Micah called him when it was already clear that they were going to get a lot more than the few inches of snow the weathermen had predicted.
Phone jimmied between tilted head and shoulder, Simon used his free hands to pull apart the blinds and peer outside. The accumulation had already formed itself into a little mound on top of the AC unit he had never bothered removing at the end of summer. Outside, the wind tumbled in white spirals and icy shards chimed against his window.
“You want me to come over?” He breathed the cold air drafting in through the AC vent. “Now?”
He winced only after he said it, when it was already too late to change the tone of his voice. Too annoyed, too critical. He wore his heart on his intonations.
“Is that OK?” Micah paused. There was the sound of him shuffling across the room. “I know it’s a little crazy outside but I just really need to get my mind off all of this.”
“I know,” Simon tried consoling as he let go of the blinds and looked down at the oddly patterned rug in his living room. He rubbed his toe on a piece of loose lint and thought about how much he needed to vacuum the place. The dust bunnies had quietly reaccumulated during the past couple of weeks.
“Big favor,” Micah said as if to reassure him that this was a lot to expect.
“Dude, of course, don’t even worry about it.
Forty-five minutes later, as the F-train crawled around the collapsing bend of track above 4th Avenue, Simon pulled out his phone to glance at the time. Cranes and bulldozers glazed in ice announced that construction was ongoing. Construction was always ongoing, it never seemed to stop.
The small pocket of reception permitted by the brief emergence from the tunnel gave him a chance to send a quick text to Micah promising his impending arrival, albeit significantly later than originally anticipated.
Bowing his head, he thought about Micah waiting for him, alone in the apartment. The same apartment that, only hours earlier, Micah had occupied with Julie. From the beginning, they had been one of those feisty couples, the easy-going guy and the slightly uptight girl. Micah had a tendency to shrug things off, to let Julie take the lead. She’d get worked up about something, roll her eyes at him, and after a few back and forth, undercutting comments, he would fold for the sake of harmony. Most of the time it was just really small, insignificant stuff they’d get into spats over, nothing particularly out of the ordinary for a couple. They had the sort of energy that seemed to bring them closer precisely because of its antagonistic vehemence.
But Simon never quite understood how this tightly-wound dynamic managed to work for them. In fear of disrupting his friendship with Micah, he chose not to question things, not to bring anything up even when Micah told him that he was going to propose to Julie. Micah was happy, and Julie, after all, managed his quirks better than any other girl Simon had ever seen him with. It was now, in hindsight, that he felt guilty about not disclosing his reservations, about not saying something earlier.
Then again, what would he have even said?
“Dude, something just feels off to me about this whole thing”?
He didn’t think he had anything particularly noteworthy to point to. She’s too serious? She likes nice things and you, Micah, are more of a shlub? She gets annoyed a lot? She acts like she’s smarter than you, but then again, maybe she is?
He sighed as the tracks squealed underneath the train. They sparked in the exertion and sprinkled Brooklyn with fragments of lightning steel. The Gowanus stretched ahead, winding its way around the “Kentile Floors” sign on its matrix of rusted crossbeams and towards derelict mills and factories in this forgotten portion of the borough. The canal glowed a sickly, pale green in the shadow of the streetlamps, shrugging off its past industrial adventures from behind the falling snow.
---
The walk from the subway to Micah’s apartment was only a few blocks, but in the mid-calf depth of the snow, it turned into an inspired pilgrimage.
There were no cabs on this typically busy Saturday night, but still plenty of people smoking outside of bars, music and voices breaking into the stillness on the streets during the momentary opening and swinging shut of doors. The plows asserted themselves by running through red lights, honking aside pedestrians who tried to take advantage of the absence of vehicles by walking down the parallel yellow lines in the middle of avenues.
Spontaneous snowball fights erupted on corners, with casual strollers taking refuge behind buried cars and falling over from impacts, bodies collapsing into the white pillow of the ground. Some stepped precariously off of sidewalks and onto sloshy streets, trying to gain solid footing before committing their full weight. In the middle of 10th St., a girl in psychotic stilettos slipped on the incline slant of a parking lot entrance, and blushed red through her concealer when four passersby ran to help her up.
