【by Chapman Jones】

I started dating this girl, Valerie, recently. We both go to high school together, to Dalton,
and I think we had a trig class and maybe history together, but we never talked in those. Instead,
I knew her from parties at Troy’s or Reece’s or Mathew’s, and sometimes I would say hi to her,
and sometimes she would say hi to me and, sometime after spring-break, we talked for three
hours at a party on a couch in Reece’s apartment, and then had sex in his parents’ bathroom.
After that we started going over to each other’s apartments and now it’s late June. I guess we’re
not really dating, but I’m not really sure what other word there is for it. We’ve never talked about
it, and even when we do talk we don’t really say all that that much. We’ll talk about what we did
that weekend if we didn’t see each other, what we should do that day; about the last thing we
bought or about Instagram posts we think are in bad taste. Sometimes we don’t say anything for
a long time, maybe just sitting in a booth at a restaurant or at a table outside a frozen yogurt
place, looking placid and very young, like we’re posing for something. And in a way we are,
because we’re expressing an ideal, typifying it. And it doesn’t ever seem to matter if this is
conscious or unconscious, or if those words even mean anything anymore.


Today it’s eighty-three degrees. Today I’m wearing linen shorts and a knit camp-collar
shirt and tennis shoes. I catch my reflection in a mirror in my apartment on the way out, and my
reflection looks like Jude Law in The Talented Mr. Ripley from the neck down. I take an Uber
over to Valerie’s, heading from Park in the mid 80s, all the way down to Fifth in the upper 60s.
It’s not a long trip. The car passes people as it rolls down Fifth, people who look hot and sticky
as a low wave of heat ripples above the sidewalk, but it can’t touch me. I’m staying cool, and
casual, and the weather exists somewhere only in the background, or maybe the middle
distance.


At Valerie’s I zip past the doorman and check myself out in the giant obsidian panels of
the elevator. When the doors open she’s waiting for me, smiling, maybe slightly stoned (but so
am I).

“Hi James,” she says.

“Yeah. Hi,” I say.

She’s blond but not generically—not over bleachy or anything—with shoulder length
hair, blue eyes, etc. She looks like a model maybe, effortlessly gorgeous and genuine. She has an
amazing Instagram.

“Cool shirt,” she says.

“Thanks,” I say, as she reaches out to touch it, feeling the fabric. “You look like Jude
Law in that one movie,” she trails off, trying to remember the title.

“Are your parents home?” I ask.

“Does it matter?” She laughs.

“Not really.”

“No,” she says. “No one’s home.”

“But,” I pause, confused, “you are?”

“What?” she says, unsure of what I mean, then: “Oh, yeah.”

The hallway has beige wallpaper, and we walk to her apartment, which is just more
beige, but mostly whites and off-whites and grays. It overlooks the park, and the people in it are
far away, like extras in a movie, though I feel connected to them since we’re all in the same
scene. They’re background to the moment, like the clouds or the music playing from the
Bluetooth speakers that run throughout Valerie’s apartment.


I like Valerie’s place, which is sort of mid-century modern, and which has fifteen-foot
ceilings in some of the rooms. It has a kitchen with a huge island, just a solid chunk of some kind
of brownish-whitish marble, which has an alcove within its side so your knees don’t knock the
counter when you pull up a stool. It might be slightly nicer than my apartment, it might not be.
Her bedroom, which is a reflective gray, or maybe matte gray, has a huge plate glass window
that lets in all this light, and somehow mid-morning or twilight or late afternoon or 4 a.m. all
look the same through it, just variations on a theme. There’s a muted quality to the light though,
as if it were actually coming from some sort of set like the apartment in Seinfeld, and everything,
no matter how much sun there is, is always a cool gray. During sex this grayness is intensified,
and sometimes I can catch a beam of sun bending around her straining rib cage or moving under
her shoulder and past her breast, refracted in a bead of sweat on her forehead, but then it
disappears again. It reminds me of a commercial for high end kitchen appliances, or a Brunello
Cucinelli campaign, though I don’t necessarily think of these as bad things. Sometimes I get the
same feeling as when we’re walking down the street or at a restaurant; the feeling of people
there, who may or may not be watching us, and I’ll look up from kissing her neck or chest or
thighs just to remind myself that nobody is. There’s no relief, though, because I don’t think this
thought actually bothers me, and I have to remind myself that it’s just another moment, another
flash of color, another series of sounds. This is what I’m thinking about on the couch as Valerie
asks me if I want to go get food.

