X, page 2
And Syd isn’t wrong, about seeing me and Margot around. I do know Margot, or I did, but it’s not something I feel like getting into with Syd, of all people. Not that my relationship with Margot is privileged information. It was just one of those things that happen in this small, gay world.
“Yeah,” I say. The surface of my coffee is as greasy as a pesticided orange peel. The caffeine was a mistake. Now I’m even more attuned to the singed feeling in my nasal cavity. “Margot and I were hanging out for a little while.”
“Oh yeah?” says Syd.
“Yeah.” Conversations with Syd have always been like this. It’s probably why we’ve never fucked—most people wait until the morning after to get boring. Not Syd. Every exchange happens at half speed, every statement and interjection followed up with a needless pause for confirmation, plus careful posturing to be sure everyone can see their incredible jaw definition. Their fakeness makes my skin crawl. It’s probably the worst possible conversational juncture to pick up my phone, but I want it so bad my fingers flex. There’s nothing worse than being bored, and Syd is as dull as a butt plug.
But I have to be polite. If Syd knows anything about X, then I need to know it, too. And if finding out means not being a bitch, well, I can do that, for a little while. I take a deep breath, exhale slowly, blocking out the hum of the café, the screech of a bus on the corner. Think about a beach with no trash on it. Think about sinking into a queen-size bed all by myself. Think about my lungs before I smoked my first cigarette, pink as a pair of popsicles. Nothing on my phone I can’t see later. Nothing on the internet ever dies, though you never know what might end up shadowbanned or paywalled tomorrow.
“So how do you know Margot?” I ask. Syd and Margot are regulars in the gossipy game of telephone Camille is always playing, but I want to hear how they describe their relationship.
Syd sighs. They’re dressed like a housepainter, but their fingers and ears are all silver. “I mean we’re dating,” they say. Their cup is still almost completely full, the coffee rippling like a full binder. “Were dating. I don’t know anymore.”
Personally, I can’t imagine seeing a breakup with Margot as a bad thing.
“We haven’t really talked about it,” they go on. “But we haven’t really talked at all in like a month. Maybe longer.”
“So what happened?”
“It’s just . . .” They fiddle with the dangliest of their earrings with one long, soft finger. They attempt a grimace. “It’s just so many things.”
God, leave it to Syd to make a lesbian breakup sound boring. “Yeah,” I say, making a point of thoughtfully nodding my head. Most people are too self-absorbed to tell the difference between apathy and empathy, which is convenient in situations like this one.
The front door slams behind a customer, and Syd’s cup—it’s almost brimming, really—trembles in its aftershock. I wonder if they’re ever going to drink it. “You probably heard what happened with Margot and me, right?” they ask.
I haven’t—that news hasn’t made it to Camille yet—but I need to make their stupid problems seem important. “I heard a little,” I say. I draw out my words, as if I’m being forced to admit something. “Heard some things here and there.”
Their coffee shines like a nightlight. Their coffee looks like it tastes better than mine.
Syd shakes their head. “The last time I saw her, she said I stole all her drugs. Which isn’t true, and I told her that, but she didn’t believe me.” They push soft black hair behind their ear, tickling the silver. It’s too bad they’re horrible. They’re lanky but puppyish, like a young Keanu. Primo blowjob material. “Then she left. I haven’t heard from her, but she was telling people, our friends, that I stole all her drugs, that I have a problem. And she told them I like tried to drug her and stuff.”
“Damn,” I say.
“Yeah. She said that I was an abuser and that that was one of the things I like did to control her. She told people that she saved my life when I OD’d. I’ve never OD’d.”
“Wow,” I say. Liar. Everyone’s OD’d, though not everyone is still alive. And if you’re dead, you OD’d or you killed yourself. Or maybe someone killed you. I finish my coffee. It tastes good but fake, so it actually tastes gross. I’d settle for shitty real coffee over chemicals designed to mimic the world’s finest Kenyan peaberry any day of the week. I look at Syd’s cup. There’s a subway ad campaign I like that says BLACK OPIUM over a perfume canister glittering with coal fragments and rose gold. That’s what Syd’s coffee looks like.