She nodded a silent “thanks” and tapped away, head held high, cheeks burning, heel spikes stabbing the pavement.
Micah’s apartment was in one of those doorman buildings with the faux-antique furniture in the lobby, the kind that keeps the requisite Christmas tree/Hanukkah decorations around for at least two months after the holidays are over. An old woman in a fur coat sat on one of the brown leather couches near a glass table with outdated copies of Esquire and Vanity Fair. She had already surrendered to the weather that was proving too complicated for walking the small schnauzer that sat poised by her side. Clad in doggy winter-wear, he kept glancing at her and then back out towards the street, still holding onto the false hope that, eventually, he would get to leave the lobby.
Micah’s doorman glanced at Simon suspiciously as he moved towards the elevator bank.
“Excuse me,” he said, his voice reaching out to pull at a shirtsleeve. “Who are you here to see?”
“Micah,” he answered, and then paused as if to indicate that this should be enough information.
The doorman merely peeked out from under his cap and reached for the intercom phone. “Room number please.”
“717.” His momentum formally stifled, he walked over to the desk and leaned against it with an exhausted weight. The schnauzer looked on pleadingly, his back leg twitching in anticipation.
“And your name?” the doorman asked, covering the receiver.
---
Simon had to knock a few times before Micah finally answered the door to let him in.
“Hey,” he said when he saw his friend.
Micah stood dazed and stared off towards the kitchen while Simon removed his boots.
“Sorry,” he added out of habit when he noticed the ice he had tracked in from outside.
Simon stepped onto the lacquered wooden floor and followed Micah’s plodding form as it moved towards the living room. It was there that he saw the firestorm that had erupted around Julie’s departure. Books had been pulled from shelves, frames were knocked over from tables and stands where they had once stood calmly between innocuous statuettes and clocks and potted plants. Random papers and photos were strewn around the floor as if the filing cabinet of the past had been broken into and its contents viciously sprinkled out of manila folders and albums, memories detached from their proper places and now deposited into mounds that were easier to forget. A corner of the rug was stained with a Rorschach blot of red wine that left a dribbling path to the coffee table where a single suspect bottle stood empty besides stacked, unused coasters and no glasses.
It was all very dramatic. He didn’t understand whether Julie had felt particularly inclined to make a point before she left or if Micah had gone through some irrational act of ravagement on his own, after she was gone.
“What the heck happened here?” He noticed a plate on the windowsill, a sandwich abandoned mid-chew. As he stepped forward, his right sock accumulated a bit of the red wine stain that hadn’t yet dried.
Micah shrugged, brushing off the question, seemingly as clueless about it all as Simon was. He moved towards the couch and lashed his hand against the decorative pillows with knitted patterns and fringes that lay spread out along its length. They flew off towards the edge of the room and landed neatly into a small pile of paper.
Simon thought about the couch, the one that was now adorned with the fancy pillows Micah had contempt for. It was the same couch that had followed Micah from his old apartment, the “bachelor pad” just off Greenwich Ave. that dated back to their immediate post-college days. It had rested along one of the walls, just opposite an inoperable fire place, amidst other dark brown pieces of furniture composed of wood and leather and accented by the occasional wedge of buffed steel or frosted glass. It had been a centerpiece, the thing that, over the years, had supported many an ass, reinforced multiple conversations, provided the foundational base for drinking and hookah smoking and movie-watching sessions.
When Micah moved in with Julie and had to go through a process of discarding pieces of the past, he just couldn’t part with the couch, with its worn armrest glowing in a muddied polished tan, its reek of afternoon naps and slept-off hangovers after nights of alcohol-induced pontification about the uncertainty of the future and the failure of relationships. This was the same couch Simon had slept on after he split with his girlfriend of two years, when the reality of what he had done suddenly sunk in late on a Saturday night and he needed to be somewhere other than standing in his shower, letting the sound of the water drown out most of the things popping into his mind.