“What kind of food?” I ask.

She shrugs.

“Where do you want to go?”

She shrugs again. “I don’t know.”

“Yeah, I could eat,” I say.

“Okay.”

“Yeah,” I confirm.

It doesn’t really matter where we go, because it’s really about the gesture.


As we walk down the street she lights a cigarette, and I bum it, and she’s wearing a pair
of men’s tennis shorts and Ralph-Lauren tennis sweater, and tennis shoes, and it’s all boyish but
in a cool way. We’re both wearing dark sunglasses. We could be mistaken for off-duty models,
for celebrities trying to keep a low profile. We both look very clean, almost like we’ve been
rendered in some sort of computer, something from a screen.

“Do you play tennis?” I ask.

“No,” she says. “Why?”

“No reason,” I say, then: “Do you think I look like Robert Pattinson?”

“What?” She asks, then cocks her head, scrutinizing me. “A bit.”

She takes the cigarette out of my hand, takes a drag, says “What does he look like
again?”

“I don’t know, like…” I trail off, not sure how to describe it.

“I’ve always thought I kind of looked like Gwyneth Paltrow. Not now, but, like,
younger,” she says. “Or maybe Samara Weaving?”

“Yeah, I see it. But not really. Who’s Samara Weaving?”

Someone sweaty, straining in the heat, walks past us, and I realize that I’m barely even
warm despite the temperature. Neither is Valerie, who, like me, is really tan with a whiteness
underneath that only announces itself up close. From a distance we look like we were born in the
sun.

At an ice-cream and frozen yogurt place, which Valerie likes, we get the smallest sizes
and sit inside next to a window, then go outside since it’s too cold. She’s sipping a Diet-Coke,
and I’m smoking one of her cigarettes. We both have Juuls, but since we’re outside it seems
pointless not to just smoke the cigarettes. We’re both of the opinion that they (the cigarettes)
look much better, that it sends a sort of message. It’s not rebellious, but it says you’re not overly
health conscious; it says that you maybe know something that maybe everyone else doesn’t
because you’re not afraid to enjoy yourself, and while we’re sitting there I take absent-minded
drags, thinking about a dream I had last night. In this dream, I had felt confused even though
there was nothing to be confused by, but the feeling was still there. The dream is hard to
remember because nothing really happened and it was actually about a mood; because before me
an infinite surface stretched out, expanding forever into nothing, though I had the feeling that I
wasn’t at the center of it, because there was no center, no origin. The horizon became impossible
to see, or even imagine, and the concept of it became useless after a while. More than that, it
ceased to exist. There were no reference points, no distinctions, since the surface—a blank
material with no color or texture, on which anything could be written, erased, and rewritten—
was endless. Things dissolved on and around the surface, but not really since they had never
actually been there in the first place, and they were just another reflection, erased by the blinding
light of what I thought was the sun. But, when I turned to look at it, the sky was empty, or maybe
there was no sky. Nothing ever started or ended in this dream, and it wasn’t scary, or pleasant, or
anything, and maybe its starkness and meaninglessness were the point, or maybe they weren’t,
because all of this had ceased to matter. It reminded me of Valerie’s kitchen for some reason. I
try to describe the dream to her.

“So you were in some kind of room?” she asks.

“No, not really,” I say, ashing the cigarette into a near-empty Diet Coke can.

“Oh. What happened, though?”

“Nothing, really. I was just there, I guess.”