“I’ve been so stressed out,” Syd says. The grimace is back. “Everyone believed what she said about me, so most of my friends aren’t fucking with me right now. I had to quit my band. I missed all this work. I almost lost my job.” Syd works for a nonprofit, where they help launder money for big corporations. From what I remember, it’s not all that different from my job at a big corporation, where I help launder money through nonprofits.
“That’s hard,” I say. I can’t think of anything less hard than Syd’s stupid life.
“It’s been pretty lonely.” They sniff, and for a second I think they’re going to squeeze out a tear, but their hand levitates to rub the corner of their eye and then returns to their side, coffee untouched. (What do you call a Bushwick queer’s nostrils? Their k-holes.) I wonder what would happen if I just picked up their coffee and chugged down those shards of gold and carbon. I wonder what would happen if I took Syd by the throat and squeezed.
“Anyway.” Syd eases back into their chair and sighs, their breathing free and easy. The undertipped barista knocks the portafilter against the counter. Someone in the café is blasting trapchata from their phone. “I knew you and her had a thing or whatever. A while ago.”
Finally, we’re getting somewhere. I screw up my mouth and nod, blinking a lot. It might help to look a little contrite about dicking down their stupid girlfriend.
“Her friends won’t tell me where she is. I was hoping you knew,” Syd says. “She owes me money. And she took some of my things with her the last time she was at my apartment. She took one of my guitars.”
There it is. Now I know what Syd wants—why they texted me back, why they’re here—but I don’t have anything to offer in return. For one thing, I haven’t seen Margot, online or elsewhere, in ages, and I don’t know where she is or what she’s doing. Even if I did, I’m not sure I’d tell Syd. Deciding who is the least worst in a strung-out couple is a skill I’ve never claimed to have. It’s entirely possible that Syd is lying—that they had been abusive, that they had been drugging Margot, that they deserved everything she’d done to them, and much more, if indeed it had been done. If I was going to rat out an abuse victim to their abuser, I’d have to have a really good reason.
Time to change the subject. I smile and sit up in my chair, as if my train of thought has all of a sudden been hijacked by a real bright idea. “You know, it’s funny you’re looking for someone. I’m looking for someone, too.”
“Oh yeah?” says Syd.
“Yeah,” I say. I pause, clear my throat. I want to sound as casual as possible. “Do you know X?”
For the first time this morning, Syd displays what looks like a spontaneous feeling. The surprise on their face is hilariously amphibian: big eyes, downturned lips. “X?” It comes out too fast, created in and launched from the front of their mouth.
“You do.” It’s all I can do to keep the exclamation mark out of my voice.
“I mean we’ve met,” they admit. Their face has returned to its normal blankness, but when their fingers seek their cup, a sheet of coffee wraps over the brim. “Like once or twice.” I know they know her much better than that, but the admission is promising, nonetheless.
“I’m trying to get in touch with her.” I’m so good at hiding my excitement I wonder if it’s even there. “I need to talk to her before she exports.”
“She’s exporting?” Coffee drips from their fingers. They don’t seem to notice.
“You didn’t know?”
“No.” Syd frowns. “Why would I?”
“Can you connect us? Do you have her number?”
Syd frowns harder.
“Can you—”
“Listen, before this goes any further, I need to talk to Margot,” says Syd, putting up a tinseled palm. They sound impatient, like I’m waitstaff with the gall to ask them to repeat their order.