“But it’s so ugly,” Julie had tried convincing Micah. “It won’t make any sense in the apartment.” To her it was just like his movie posters and kitsch tribal masks, the vestigial collection of ice hockey cards organized in thick, tome-like albums that he was forced to send back to Long Island to live in his parents’ attic.
It was a small battle and Micah thought he had gotten his way when the couch was grudgingly loaded into the moving van. But then Julie embarked on her war of attrition which involved burying the couch under as many accessories as it would take to shroud its true nature. More than anything, it seemed as if the couch embarrassed her, reminded her, perhaps, of who Micah was, of the man he would always be no matter how much she tried changing him, of all the incongruities that existed between them.
Micah sat down and the storied leather squeaked underneath him. He leaned forward onto his knees and stared at his muted reflection in the LCD screen on the wall.
The apartment held its breath. All was silent except for the sound of the refrigerator motor switching on and off and the steam drumming against the building’s old piping. Micah dropped his head into his hands.
“I seriously need another drink,” he said.
---
A bottle of scotch now stood half-empty next to the crusty bottle of wine. Micah was on the rug, leaning against the couch, swirling around some ice in his glass while crunching his teeth down on one of the cubes.
“You know what she told me before she left?” Micah asked as he looked towards the interior of the apartment and squinted, as if straining to see something. “She goes to me – sometimes we get away from ourselves.” He shook his head and smiled to himself. “Now what the hell does that mean? When did she become a fucking philosopher?”
Simon didn’t say anything.
“Just out of the blue dude. Like one moment we’re having dinner, we’re getting a drink – shit, we got a drink with you like two weeks ago, that crappy dive with the messed up darts that you couldn’t throw straight, remember? – and then she’s taking off.”
This was them going through the events of the past few months, trying to understand what might have happened, where the turning point was, if there had been some singular, instigating occurrence that helped precipitate the quick descent from newly-engaged to newly-separated young adults. Maybe it was easier to try to find a specific thing that had gone wrong rather than have to deal with the idea that there was just no way to predict any of it.
“She never said anything? She wasn’t acting weird?”
“I don’t think so, I mean, fuck, who even knows anymore?”
“You guys weren’t arguing?” Simon asked, taking another sip of the scotch, trying his best to keep himself engaged in Micah’s dissecting of moments even as he was growing tired from the drinking and the dimly lit apartment.
“We argued a bit, but not in any strange sort of way. The usual. You know how we were.”
Micah smiled dismally at the memory. Then he turned to look at his hand, he opened and closed it, watched its motion. It was as if he was assessing how odd it all was, the way that hands move, the way we have the power to make them move in the way we want them to. The tendons contracted and released, the fingers tightened themselves into a fist, into a grip that burned white as the blood rushed from it and he held on to something, to nothing, to the air in the room. Then he opened his hand and let go.
The wind, abandoned by the revelers who were finding it too cold and too late to be outside, whistled its lonely tune from the street. It bent its head around corners and loitered by stoops with lit entryways and corridors, still sleepless, giddy, hopeful perhaps, of finding some company even in the midst of the deepening night.
“Maybe it’s pointless.”
“What?” asked Micah.
“Trying to dissect it all, looking for something specific that could explain this. Maybe there’s just no sense to be made.”
Micah didn’t seem satisfied. “No, I don’t know if I believe that.” He paused. “There has to be something I’m not getting.”
“You’re liable to drive yourself nuts trying to figure it out.”
Micah turned to face the window. A shadow fluttered in front of the floor lamp, dancing precariously in its yellow warmth. In one moment, it wrapped itself around him, obscuring him in darkness. And then as quickly as it had come, it slipped away, passing one last, loving stroke across his cheek.
“You think she’ll come back?” he asked, glancing back at Simon. His face drooped pitifully, sunken and hollow, a forgotten jack-o-lantern with the bottom ready to fall out.