“Oh,” she says, staring into my sunglasses.

I can see my reflection in hers, and I sit there for a moment, studying it. “It kind of
reminded me of being in your apartment.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know,” I shrug.

“You’re ridiculous,” she laughs.

“I’m an American,” I say.

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing,” I shrug, again.

On the street a bike messenger, or maybe just someone on a Citi Bike, crashes at high
speed, losing control and sprawling all over the pavement. They’re not seriously injured, but
because of how many people are out today, and because the rider is moaning in pain, clutching a
skinned knee, a crowd gathers around him. Neither of us look—we don’t even notice—because it
would ruin a certain amount of poise that’s required to maintain the illusion that we’re currently
engaged in. Valerie takes the second bite of her frozen yogurt since we sat down, and then we get
up and leave.


Valerie has lots of friends, people that I don’t know, who are skaters or artists or
whatever, though I think most of them go to private schools in the city like us, and I’m distrustful
of these people for some reason. They always look like they’re trying to deny something, to form
some sort of counter-narrative, but this is never really the case. One of these friends, this guy
named Spike, told me that he was an audio-visual sculptor, and that he was strongly against
“complacency in the art-world.” When I told him that was cool, and that I was too, he gave me
some sort of weird look. Later someone told me his dad was in the C-suite at Amex, that his
mother was a dean at Columbia. His apartment might cost something like 15 million dollars
(before renovations). We’re on the way downtown, to The Whitney, when Val asks me if I want
to hang out with some of her friends, immediately reassuring me that Mathew and Rachel, also
both from Dalton, would be there, too.

“It’s not gonna be that Spike guy, is it?” I ask suspiciously as we get out of the Uber.

“Who? Oh, no,” she says. “It’s just Mara and her friend, Mike or something.”

“Spike?” I ask, alarmed.

“No, Mike,” She clarifies.

“Thank god,” I mutter.

“You know, I wish you liked Spike more,” she says. “He’s cool.”

“Why would I and why should I like Spike?” I ask, trying to conceal the undertone of
menace.

“He’s cool. He’s an artist,” she says.

“And?”

“And nothing,” she says. “I like cool people, they’re interesting.”

“I think he’s sort of bogus,” I say. “I mean, the guy’s trying to be some sort of, like,
bohemian artist, but he goes to Horace Mann. And it’s not like he’s not on financial aid or
anything.”

“Yeah,” she says, distracted by something, maybe her phone. “He is a bit fake, I guess.
He doesn’t really play the part well enough.”

“Not even close,” I laugh. “But what’s supposed to be so interesting about these people,
anyways? Are you sure they don’t just look interesting?”

“What’s your point?” she asks as she opens the door to the lobby.

Inside, after we buy tickets, we wander around various floors. There’s Hopper, which is
neat, and other stuff that’s also cool. We stand by paintings, looking at them for a long time.
Valerie says that she likes one of the paintings, an image of a guy with no skin on his chest lying
in bed. I ask her why she likes it. She says she likes it because it looks cool, and I agree. I like
the colors, though there’s too many reds and blues. She takes pictures of some of the art, and so
do I. She posts the one with the skinned guy on her Instagram story. I find a bathroom, and think
about ripping my dab pen, but don’t, and we go out onto some of the terraces and just walk
around, and I can see the city rising up around us, and the feeling is that I can go anywhere, that
I’m already there because it’s all a part of the same view, and heat wavers lightly over the streets
below. I ask Valerie if Spike would consider Edward Hopper conformist, and she asks who that
is.

“Spike, your friend?”

“No, Edward Hopper?” she says.

I just stare at her.

“It’s called a joke?” she says, and we both laugh.

In the gift shop I buy a set of pencils because there’s a picture of Starry Night on the box,
and Valerie gets a tote bag that has The Whitney logo superimposed over the same image of
Starry Night.

