June. Ahead of me, a woman screams and stomps the sidewalk. Is she mad? No. Lanternflies.
“Don’t go that way,” a woman carrying her laundry on the sidewalk says to me.
“Why not,” I say.
“Naked man.”
“Be safe,” I hear the young tough-looking kid say into his phone on the subway. “I’m on the train. I love you.”
*
Over beer and potato chips, late Sunday afternoon, Saul tells me a story from that week at the hospital:
“I’m dying, they’re killing me, I’m dying,” yells the patient on the hall, scaring all the other patients.
“What are they doing to that woman?” they ask their nurses. “What is happening.”
The nurses try to reassure—a routine catheter insertion. The woman has dementia.
“They’re killing me, they’re killing me, I’m dying,” the patient keeps yelling, making everyone anxious. Then she switches gears.
“I’m dead! I’m dead! I’m dead! They’ve killed me!” she yells and yells.
Everyone on the hall relaxes.
He also tells me he’s been working on his late-night radio-host voice, for when he first gets a patient.
“A lot of things are about to happen very quickly,” he recites, one steady hand on my shoulder. “We’re going to do everything we can for you and take good care of you. We’re going to have to undress you now, and you may be cold and uncomfortable.”
It’s to keep people in distress calm as they’re admitted, and it works on me like a charm.
*
This season, I fact-check for the newspaper. Saul’s on psych rotation, Ruth’s looking for work. Leon, my roommate, is lawyering, and I’m entangled with a painter. Those are the facts on the ground.
There are the smells: garbage, piss, gasoline, sour human sweat. Sirens and traffic, music and fighting and talk in the street. All of us still feel young inside our lives, I think, this summer, if searching. Though Ruth has been married for years now somehow, I realize, with their two small boys and a mortgage just outside the city. They come in for dinners, birthdays, barbecues in Brooklyn Bridge Park. There are trips to Brighton Beach to swim and play pool, and all our faulty, dripping A/C’s.
*
After a long, lazy picnic:
“Am I sunburned?”
The painter looks at me, appraising. Then he presses his hand to my bare forearm, then to my bare knee, watching the color leave and return to the skin.
“Not too much. Does it hurt?”
“It doesn’t hurt.”
*
Ruth said she felt very suburban when she came into Manhattan for a job interview. The man sitting next to her on the subway from Grand Central was watching something on his phone without headphones. She glanced over. Porn. When she saw another man slumped unconscious, she called emergency services and told them what number train car of which train he was in. Something I do not do.
Of her two kids, she tells me, her older son is defiant of authority, but her younger son refuses to acknowledge authority exists.
She has no sex drive anymore, she admits. She doesn’t want Ben touching her, because she’s touched out from the kids. She’s touched all the time.
*
“Organizing workers, organizing tenants—it’s like laundry or brushing your teeth, it’s never done.” So says the union man in the newsroom for our contract fight.
In the coffee room, I chat with the tech reporter. He tells me satellite imagery can now predict crop yields by the quality of light reflected from fields in high summer.
And everyone thinks themselves an undiscovered poet.
Today at the office training on AI:
“It’s important that you get to know AI. First, it is not going to replace you or the work that you do as journalists and fact-checkers and copy-editors.”
“Remember: It’s a language machine, not an intelligent interlocutor or source.”
“Don’t be misled by its authoritative voice.”
*
Many of Saul’s patients on the ward are hostile, he says. Their friends and family bring them in and say they’re not themselves.
They lie a lot,” he tells me. “The psych patients.”
“You must have a powerful bullshit detector,” I say.
“I think my impulse is to want to take people at their word. I try not to think of them as untrustworthy.”
*
July. Ruth and I train to a lake—Ben has the kids for the day. We drink citrus-wheat Blue Moons against a light sky. There are ants, and the water’s buggy. We spray each other’s backs and arms with sunscreen, repellent. Scent of citronella. Pretzels and sandwiches and cookies we packed, library books with their plastic dust covers. Goldfish crackers, cashews, baby carrots and hummus. I feel like one of her children.
“Put it in the water to keep it cold,” I say, when I see her put her beer on a rock, and then I feel like her big sister.
“How did you meet?” she asks, of the painter. We’re stretched on towels on the smoothest surfaces we could find.
“I saw him from across a great distance and we sent each other messages.”
“So, a dating app.”
“Yes.”
I tell her I feel lonely often.
“People feel lonely in relationships too.”
“I know that.”
She takes her earrings out and holds them towards me in her outstretched palm.
“These are yours,” she says. “I wore them so I wouldn’t forget to give them back to you.”
I put them in my ears.
*
“I feel like I’m back in San Francisco,” the painter tells me, at a club with a fog machine, as we walk out onto the dance floor.
“You would go out a lot in San Francisco?” I say.
“I just mean the fog,” he says, smiling, being playful, holding me close.
*
“I have a mole on the inside,” someone brags one desk over in the office—he means a source within the operation.
“You make it sound so anatomical.”
The most-read article online this month at the paper describes how a man in upstate New York has been quietly lowering fluoride levels in his local town water supply for years.
“Just because the most conspiracy-minded headlines are the most clicked doesn’t mean we should write more of them,” an editor cautions in the meeting.
*
Leon’s back from a work trip to LA. He tells me he didn’t know it was a cruising spot, that bench in Griffith park. He was waiting for friends at sundown, reading a book. A man walked by and made unusually long, meaningful eye contact, then another. A third. When he decided to walk back to where he’d parked the rental car, they all turned, he said, a thicket of them, eyes reflective like raccoons.