Simon wasn’t sure how to respond. The truth began floating up softly, naturally, aided by the drinking and the sense of prophetic understanding it brings on. But then his mind panicked and dug its claws in, keeping the words lodged firmly in his throat.
“She has to, right?” Micah tried answering his own question. “I mean, it’s too surreal. It happened too quickly. It was too rash. People don’t just disappear like that, right?” He sighed, the confidence draining out of his voice. “Maybe she just needs some time.”
Simon yawned and quickly raised his hand to cover his mouth.
“I’m gonna run to the bathroom.”
He got up and walked back past the foyer, into Micah’s bedroom, suddenly attacked with the nagging sense that he needed to leave the apartment. It was getting late and he was finding himself completely exhausted, unable to focus. He breathed heavy and shut his eyes, trying to will himself back into being a helpful, receptive friend.
But the weight of the scotch unpacked itself in his head and slid down to his legs. He sat on the bed and looked around him. The light from the rest of the apartment illuminated the bedroom and he saw the unkempt sheets tossed around and bundled in the corners of the mattress, outlining a space in the middle of the bed where he perceived a depression. Maybe it was where Micah had been laying earlier in the evening, trying to imagine it all away. Maybe it was where Julie had placed her suitcase as she packed it with the clothes she pulled from the hangers in the closet, letting them swing vacantly, pendulum-like, until they tired.
He imagined her a few hours earlier, filling the suitcase quickly and efficiently. Her face focused, locked in the concentration of her folding, with Micah standing in the door frame, leaning against it with his hands tucked into the pockets of his jeans. She didn’t look up, didn’t pay attention to his presence. When he asked her questions, asked things like “why?” and “how did we get to this?” and “are you going to say anything?,” she glanced at him for a moment, exhaled in a way that accented her silence with the notion that answers were unnecessary, that it should all be obvious, and then continued with her packing.
Simon rose from the bed and its springs creaked in response. In the bathroom he ran the water, washing his face, his hands. By the sink he noticed two toothbrushes staring out stiffly, judgmentally, from a water-stained glass, a tube of paste curled up timidly by its side.
Everything changes, he thought to himself as he walked back out. Everything changes, all the time, even when we’ve gotten old enough to not want it to anymore.
“Hey,” he said to Micah, who sat spinning the empty wine bottle on the rug, watching it turn methodically. “It’s pretty bad out and it’s getting late…”
Micah looked up and nodded. He reached out his hand and Simon helped prop him onto his feet. He fixed his shirt aimlessly, scratched his nose.
“I should probably go,” Simon continued quietly.
“You can totally crash here,” Micah offered. He peeked up at Simon and shrugged. “I can set you up on the couch.”
Simon looked back towards the door, at his boots sitting in the middle of a small puddle of water, and felt overcome by a mild panic that tugged at his hand, urging him to leave.
“Thanks dude, but I think I need to head out.”
Micah nodded silently.
“I have some stuff to do tomorrow. I wanted to get an early start.”
“Sure, of course. Don’t worry about it.”
Simon hated himself for leaving, but he couldn’t overcome his desire to flee, to escape from the suffocating sense of loneliness he felt himself being pulled into.
“You’re going to be alright?”
Micah put his hand on Simon’s shoulder and smiled. “Yes, I’m going to be alright. Don’t worry, I’m not going to kill myself or anything.”
They walked over to the foyer and Simon pulled his coat back on, slipped into his boots. Micah unlatched the door and opened it for him. From down the hall they felt the electrical hum of a TV and heard the muffled rasping of voices against hollow walls.
“Look,” Simon began as he stepped out of the apartment, feeling the need to add something reassuring before leaving, “this will all fix itself. Just give her some time to breathe, or do whatever it is she needs to do.”
“Yeah.”
“Maybe it’s all a bit stressful for her. I mean it’s such a huge thing, to be getting married. I can see how the realization of what it all means can suddenly hit you and seem freaky.”
Simon stuck his hands in his pockets and felt the ridges of his keys with the tips of his fingers. The sound of his own voice was odd to him, it trailed from a distance, contrived in the manner of things we say because we think we must. He heard it and thought that perhaps someone should silence its noise.