As we leave I check my phone and realize that it’s almost five. I tell Valerie this, and she
tells me she knows. We decide to Uber back to my apartment, and then walk a few blocks over
to this restaurant, Pascalou, and even though it’s early they’re willing to seat us for dinner.
Mathew and his girlfriend, Rachel, are already there, though Mara and Mike are not. All of us
except for Mara and Mike go to Dalton, and a conversation about summer plans ensues. Mathew
is spending July (and maybe August) in the Hamptons. Valerie and I are doing the same, and
Rachel might also, but she says there’s a possibility that her dad will want her to come to LA to
live with him that month, so she’s not sure what she’s doing. Mathew, like me, has a square jaw,
high cheekbones, etc., though he has brown eyes and slightly longer hair, and I’m a few inches
shorter than he is. They stood up to say hi when we got to the table upstairs, which reminded me
of the height differential—I’m 6’2” so it’s not a huge deal—though we still tower over both of
the girls, who are maybe 5’9”ish. Mathew is slightly more muscular than I am since he’s a
captain on the Lacrosse team, but at the end of the day we’re all basically thin and tan and well
dressed, and everything has a cohesive look to it. Rachel looks kind of like Valerie, but maybe
more Jewish, though she has darker hair. Both Mathew and Rachel are wearing polo shirts for
some reason, and you can see Rachel’s nipples through hers because of how hard her—
admittedly large—breasts strain against the fabric. But, because of how put together and preppy
she is, it’s also not exactly slutty. Someone says they scored a 1550 on the SATs and someone
else asks why they took it so early. Rachel says she scored a 1560, and then we order drinks.
They tell us they spent all day watching movies with the sound off.

We’re all sort of buzzed by the time Mara and Mike show up, and we all get introduced
and rehash the same conversation we’d already had. Mike is trim verging on skinny, and looks
like a cross between our friend Reece and Brad Pitt. Mara, who says she’s a model, looks like a
thinner version of Rachel, though she’s blond and more attractive, and at one point she tells me
that I look like an actor she likes, but that she can’t remember which one. Someone asks them
what they’re doing over the rest of summer, and Mike, who’s also wearing a polo shirt, says he’s
going to France in August. Mara says she’s going to LA at some point. They both go to Trinity
on the West Side.

“Will you be there in July?” Rachel asks while also checking her phone.

“Maybe,” Mara says, “It’s just for a week or two.”

“Oh, well what’s your Snap? Maybe we’ll get in touch if we’re both there.”

They exchange information, and Mara asks, “Are you just taking a trip?”

“Yeah, I’m seeing my dad.”

“Does he live there?” Mara asks.

“Yeah, my parents are divorced and he lives in LA,” Rachel tells her as the entrée
arrives.

“Oh, really?” Mara says, looking up from her phone—though without any emphasis.
“Mine too.”

I take a sip of my drink, noticing that Valerie has a hand on my thigh.

“Same.” Mike and Mathew say at the same time.

The rest of dinner moves pretty fast and we’re all mildly drunk by the end of it, barring
Mike who says he smoked a bowl before coming. Mara also smoked a bowl, but has had, by my
count, four Gin and Tonics. Mathew asks Mike at some point if he knows a good dealer.

At some point Valerie and I go outside to smoke, and Rachel comes too. After that all
that’s left is dessert, and Valerie says that we should all just go to her place. Mathew says his is
closer, but since his parents are home we all decide it would just be easier to go to Valerie’s.
None of this has anything to do with sneaking alcohol in or out, since Mathew’s parents—like all
of ours—don’t notice or maybe don’t care, but instead because his parents are having a dinner
party that he forgot about and it seems like a hassle. Rachel asks if we should buy “booze” (her
word not mine) on the way there, but Valerie says there’s no point, since she already basically
has enough at hers. We pay the check (split between Amexes and Mike’s Platinum Citi card) and
realize that we’ll need to call two Ubers. Mike, Mathew, and Rachel leave since theirs got there
first, and Valerie and I just wait at the table for ours to show up.

“That was sort of fun,” she says.

