The handwriting is sticklike and scruffy, no return address label. The envelope is secured with little pieces of tape, as if the sender didn’t trust the seal of their own spit. Opening it, I find a page of perforated lined paper. It looks to have been torn carefully from a work notebook, folded exactly in half. Eyes skipping to the bottom, I see the signature.Chris.
Only then, once it’s confirmed, do I allow myself to backtrack to the hope that this might be him offering the olive branch I was never going to give. It takes forever to decipher the note—not because I’m poring over each word or anything, but because his writing is just chicken scratch.
It’s an apology but not a stellar one, just a few quick sentences about how he took his emotions out on me, and how that was wrong and he hopes we can still be friends. I read it over a few times before making my judgment because I’m fair like that. In the end, I decide I don’t like it at all, mostly because who writes a letter to someone who lives in your same city? It’s a total cop-out. Also, if he actually felt bad, he’d write more. I mean, I churned out sixty-seven and a half pages about him—not that I mailed them to him, but still. It feels like the bare minimum, just a wimpy little confession to ease his Catholic guilt.
I head out for a walk to throw away the letter. No need for it to clutter up the Inn. Each garbage can and dumpster I pass, I think about tossing it in, but I don’t like the idea of someone rummaging through the trash and reading it. By the time I get to the Williamsburg Bridge, I still haven’t found a suitable disposal location.
I walk onto the bridge and halt when I’m partway across. It’s rarefor me to be up this early. The tangy morning air with a newness you don’t get by noon. Crepe-paper clouds strewn about the baby-blue sky. The Manhattan skyline spliced by chunky rays of sun, or maybe the sun spliced by the skyline.
Cars rumble below, cyclists whiz past. It’s almost hard to tell if they’re the ones moving or if I am. The theory of relativity can really get you sometimes, but the point is everyone’s rushing to get nowhere except me. I’m standing still to get somewhere.
I drink in the summer morning like a cold beer. It washes down easily, stirs in me some forgotten knowledge about the scale and scope of the world and why I was dropped into it.
Not that there’s any greater purpose, any divine intention. I was randomly born, just as I’ll randomly die. Just as Luke randomly died, leaving Chris with the memories and mutilations that come from loving mortals, from being stupid enough to attach ourselves to other humans, delicate champagne flutes that cut us with jagged debris once they’re destroyed and we’re forced to keep standing. Clinging to old cuts, tracing new ones just to remind us of what once was, what will never be again.
The impermanence of it all, the futility, makes me want to smooth things over with Chris. I type out a text and nearly send it, but I don’t. I delete it letter by letter until no one will be able to prove it was ever there at all. Then, with the quick flick of my wrist, I toss Chris’s letter over the side of the bridge, through the grated guardrails. It flutters, then falls.
There’s a wrench of remorse for polluting the river—not that it really matters since the earth is being destroyed by humans anyway. A single piece of paper isn’t to blame. One little person can’t wreck anything, can’t fix anything.
On the walk home, I pass one of my favorite street performers who always camps out on Knickerbocker Avenue, just outside the laundromat. Elijah is his name. He’s this older guy who wears the sameChristmas tree sweater vest even in summer and plays the trumpet like he’s at Carnegie Hall.
The music hits extra hard today, or extra softly I should say, because it gives me the feeling that my bones are gelatin, like I’m just learning how to walk again or something. I have to sit down on the cigarette-and-candy-wrapper-littered curb to regain my balance. But Elijah’s gritty trumpet melodies keep knocking me over again, one note at a time.
The jackhammers and wind gusts and car horns try to drag the music away, but it has a hefty quality, staying put. Like it’s trying to remind me of something I’ve intentionally forgotten and have no desire to remember. Because as much as I despise the status quo, I guess I don’t like change that much either.
Chapter 22
In the days after Hal’s lecture about needing to make rent, I take on more shifts at Kora’s. It doesn’t help much because the more I work, the more I go out and blow my paychecks on drinks and gummies. Nothing breeds recklessness quite like restraint.
One night, the three of us head out to the House of Yes. There’s nothing dramatic, no notable difference, but the magic is gone. The whole thing feels cheap and overdone, a high school prom with a poodle updo and too much eyeliner.
The next day’s hangover is extra bad. Everything throbs. The strobe lights are still there, blinking like red traffic lights at a four-way stop. I’m late to Kora’s, barely making it there at all.
Someone taps my shoulder, awakening me before I realize I’ve fallen asleep standing up, leaning against the counter.
“EJ,” a voice says.
My eyes blink open. It’s Chris, standing right in front of me, dressed in a white button-down and a blazer. The edges of him are too crisp to be a hallucination, but I still reach out and touch his arm to be sure. He’s solid, the linen of his shirt too stiff, in need of fabric softener.
“What’re you doing here?” I ask. There’s no time to organize my emotions, delineate which section needs to go where. Everything spills out, spills in.
He tells me that he went to my apartment but Hal said I was over here. “Did you get my letter?” he asks.
“What letter?” I fiddle at the cash register, gripping the paper bills just for something to hold, something to tear.
His forehead creases. “I wrote you an apology. Thought I got the address right...”
“Oh, that letter,” I say, as if only just remembering. “Yeah, I got it.”
Hands in his pockets, feet shuffling in place, he waits for me to continue.
He looks so earnest and awkward that I want to put it all behind us and forgive him, but of course I can’t do that. “Some might say that letters are a coward’s best friend,” I say.
He flinches at that. It doesn’t feel as rewarding as I’d hoped. “I thought it was the most respectful way to get in touch,” he says. “To give you space.”
“You mean so I couldn’t yell at you through the phone or send an angry text right back?” I clarify. “Youwere the one who wanted the space, Chris.”
“Maybe that’s true. Look, I’m sorry for how I reacted.” There’s a glitch in his voice, a rasp that’s not usually there. “I just have a hard time talking about Luke, and I felt like I was being backed into a corner.”
