We've Met Before

Alex knew this guy, or had at least met him before. As they passed each other on the steps of Lucy’s walk-up – Alex heading back down to the first floor, to the front door, back out into the street; the guy coming up, climbing along their steep and narrow marble edges – the guy gave him a simple nod, and then averted his eyes.

Alex’s mind worked to catch up with the circumstances, and when it did he felt his chest sink deep into his body and a hollowness, absent but heavy, its presence round and dark and spreading wide, pressed down onto his lungs. He missed a breath, gasped for air, but kept moving. Behind him he could hear the labored squeaking of rubber soles on worn, shiny stone, rising higher into the building, growing faint as they receded from him and approached Lucy’s door.

He was sure of it now, this was a guy she went to school with, one of the many who smiled and shook hands with him when she would introduce them at parties or in the lobby whenever he’d stop by to pick her up after one of her classes. They stood off to the side, acting busy with something else, part of some conversation or the checking of some message on their phone, but out of the corner of his eye he always saw them looking at her. Some allowed themselves nothing more than a quick glance. Others, this one in particular, would watch her, track her movements, the way she played with her hair, her smile, the way she would lean in towards Alex and whisper something into his ear before pressing her lips to his neck or stealing a quick kiss.

The time Lucy introduced them – How long ago was it? Seven? Eight months? – they even got into a short conversation. Nothing particularly memorable or worth repeating, but now it seemed important for Alex to recall it, dissect the details. She had just completed a difficult test and it was all she could talk about. Alex, just to be civil, brought it up with this guy, asked him whether it was as bad as she was saying it was while she excused herself to say hi to another friend.

“It happens sometimes.”

“What?” Alex wasn’t sure if they were talking about the same thing.

“These sorts of tests. Maybe the professor just wakes up one day and decides he wants to really dig into his class. Or screw them over. Then you have all of these kids complaining about it afterward and talking about what a jerk he is.”

“Sort of annoying.”

“Except in the end, I’m sure most of them did totally fine.” He paused and looked at her, his glance passing over Alex’s shoulder to where she was standing a few feet away from them. “Don’t worry, she’s smart” he continued, returning his attention to Alex, “she probably aced it.”

What was his name? The floor numbers in the stairwell continued to drop off and Alex found himself moving slower, taking the time to measure each step and hold onto the handrail. More than anything he just wanted to remember his name.

A few minutes earlier, Alex had still been in Lucy’s room, picking up some of the last pieces of what had been left behind. At that point it wasn’t much, stuff he probably could have gone without and just allowed her to throw away or donate to Goodwill. But he made a show of saying he wanted to come get it, that it wasn’t a problem for him to stop by.

She had it all ready for him by the time he got there, packed into some cheap plastic bag from under the sink, saved from a trip to the grocery store. It sat by her kitchen table, slumping against the leg of a chair and slowly sliding further onto its side, making a light crunching noise that bags like that make when they self-deflate after being placed on the ground. As soon as he walked through the door, she stood to the side and pointed at it.

“That’s your stuff,” she said, as if it wasn’t obvious. The way she said it annoyed him.

He stepped further into her apartment and sat down at the kitchen table, leaning over to do a cursory inspection of the bag’s contents. He straightened up and looked at her.

The front door was still open and after a moment she made a move to close it, realizing that he hadn’t just come to grab his stuff and leave. She sighed as she did it.

“Everything good?” she asked.

“Guess so,” he said, realizing that honesty was probably the last thing she was in the mood for right now. Just her being polite, he had to tell himself, she’s not really asking you anything. Leave it alone.

He nodded when she didn’t say anything.

“Fine,” he added.

She moved into the kitchen area but didn’t sit down with him at the table, choosing instead to stand near the fridge, arms crossed in front of her. Magnetic poetry sprinkled the freezer door, most of it arranged in haphazard shapes without regard to the meaning the combined words might have. But a few lines seemed ordered for their content and he thought he recognized some from when he formed the sentences months earlier.

“The past finds no answer. Love is the melody of today. Our monument of truth sits alone.”

How depressing, he thought to himself. What kind of magnetic poetry is that? Surely it meant something, it was some sort of sign.

He engaged her in conversation because he just couldn’t bring himself to pick up the sad shopping bag from the floor, hear its crinkle of finality, and walk out the door. He asked whether she was still having problems with her water pressure, whether the super had finally come to look at it.

He had.

But had he fixed it? Or had he just looked at it and promised to investigate it further at some unannounced future date?

She sighed again. It was the later.

He implored her not to let it go, he was passionate about it. He was never passionate about things. This was something she had to keep pushing, because that’s the way that supers are, they give you the run-around until you get tired of asking.

OK. He shouldn’t worry about it. She would take care of it.

Really, he continued, he was serious.

Yes, yes, she knew. She was serious about it too.