“Yeah, it’s nice to see Mike and Rachel again.”

“Oh, so you’re excited to see Rachel again?” she says, furrowing her brow exaggeratedly.
“I wonder why that is?”

“Uh, what do you mean?” I ask and, though I know what she’s talking about, I was
hoping she wouldn’t catch any of the occasional glances. Only seven or eight, maybe ten.

“Were you excited to see any particular part of Rachel?” she intones.

“I—What? No, no I, I just—” I stammer before she starts laughing and interrupts: “Jesus,
James. I’m joking.”

“Oh,” is all I can say.

“Oh my god,” she laughs. “You should see your face.”

I clear my throat, think of ways to pivot away from this.

“So, what did you think of Mike and Mara?” I ask.

“James, I invited them,” she says flatly. But you can tell she’s amused.

“Oh, right. Yeah, sure.”

“Calm down, I was just joking,” she laughs again, leaning in and kissing my cheek. “It’s
not a big deal.”

But I’m not paying attention, because I’m staring past her, noticing how red the room is,
how much color there is, and for some reason it seems wrong. It’s not fitting with the tone of
things, and I’m glad we’re going back to Valerie’s where everything is gray and off-white.

“What’s wrong?” she says.

“Nothing… it’s just kind of, like, colorful in here,” I say after a minute.

“Colorful?” she repeats.

“Yeah.”

“Maybe have some water,” she laughs, but then her phone buzzes, and the Uber is here
and we’re leaving.


We don’t talk much in the car, though not because of any embarrassment or tension. In
fact, that’s already receding from my mind at an impossible speed because of how buzzed I am,
with dinner now hiding behind a cloud of liquor that grows denser as the blocks roll by outside
the window. Valerie is equally buzzed, lazily humming something and, as I look past her, I
notice that I can no longer see the waves of heat hovering over the sidewalk or pavement.
They’re still there, though.


Jumping out of the car in front of her apartment we meet everybody else—we were only
a few minutes behind them—and all head up to Valerie’s. She says her parents are in Milan or
Montana or something (did she mention this earlier?), and Mathew and I make drinks while
everyone else smokes a joint out of Valerie’s bathroom window. Once they’re back, we put on
Apocalypse Now, since Mike says it’s really good and Mathew and I have never seen it, but the
sound is off and no-one is watching it. Valerie turns on music, and soon the entire apartment is
filled with the Weeknd, and then Earl Sweatshirt for some reason, and then it violently pivots to
Lorde’s Supercut before returning to the Weeknd. We’re all talking about where we went last
summer now (Switzerland, France, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, Argentina, etc.) and then I grab
Valerie’s phone and play some Oasis and Mathew Sweet, since I’m in a sort of ‘90s mood
tonight. Someone’s dimmed the switch in the den, but light still bounces around from the setting
sun, scattered and diffused throughout the room, highlighting the various grays and beiges and
making everything relaxed. I’m hitting someone’s Juul, and the silver blends into the grays of
some of the furniture and allows it to become just another part of the decor, just like everyone in
it. We all look like we’ve lived here forever, like our natural habitat is an expensively furnished
living room. The heavy crystal tumbler in Valerie’s hand looks like it’s never not been there, and
Mathew and Rachel have just stepped out of a Stella Artois ad, bottles in hand. It’s a perfect
moment, not because it’s fun or special in any way, or because we’re all particularly good
friends, but because it manages to let nothing escape from its orbit, fully articulating exactly
what you would expect from a night like this. It strikes me as essential, in some way, maybe
inevitable. Mathew and I go to get more drinks, but not before someone shows us a video their
friend DM’d them of the Eiffel Tower collapsing, and, even though it’s CGI, it looks so real that
someone lets out what I at first think is a gasp, but then realize is laughter. “Fuck the French,
anyways.” Mathew says, patting me on the back and leading me out of the room. At the bar—
which is off the kitchen, but not a part of it, though also not entirely its own room—we make
drinks, and as Mathew is leaning down he asks if Valerie and I are going out. I tell him I don’t
know, and he asks what that means.