The wind howled at them from the empty stairwell.
“I don’t know,” he continued. “And she loves you dude, which is the most important part, right? You don’t just disappear on someone you love.”
“Right.”
“So I’ll call you in the morning then.”
“I might be sleeping off a scotch-ache but I’ll call you back when I’m up.”
“So I know you’re alive?”
“Exactly.”
Simon walked over to the elevator and pushed the call button. Micah waved and closed the apartment door, leaving him to wait alone in the hallway.
In the lobby, the doorman sat poised in his chair, writing on something hidden behind the counter with the vehemence of a novelist in the middle of a perfect passage. He seemed annoyed to have to look up in response to Simon’s emergence on the marble floor. Simon half-expected to see the old woman with the dog, still waiting to be walked, but they weren’t around anymore. He wondered if they had ever made it into the snow.
“Have a good night,” he said to the doorman who just looked back down to his secret scribing and proceeded to throw the full force of his arm into the motions of his pen.
---
Outside the snow had stopped falling and all was relatively calm. The storm, being pulled helplessly into the late night silence after a full day of activity, laid down its head before closing its eyes and exhaling a final breath. The sidewalks had been mostly cleared and only when he got to the corner did he find the mess of plowed piles, coalescing at a point that made it impossible to cross the street. He took a moment to look back up towards the 7th floor, to Micah’s apartment windows extending out along one line of the brick façade, trimmed by eroding, sand-colored fleur-de-lis moldings. Light from the inside of the apartment washed over the drawn curtains as, he imagined, Micah paced back and forth over the floor beams, biting his nails and fixing his shirt. Eventually he would sit back down into the mess in the living room, on the couch Simon had refused to spend the night on. He would stare at the TV, glance around at some of the photos on the walls, at the little feminine flourishes that decorated the entire place, and wonder about how, no matter what ultimately happened, nothing would ever be the same again.
Simon shook his head. He shouldn’t have left him like that.
A truck engine burred angrily somewhere nearby, trudging forward with effort over the ice-glazed blacktop on another street or avenue. It moved somewhere in the darkness.
The sound created the illusion of closeness, an impression that at any moment it should pass directly in front of Micah’s building. Simon, tricked by the way the City’s grid amplified the noise, began looking around for the source, but saw only the somber side-view mirrors of encased cars poking out from under the snow. Then, from seemingly out of nowhere, a lone walker emerged. The man, his collar upturned and hiding the contours of his face, kept his eyes focused on his feet, to the precariousness of his every step. As he passed Simon, nudged closer by the shoveled snow that narrowed the width of the sidewalk, the man didn’t look up, didn’t acknowledge that two people had found themselves on the same sidewalk, at the same moment, at the tail-end of a storm that had shut most everyone else inside their homes.
After he had passed, Simon turned his attention back to Micah’s apartment, and found that the lights had been switched off.
Phone jimmied between tilted head and shoulder, Simon used his free hands to pull apart the blinds and peer outside. The accumulation had already formed itself into a little mound on top of the AC unit he had never bothered removing at the end of summer. Outside, the wind tumbled in white spirals and icy shards chimed against his window.
“You want me to come over?” He breathed the cold air drafting in through the AC vent. “Now?”
He winced only after he said it, when it was already too late to change the tone of his voice. Too annoyed, too critical. He wore his heart on his intonations.
“Is that OK?” Micah paused. There was the sound of him shuffling across the room. “I know it’s a little crazy outside but I just really need to get my mind off all of this.”
“I know,” Simon tried consoling as he let go of the blinds and looked down at the oddly patterned rug in his living room. He rubbed his toe on a piece of loose lint and thought about how much he needed to vacuum the place. The dust bunnies had quietly reaccumulated during the past couple of weeks.
“Big favor,” Micah said as if to reassure him that this was a lot to expect.
“Dude, of course, don’t even worry about it.
