to the arch, and had a job in PR on the eighteenth floor of the Redson Tower. She shopped in Waterloo when she had the time but mostly preferred the smaller boutiques around Yarbots. Her life was her favorite subject; she ended sentences in useless questions. Eustace could scarcely get a word in:

Monica Iñes had a story about being mistaken for a billboard girl while strolling around Battery: “And I couldn’t get them to stop following me even when I showed my ID, you know?”

Monica Iñes had a story about walking in heels all the way from Avenue II to the Phantom District: “The taxis in that part, really, they are the worst. Always on a smoke break, isn’t that so?”

Monica Iñes had a twin sister who was thinking of moving apartments: “Although I keep telling her, Listen, Marissa, Haverford is not the hot market right now. What’s so bad about Point James, right?”

Her sweeping gestures from within the big chair gave her the air of a monarch. She spoke of Polis with the false boredom of true love. Eustace was bloodless and sweating (he kept looking to the extinguished lamp beside her), and Calumet continued regarding her with an irregular suspicion, getting up often to use the bathroom, from which he’d return with a splashed face. Me: I was having a good time. I’d never heard of any of those places. With every next story, a new part of Polis would light up in my mind’s eye, working me into a fire of imagination. She seemed a kind of merchant bringing missives from another land. Soon it was clear that Eustace was caught in a trap of his own design, ...