Now my jaw is as tight as theirs is. I should have expected this from Syd. I try to head off my irritation, remembering the stuff that therapist taught me. Deep breaths. Planting my feet. The mantra: beach, bed, lungs. I try to imagine what my face looks like when it’s expressionless. What does it matter if I’m being extorted by this asshole who was never my friend, anyway? All the more reason to extort them right back. I feel my heart slowing, although the tempo quickens slightly when the light catches some silver along Syd’s snappable little collarbone. Sometimes I think my body doesn’t know the difference between horny and angry.
I take another deep breath, bottle my sneer. Getting mad won’t change the fact that they have the leverage here, not me. “I’ll ask around about Margot.” I should stay and chat for a while, pad this meetcute with more socializing so both of us can feel better about it later, but I just can’t. I’d rather be early to work than spend another second with this cunt. I stand up and grab my bag.
“I’m late,” I say. “Talk soon, yeah?”
Syd doesn’t respond, eyes on their phone as they crane their arm behind them to drop their cup in the trash. I think about the wasted coffee all the way to the office.
####
I’m always finding ways to kill time at work, but when I go for one of my hourly trips to the bathroom, I’m even slower than usual.
My desk is toward the back of the office, which means no one’s watching as I shuffle to the foyer. The glass door is heavy enough that I have to lean rather than push. I really should start hitting the heavy bag every once in a while. How do the body fascists motivate themselves when every news cycle shortens the time line between now and mass extinction? Tweaking lab mice, spinning homosexually while the world burns. What would be the point of getting fit? To live longer, so I can work myself to death over a longer period of time? Retirement’s as extinct as bluefin tuna. I walk a little more slowly.
When I return from my first bathroom break of the day, Aisha swivels her chair toward me, smiling hard.
“How was your weekend?” she sings. The dog shifts his legs on her lap as if he wants to get down, but she holds him firmly in place, rubbing his skull as if searching for a latch.
“Fine.” I sit down and put in my earbuds.
Aisha thinks we’re friends because we work next to each other for like fifty hours a week. We have the same title (analyst) and do the same job (analytics) for a 501(c) shat out by a Bezos subsidiary for the purposes of, I don’t know, tax evasion, probably. Everything we produce—Excel sheets with words like STATUS, PROGRESS, and QUALITY in the titles—is stored on a server somewhere, never to be opened, or else deleted and then rewritten by workers with identical job functions before being forwarded on to a marginally higher level of development, and so on, for eternity. It’s mindless, and yet neither of us would have been hired without college degrees. I wonder if her parents are proud of her.
The earbuds don’t phase her. “Do anything fun?” she demands.
“Not really.” Petra and I were together for almost three years, but in all that time I never once mentioned her to Aisha. For all Aisha knows, I’m a monk.
“Same,” she says. When she laughs, her upper lip pulls up into a wet snarl. “Me and Triskit stayed out of the cold and watched movies.” Aisha has been loudly single for as long as we’ve worked together. She says she’s waiting for a guy who’s as nice as her dad. I pity straight women.
We both look down at Triskit. When she pets his head, Aisha pulls the skin back, and his eyes pop out like one of those plastic dolls you win at the carnival. He watches me in a way that’s unsettlingly direct for a dog.
The radiator rattles like someone’s handcuffed to it. I think it’s gotten louder since I started working here, or maybe it’s just that there are fewer of us in the office now, so there’s more space for the noise to echo. Layoffs and no-shows are only replaced half the time. For every computer with someone sitting in front of it, two are unattended. In the kitchen, the industrial-size fridge opens onto lukewarm plastic shelves stocked with a handful of bagged lunches, a shriveled carrot, a rancid carton of hemp-based creamer. The anti-union propaganda curls along the edges, the white space between the words darkened with blue-inked doodles. The toaster oven is busted, though the coffee maker still spends its days drooling brown syrup. There’s a rule about bringing animals into the office, but it’s never enforced. Thus, Triskit.
I avoid his eyes, looking away from him toward the white-frosted windows above our heads. X would never set foot in a trap like this, but beyond that glass is an entire city of hiding places.