Forty-five minutes later, as the F-train crawled around the collapsing bend of track above 4th Avenue, Simon pulled out his phone to glance at the time. Cranes and bulldozers glazed in ice announced that construction was ongoing. Construction was always ongoing, it never seemed to stop.
The small pocket of reception permitted by the brief emergence from the tunnel gave him a chance to send a quick text to Micah promising his impending arrival, albeit significantly later than originally anticipated.
Bowing his head, he thought about Micah waiting for him, alone in the apartment. The same apartment that, only hours earlier, Micah had occupied with Julie. From the beginning, they had been one of those feisty couples, the easy-going guy and the slightly uptight girl. Micah had a tendency to shrug things off, to let Julie take the lead. She’d get worked up about something, roll her eyes at him, and after a few back and forth, undercutting comments, he would fold for the sake of harmony. Most of the time it was just really small, insignificant stuff they’d get into spats over, nothing particularly out of the ordinary for a couple. They had the sort of energy that seemed to bring them closer precisely because of its antagonistic vehemence.
But Simon never quite understood how this tightly-wound dynamic managed to work for them. In fear of disrupting his friendship with Micah, he chose not to question things, not to bring anything up even when Micah told him that he was going to propose to Julie. Micah was happy, and Julie, after all, managed his quirks better than any other girl Simon had ever seen him with. It was now, in hindsight, that he felt guilty about not disclosing his reservations, about not saying something earlier.
Then again, what would he have even said?
“Dude, something just feels off to me about this whole thing”?
He didn’t think he had anything particularly noteworthy to point to. She’s too serious? She likes nice things and you, Micah, are more of a shlub? She gets annoyed a lot? She acts like she’s smarter than you, but then again, maybe she is?
He sighed as the tracks squealed underneath the train. They sparked in the exertion and sprinkled Brooklyn with fragments of lightning steel. The Gowanus stretched ahead, winding its way around the “Kentile Floors” sign on its matrix of rusted crossbeams and towards derelict mills and factories in this forgotten portion of the borough. The canal glowed a sickly, pale green in the shadow of the streetlamps, shrugging off its past industrial adventures from behind the falling snow.
---
The walk from the subway to Micah’s apartment was only a few blocks, but in the mid-calf depth of the snow, it turned into an inspired pilgrimage.
There were no cabs on this typically busy Saturday night, but still plenty of people smoking outside of bars, music and voices breaking into the stillness on the streets during the momentary opening and swinging shut of doors. The plows asserted themselves by running through red lights, honking aside pedestrians who tried to take advantage of the absence of vehicles by walking down the parallel yellow lines in the middle of avenues.
Spontaneous snowball fights erupted on corners, with casual strollers taking refuge behind buried cars and falling over from impacts, bodies collapsing into the white pillow of the ground. Some stepped precariously off of sidewalks and onto sloshy streets, trying to gain solid footing before committing their full weight. In the middle of 10th St., a girl in psychotic stilettos slipped on the incline slant of a parking lot entrance, and blushed red through her concealer when four passersby ran to help her up.
She nodded a silent “thanks” and tapped away, head held high, cheeks burning, heel spikes stabbing the pavement.
Micah’s apartment was in one of those doorman buildings with the faux-antique furniture in the lobby, the kind that keeps the requisite Christmas tree/Hanukkah decorations around for at least two months after the holidays are over. An old woman in a fur coat sat on one of the brown leather couches near a glass table with outdated copies of Esquire and Vanity Fair. She had already surrendered to the weather that was proving too complicated for walking the small schnauzer that sat poised by her side. Clad in doggy winter-wear, he kept glancing at her and then back out towards the street, still holding onto the false hope that, eventually, he would get to leave the lobby.
Micah’s doorman glanced at Simon suspiciously as he moved towards the elevator bank.
“Excuse me,” he said, his voice reaching out to pull at a shirtsleeve. “Who are you here to see?”
“Micah,” he answered, and then paused as if to indicate that this should be enough information.
The doorman merely peeked out from under his cap and reached for the intercom phone. “Room number please.”