“I don’t know,” I say again.

“Are you, like, dating?” A pause. “Jesus, that sounds so corny.”

“Maybe,” I tell him. “I don’t think so.”

“Well, it looks like you guys are,” he says, then: “Hand me that glass, behind you.”

“Which one?”

“That one,” he points.

I spin around, and am confused for a second since all the glasses are the same, just crystal
tumblers lined up in neat little rows. I grab a random glass.

“Yeah, I guess,” I tell him as I hand him the tumbler.

“I mean, I guess that doesn’t really mean much anymore, right?” he says, turning to
resume crushing ice in a bucket.

“I mean, it’s fun. It’s casual, I guess.”

“Sure,” he says. “You want one?”

“What is it?” I ask.

“Whatever you want it to be,” he says, gesturing to the fully stocked bar.

When we walk back into the den, Valerie and Rachel are discussing whether or not this
girl, Jill Hearst, really had her nudes leaked. They may have been fake, they might have been
real, and no one is really sure. There’s no menace in the conversation, though, since it’s just
high-school gossip, just fun, and it doesn’t convey any weight or animosity that a conversation
like this might. Mathew says they looked real to him, and the girls think he’s making a crude
joke and give dirty looks. I’m pretty sure he was being genuine though, since he said the same
thing when he showed them to me last week.

“Asshole,” Rachel says, slapping his arm.

“What did I do?” Mathew asks, catching on and playing it off.

I realize that Mike and Mara aren’t here, but it doesn’t really affect anything so I don’t
mention it.

“They’re not real,” Valerie says, bored. “She told me her ex-boyfriend called her, totally
fucked up or something, and said he was going to post them if she didn’t get back together with
him. Or something like that, I don’t really remember.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard that guy is really fucked up,” Rachel repeats with an ominous tone.

“Yeah,” Valerie confirms.

“I mean, she doesn’t really seem like the type,” I say in between sips.

“The type to what?” Rachel asks.

“The type of girl who would send nudes… I guess?”

“Is there really a type of girl who does that?” Mathew asks, then, grinning: “And if so,
how can you spot them?”

Rachel slaps him again, which he snickers at. I take another swallow of the drink Mathew
made, which has a little umbrella in it that makes me think at first of the beach, and then of the
movie Spring Breakers. I haven’t seen the movie, it’s just what the drink makes me think of.

“I guess you can’t really tell, right?” Valerie says. “I mean, I don’t think she did, but I
guess you can’t tell.”

“Hey, seeing is believing,” Mathew laughs, and instead of slapping him Rachel laughs,
too, and then we all are.

“Hey, are Mike and Mara fucking somewhere out there?” Mathew asks, turning towards
the hall.

“No, Mike started having a minor seizure or something, and she had to take him to the
hospital, or home, maybe. They just left before you got back,” Valerie says.

“Did it look bad?” I ask.

“I’m not sure.” Valerie says. “Why would I be able to tell?”

I don’t answer her, because it doesn’t seem all that important. It doesn’t seem like
anything bad could happen in the apartment, among all the cool grays and browns on the walls,
and floor, and couches or tables. It doesn’t seem like there’s any reason to be concerned, because
the room hasn’t changed without them. It basically looks the same.


At some point Mathew and Rachel say they have to leave, something about a bar and a
friend from St. Bernards, though it takes them another thirty minutes to actually get out the door.
As Mathew and I wait by the elevator—the girls are looking for Rachel’s Juul in the couch or
maybe the bathroom—he sing-songs “reeeaal eyes, reeeaaliiize, reeeaal lieees,” and this confuses
me, because I’m not sure how you can see a lie. I’m not sure how something can look true or
untrue, since I can’t figure out how the way something looks can not be what it is, how that thing
could even be described. Eventually Valerie and Rachel meet us at the elevator (the Juul was in
Valerie’s pocket), and we all say goodbye again. After this Valerie and I go back to her
apartment, and on the TV people are slaughtering a Water Buffalo for some reason, though it
looks pretty fake and we turn on some reality TV show Valerie likes instead. I realize at some
point that Valerie is pretty drunk, that I am too, that it’s only 11 p.m.