He kept finding small things to bring up, just wanted to keep talking even if her answers were becoming more disinterested. Until eventually, he felt ridiculous. That’s when he got up and walked over to her, placed his hand on her waist. Her body stiffened but he kissed her anyway, and her lips were two tangled vines pressed tightly together, winding their way up stone. When he didn’t stop, she softened, she kissed him back.

But she kissed too thoughtfully, as if she had processed the situation, arrived at a rational decision about how to behave, and was carrying it out. Lock-step, planned. That’s how she liked to do things, he remembered, shunning spontaneity because it was likely to interfere with her expectations of how things were supposed to play out.

Her kiss was resigned, it was responsible, it was as if it came from some latent sense of obligation. Her kiss was pity.

He continued even when he realized this. His disappointment wasn’t enough to make him stop.

When it was over, he stepped back, looked at her for a moment, and then picked the bag up from the floor. The plastic compressed in his hand and filled the room with the sound of emptiness, of discordant echoes and discarded items, all falling atop themselves in a sprawling, vast space. The bag felt far heavier than he had expected it to feel.

“Thanks for coming by,” she said.

He didn’t wait for her to show him out. He walked over to the door, unlocked it when he was surprised to find it latched, and stood in the portal to say goodbye. She smiled at him from inside the room.

And now her smile, it bothered him, not because it was fake or ironic, but because it wore the look of nostalgia. If only he had left a few seconds earlier. If only he hadn’t taken the time to ask her questions or kiss her or wait for her to say one more thing before he started walking down the stairs. Then maybe he wouldn’t have passed this guy on his way up to her room. This guy – What was his name? Just let him remember the guy’s name – he must have seen the plastic bag in Alex’s hand. Surely he had seen it, and understood what it was, what it meant. Alex looked down at it now, at the wrinkled red and yellow logo on its side, tacky and excessive. He hated himself for carrying it.

He was on the first floor now, he could see the lobby and the mailboxes near the front. His reflection approached him through the glass panes of the entry door, as if emerging from the darkness outside. Overhead, a light hummed an electrical current. He had sensed this same tune before, the electricity discharged into the air, but until now he had never heard it.

It was too soon, he said to himself, shaking his head, far too soon for her to be seeing someone new. She could have waited a little longer, given things a little more time. He was having dreams about her every night, ordinary, uneventful, cliché dreams where she was just standing at a distance, her face blurry but visible, watching him. She stood at the end of a hallway. She stood, in a white dress, atop a small hill in a wide field. She stood near the edge of the water.

Did she have dreams about him? She must have dreams about him. He must have left a lasting impression.
It wasn’t right. It was far too soon. She could have waited a little longer.

Or maybe it didn’t matter how long she waited. The ending, after all, would be the same whether it was weeks, months, or years. Had it been years? When had they met, how long had they dated? A moment. A millennium. Time folded onto itself, the past pressed up against the future, and everything was just as it was, just as it had always been, the whole universe on the head of a pin.

He sees someone knock on her door and enter her room. She greets him the same, but differently, wrapping her arms around his neck and throwing one foot back as she stands on the toes of the other.

He knows her to do this.

Something annoys her and she tugs on a shirt playfully, pulling him, a body, towards her as she rolls her eyes.
She acts as if she’s angry, but she’s really not. She tries to keep a straight face but she can’t.

He sees himself and her. He sees them. They’re walking together silently, fingers interlocked, and she presses his thumb between her own thumb and forefinger. She doesn’t look up but he knows it’s a reminder – “I’m here. Know that I’m here” – and maybe nothing else matters. The rest of the world be damned.

In one of his dreams, the ones he keeps having, a black screen passes in front of him, obscuring his vision. As it passes off to the side and away, it becomes a black silhouette of shoulders and arms, then a torso, legs, the outline of a head. Her blurred face responds, just slightly, and even though he can’t see her eyes he knows that she’s watching the shape as it moves closer to her.

He shook his head as his feet passed over the tiling in her lobby. His reflection extended its hand towards him just as he extended his hand towards the front door. The two met at the knob, turned it together, and then went their separate ways.

Outside, the street lamps had just come on and were still heating up. The red and orange hues on the edges of the sky melted into the blues and purples that were taking over. Above and to the east, everything was already black, but somewhere in the dark he sensed the stars that he never managed to see when he looked up from the sidewalks outside of buildings.

At the corner he approached an overflowing garbage can, still waiting to be emptied after the weekend. He took the shopping bag and stuffed it amongst the wrappers and discarded coffee cups. The contents from the bag peeked out at him from between the plastic folds, stoically watching as he pressed down so that everything would sink deeper into the container, buried from sight.

When he was finished, he turned away and continued down the avenue. For a moment he thought to stop, felt as if he should turn around, go back. But he kept walking, even though he knew that somewhere behind him, he had thrown away the things he had loved.