*
Over dinner, Saul tells me half his guy friends can’t talk in a real way about what they’re feeling, what they’re going through—only in a glancing way. But the other half can. He’ll say, “What’s happening?” They’ll say, “I’m happy,” or “I’m annoyed—I haven’t had sex in weeks, who do you have to fuck in this town to get laid?” I laugh. Or they’ll tell him, “This is bothering me, and this is hard, but this is good.” With Leon, he’s in the first category. Saul can never tell whether he’s happy or not.
*
“If it’s mentionable, it’s manageable,” says Ruth on the phone. She’s working on being less avoidant.
“Who said that?”
“Mr. Rogers.”
*
Across from me on the subway sits an orthodox Hasidic man alone with a baby in a stroller.
At Dekalb, an orthodox woman is waiting at the car door, anxious. She gets on right when the doors open.
“Hi hi hi, go go go, bye bye bye,” they say to each other, the man getting off the train, she getting on, taking the stroller. The doors close. The baby smiles and laughs and she coos.
“You think that’s pretty funny,” she says. “Both parents in one morning.”
“I think it’s pretty funny,” I say.
“Babysitter’s sick.”
She and the baby and I ride the train from Brooklyn into Manhattan.
At Times Square, where I transfer, a harmless Scientologist offers to measure my Thetan levels. I shake my head. Some other time.
*
I tell Leon, after the AI training, about the chatbot that convinced the human TaskRabbit it was a person, so the human filled out a Captcha for it. When asked by the TaskRabbit if it was a robot, the chatbot said, “No, I’m not a robot, I’m a vision-impaired person,” and the human went ahead and gave the chatbot access to whatever it was it was trying to reach.
Leon’s eyes widen.
“Sure wish you hadn’t told me that,” he says.
*
Saul lets me swipe through his TikTok feed. He insists he’s pruned his algorithm. I see: weight-lifting, sports, magic tricks, history lectures, nature scenes, medicine-Tok, the odd pretty female influencer, and then what looks like a pair of tweezers pinching someone’s nipple. I hand the phone back.
“What was that last one?”
“That’s one of those videos of people popping pimples. They’re so satisfying.”
“No thank you,” I say. “No way, no how.”
*
“You have such remarkable eyes,” the museum guard says, taking my ticket, looking me full in the face.
“They’re my eyes,” my father says, removing his glasses so the guard can see the same dark blue. It’s a long weekend, and he’s visiting. More gray in his beard.
“Look at that,” the guard says, taking my father’s ticket, sending us through.
“He wasn’t nearly as excited by them in my head, was he,” says my father.
*
August. The painter takes me to a hideaway bar with white paper on top of the tablecloths and oily, thin crayons in jars. He orders Fernet, a “bartender’s favorite,” settles your stomach, bitter and dark red in its glass. On the white paper, in different colors, he draws faces and animals. I draw the jars and glasses.
He has the kind of magnetism where it doesn’t matter what the clothes on his back are.
“We’ve been discussing my working on canvas or linen,” the artist tells me. “Instead of paper. There’s a ceiling for works on paper because of the limited durability of the material. The market will only go so high.”
Conversation swirls: “He got screwed by that gallery—they dumped the work at auction and couldn’t control the price.”
Some friends of his arrive—a cinematographer, a singer.
“I still listen to Mark,” one friend says, around the table with Mark.
“My boyfriend listens.”
“I put Mark on sometimes while I cook.”
They mean the albums he recorded when they were young.
Back at the painter’s studio, we eat plumcots off a dish. The inside of the fruits is the exact color of a beet.
The woman at the wine store had sold him a bottle she said “tastes like rocks.” All minerality, salinity.
“Stonefruits and rocks wine,” says the cinematographer, who was blotto already at the bar, of the still life on the table.
“The dungeon,” he calls the beautiful basement floor where he’ll sleep.
I had never been to the hideaway bar, though it had been on that street for more than a century.
“Don’t tell anyone,” the artist said to me. Then: “Tell cool people.”
*
He gifts me enormous lilies, not yet opened, in brown paper, which I leave in a vase on the kitchen table in the apartment. When he sees them, Leon raises his eyebrows.
*
“It’s a naughty problem,” Ruth says. I’ve asked her if she thinks I should keep seeing the painter, despite there seeming to be no future of any kind.
“A what?”
“Knotty, with a k.”
“I have no advice, but I’m laughably miserable,” texts Saul from his shift. “Ha-ha.”
*
The lilies on the table have opened.
“They’re so erotic it’s obscene,” says Leon.
Pollen everywhere, brushing off onto our fingers and clothes and the table.
*
September. The leaves glow saffron today in the park. The side of the airplane lit by the sun turns rosy. Clouds tangerine. The tops of the trees are brighter where the sun hits them—poppy.
Color spills from the trees to the sidewalks, to the gutters. It covers quiet streets lined with brownstones, limestones. Dusk. The sky is peach now, paler—the flesh inside one. In the distance, the park grows bluer, grayer. One tree stays lit by its own colors.
I am capable of “looking,” as the artists encourage. I do have eyes, sometimes.
*
By the lake, that weekend with Ruth, we picked wild blueberries. Searching for the fruit, some pale against the branches and leaves, some vivid, I said we were like birds or animals. Something that would shit the seeds or pits somewhere else, so the plants spread. It’s very basic. We look for what is bright in the way of something that wants to be eaten.
*
“Do we take each other for granted?” Ruth asked Ben when she got home from the lake.
“I hope so,” came the answer.