“That was fun,” I say.

“Yeah,” Valerie says.

“Yeah,” I confirm.

“You know,” Valerie says, then pauses.

When she doesn’t continue, I realize that she’s distracted by something, something on the
TV, a guy giving a girl a rose, but she’s giving it back and they’re both crying.

“What do I know?” I ask.

“What?” she says dreamily, drunk.

“You were saying something. Something about me knowing something?”

“Oh,” she says. “I was going to say that, well, sometimes I think that you like looking at
me, and you like going places with me…”

She turns to me, and then begins a long process of climbing over a pillow, and putting her
legs around my waist, straddling my hips. This takes over a minute.

“I think that sometimes you like doing those things,” she pauses, laughs drunkenly,
continues: “but you don’t ever look at me.”

Her voice is soft, almost raspy.

“Val, that doesn’t make any sense,” I say. “You just said you think that I like looking at
you, and I do, but that’s what you said. You just said that.”

“It’s not the same,” she smiles, then her face is somewhere in my neck. “It means
something else. Something different.”

“But,” I start. “You like those things too.”

“I think I would be happier if I didn’t,” she says sweetly.

Her voice is muffled, somewhere below my ear.

“Then… don’t?”

“I don’t think it’s that simple.”

Her voice is barely there now, sad and far away, just one of a hundred things in this room
and I’m so tired. “I think, maybe, it’s not that simple.”

“What else is there?” I’m saying, trying to bring this to its inevitable conclusion, trying to
get the night over with because it’s the final stretch.

Because I can see an end that didn’t exist an hour ago.

“I’m… not really sure what that means?”

“I know,” she says, smiling, and then kisses my neck, and then again.


As I leave her room, I look at my phone and realize that it’s midnight, that the day is over.
I decide to take a shower before I go home and as the water heats up I’m lightly flexing various
muscles, idly examining them in a huge mirror that hangs over the sink, but I’m not really
looking at myself. I’m not really looking at myself because instead of my reflection I’m really
just seeing all the gym equipment that made my body this way and the soaps and the price of a
haircut and the safety of a childhood where everything was scheduled and the money that went
into that schedule and maybe somewhere is Valerie, and then, as everything comes apart, there’s
no reveal. Nothing is different because it’s all the sum of its parts and the desperation of this fact
is manageable if you’re committed enough. I’m looking at the grays of the wallpaper, at the
towels (Missoni Home), and there are flashes of a dream again, of an infinite space, a place
where meaning isn’t. It’s like being in the upper atmosphere, or maybe at the bottom of the
ocean, and there’s flashes of other things, too. Other images: a bike crash, people without faces
sitting in cafes, a ripple of heat. These images are between other images, and between those are
flashes of wallpaper and a sidewalk and a table at a restaurant and Diet Coke cans. There’s a
person seen only through a car window, and I stare at the reflection, myself, all these things for
ten minutes, at the nakedness of things that connect to nothing but themselves. I wait for it, me,
them, to do something, and I’m disappointed when nothing happens even though I know I
shouldn’t be. I wait for something behind it all, in the blank space, but it’s blotted out by too
many fractal combinations, and, the reality is, there just isn’t that much to see. Maybe nothing.
There is no narrative, only a structure, just an all-encompassing thing, an image, that flattens into
something more important, and, in the end, this might just be another mirror, another point in a
much larger, maybe infinite, reflection.

I call an Uber as I get out of the shower, and in less than five minutes I’m gone. The
mirror back in the apartment is left empty, except for a shower and a towel rack, and a light trace
of humidity that creates an opaque effect on the surface, and, because of this effect, everything is
just out of focus.