“717.” His momentum formally stifled, he walked over to the desk and leaned against it with an exhausted weight. The schnauzer looked on pleadingly, his back leg twitching in anticipation.
“And your name?” the doorman asked, covering the receiver.
---
Simon had to knock a few times before Micah finally answered the door to let him in.
“Hey,” he said when he saw his friend.
Micah stood dazed and stared off towards the kitchen while Simon removed his boots.
“Sorry,” he added out of habit when he noticed the ice he had tracked in from outside.
Simon stepped onto the lacquered wooden floor and followed Micah’s plodding form as it moved towards the living room. It was there that he saw the firestorm that had erupted around Julie’s departure. Books had been pulled from shelves, frames were knocked over from tables and stands where they had once stood calmly between innocuous statuettes and clocks and potted plants. Random papers and photos were strewn around the floor as if the filing cabinet of the past had been broken into and its contents viciously sprinkled out of manila folders and albums, memories detached from their proper places and now deposited into mounds that were easier to forget. A corner of the rug was stained with a Rorschach blot of red wine that left a dribbling path to the coffee table where a single suspect bottle stood empty besides stacked, unused coasters and no glasses.
It was all very dramatic. He didn’t understand whether Julie had felt particularly inclined to make a point before she left or if Micah had gone through some irrational act of ravagement on his own, after she was gone.
“What the heck happened here?” He noticed a plate on the windowsill, a sandwich abandoned mid-chew. As he stepped forward, his right sock accumulated a bit of the red wine stain that hadn’t yet dried.
Micah shrugged, brushing off the question, seemingly as clueless about it all as Simon was. He moved towards the couch and lashed his hand against the decorative pillows with knitted patterns and fringes that lay spread out along its length. They flew off towards the edge of the room and landed neatly into a small pile of paper.
Simon thought about the couch, the one that was now adorned with the fancy pillows Micah had contempt for. It was the same couch that had followed Micah from his old apartment, the “bachelor pad” just off Greenwich Ave. that dated back to their immediate post-college days. It had rested along one of the walls, just opposite an inoperable fire place, amidst other dark brown pieces of furniture composed of wood and leather and accented by the occasional wedge of buffed steel or frosted glass. It had been a centerpiece, the thing that, over the years, had supported many an ass, reinforced multiple conversations, provided the foundational base for drinking and hookah smoking and movie-watching sessions.
When Micah moved in with Julie and had to go through a process of discarding pieces of the past, he just couldn’t part with the couch, with its worn armrest glowing in a muddied polished tan, its reek of afternoon naps and slept-off hangovers after nights of alcohol-induced pontification about the uncertainty of the future and the failure of relationships. This was the same couch Simon had slept on after he split with his girlfriend of two years, when the reality of what he had done suddenly sunk in late on a Saturday night and he needed to be somewhere other than standing in his shower, letting the sound of the water drown out most of the things popping into his mind.
“But it’s so ugly,” Julie had tried convincing Micah. “It won’t make any sense in the apartment.” To her it was just like his movie posters and kitsch tribal masks, the vestigial collection of ice hockey cards organized in thick, tome-like albums that he was forced to send back to Long Island to live in his parents’ attic.
It was a small battle and Micah thought he had gotten his way when the couch was grudgingly loaded into the moving van. But then Julie embarked on her war of attrition which involved burying the couch under as many accessories as it would take to shroud its true nature. More than anything, it seemed as if the couch embarrassed her, reminded her, perhaps, of who Micah was, of the man he would always be no matter how much she tried changing him, of all the incongruities that existed between them.
Micah sat down and the storied leather squeaked underneath him. He leaned forward onto his knees and stared at his muted reflection in the LCD screen on the wall.
The apartment held its breath. All was silent except for the sound of the refrigerator motor switching on and off and the steam drumming against the building’s old piping. Micah dropped his head into his hands.
“I seriously need another drink,” he said.
---
A bottle of scotch now stood half-empty next to the crusty bottle of wine. Micah was on the rug, leaning against the couch, swirling around some ice in his glass while crunching his teeth down on one of the cubes.