“Yep, we’re total party animals,” says Aisha. She takes Triskit’s little front paw and waves it in my direction. He’s still looking at me with his black-and-white-cookie eyes.
####
The night I met X began at Camille’s apartment, where my hostess was already waiting for me when I got off from work.
“Hey, dollface,” she said. She was sitting on the ground with her laptop on the coffee table, using the screen as a mirror while she did her makeup. She always springs for surveillance-camera jammers like ReflecTec, but she slathers it on like the cheap stuff, as if the bottom of the tube were miles away.
That’s how Camille lives her life. Rectangles of black market cow butter warm on the counter, the faded yellow chunks hacked into blades of breadcrumb-flecked basalt. Posh Taiwanese lingerie, stained with blood and hot sauce, hangs from the lampshade. Everyone fancies themself a plant parent, but Camille’s a plant empress, her army of philodendrons gleaming like lizard scales, the Monsteras soaring over the hardwood that she never sweeps and leaves strewn with the decorative cushions that outnumber us fifty to one.
She picked up a tube and twisted the wand free. “Mail stolen again,” she announced. Her mouth hanging open as she began to apply her mascara, she sounded like she was talking through a toilet paper roll.
“Shit,” I said, but it didn’t matter to me. Even though I’d set up Camille’s place as my forwarding address when I moved in a few months ago, I almost never got anything. “You working tonight?” I dropped my bag on the floor by the table and trudged to the refrigerator. On top: no cereal. Inside: no beer.
“Here.” Camille appeared at my side, Swanson wreathed in weed smoke, the lashes on one eye shivering like a hummingbird. She reached through the ketchup and kimchi and takeout cartons for a hidden bottle and put it in my hand.
“My love,” I said.
“I’m headed out in a bit,” she said. “That thing is tonight.”
“What thing?”
“That thing you said you’d come to. That warehouse thing.” She took the beer from my hand, cranked it through the bottle opener stuck on the freezer door, and swigged, looking me up and down. “You better get a whole lot sluttier, or I’m leaving without you.”
####
One time Mom went on a weekend trip with the professor. She called a babysitter, but accidentally gave her the wrong dates. We didn’t learn this until after the fact, of course.
Mom wasn’t home when I got back from school on Friday, but that wasn’t unusual. I went to play with the foster kids next door like I always did. I remember we were bouncing a rubber ball against the back of the building, bored out of our skulls, when a dog came nosing around from the parking lot behind the complex. The dog was white with brown spots, like a cow. The stump of its badly docked tail wagged sideways.
We lured it toward us, bouncing the ball back and forth, monkey in the middle, but every time the funny dog was just about to catch it, we chased it away from us. We did it over and over, drawing it back and then chasing it again, laughing harder every time. I remember I twisted my ankle when I kicked its haunch and lost my balance, but I was having so much fun I hardly felt it.
The apartment was still empty when I limped inside, so I turned on TCM. It was almost time for the late-night movie (Dancing Lady, with Joan and the King) when I started to wonder if something was wrong. There was no phone—there was only Mom’s cell, and she had it, wherever she was. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway. I didn’t have anyone to call besides her.
I spent the weekend locked in our apartment by myself, watching movies. It wasn’t that bad, except for early Sunday morning, when something, I didn’t know what, woke me up. I stood in my bedroom doorway, listening. The apartment was as silent as the street outside. It took me a minute to realize what was wrong. I couldn’t hear Mom’s white noise machine.
I crossed the carpeted hallway to her room. The machine wasn’t on her night table. She must have taken it with her, I realized, along with her phone and purse and the carnation-pink cashmere sweater the professor got for her when he went to Tahoe with his family over winter break. I was alone in the apartment, without anything to make noise with me. I curled up under a cotton throw on her bed and stayed there, looking around in the dark, until the window began to turn grey.
When she came home later that evening, Mom called the babysitter to bitch her out for her own mistake. She promised me it wouldn’t ever happen again, and it didn’t.