“You know what she told me before she left?” Micah asked as he looked towards the interior of the apartment and squinted, as if straining to see something. “She goes to me – sometimes we get away from ourselves.” He shook his head and smiled to himself. “Now what the hell does that mean? When did she become a fucking philosopher?”
Simon didn’t say anything.
“Just out of the blue dude. Like one moment we’re having dinner, we’re getting a drink – shit, we got a drink with you like two weeks ago, that crappy dive with the messed up darts that you couldn’t throw straight, remember? – and then she’s taking off.”
This was them going through the events of the past few months, trying to understand what might have happened, where the turning point was, if there had been some singular, instigating occurrence that helped precipitate the quick descent from newly-engaged to newly-separated young adults. Maybe it was easier to try to find a specific thing that had gone wrong rather than have to deal with the idea that there was just no way to predict any of it.
“She never said anything? She wasn’t acting weird?”
“I don’t think so, I mean, fuck, who even knows anymore?”
“You guys weren’t arguing?” Simon asked, taking another sip of the scotch, trying his best to keep himself engaged in Micah’s dissecting of moments even as he was growing tired from the drinking and the dimly lit apartment.
“We argued a bit, but not in any strange sort of way. The usual. You know how we were.”
Micah smiled dismally at the memory. Then he turned to look at his hand, he opened and closed it, watched its motion. It was as if he was assessing how odd it all was, the way that hands move, the way we have the power to make them move in the way we want them to. The tendons contracted and released, the fingers tightened themselves into a fist, into a grip that burned white as the blood rushed from it and he held on to something, to nothing, to the air in the room. Then he opened his hand and let go.
The wind, abandoned by the revelers who were finding it too cold and too late to be outside, whistled its lonely tune from the street. It bent its head around corners and loitered by stoops with lit entryways and corridors, still sleepless, giddy, hopeful perhaps, of finding some company even in the midst of the deepening night.
“Maybe it’s pointless.”
“What?” asked Micah.
“Trying to dissect it all, looking for something specific that could explain this. Maybe there’s just no sense to be made.”
Micah didn’t seem satisfied. “No, I don’t know if I believe that.” He paused. “There has to be something I’m not getting.”
“You’re liable to drive yourself nuts trying to figure it out.”
Micah turned to face the window. A shadow fluttered in front of the floor lamp, dancing precariously in its yellow warmth. In one moment, it wrapped itself around him, obscuring him in darkness. And then as quickly as it had come, it slipped away, passing one last, loving stroke across his cheek.
“You think she’ll come back?” he asked, glancing back at Simon. His face drooped pitifully, sunken and hollow, a forgotten jack-o-lantern with the bottom ready to fall out.
Simon wasn’t sure how to respond. The truth began floating up softly, naturally, aided by the drinking and the sense of prophetic understanding it brings on. But then his mind panicked and dug its claws in, keeping the words lodged firmly in his throat.
“She has to, right?” Micah tried answering his own question. “I mean, it’s too surreal. It happened too quickly. It was too rash. People don’t just disappear like that, right?” He sighed, the confidence draining out of his voice. “Maybe she just needs some time.”
Simon yawned and quickly raised his hand to cover his mouth.
“I’m gonna run to the bathroom.”
He got up and walked back past the foyer, into Micah’s bedroom, suddenly attacked with the nagging sense that he needed to leave the apartment. It was getting late and he was finding himself completely exhausted, unable to focus. He breathed heavy and shut his eyes, trying to will himself back into being a helpful, receptive friend.
But the weight of the scotch unpacked itself in his head and slid down to his legs. He sat on the bed and looked around him. The light from the rest of the apartment illuminated the bedroom and he saw the unkempt sheets tossed around and bundled in the corners of the mattress, outlining a space in the middle of the bed where he perceived a depression. Maybe it was where Micah had been laying earlier in the evening, trying to imagine it all away. Maybe it was where Julie had placed her suitcase as she packed it with the clothes she pulled from the hangers in the closet, letting them swing vacantly, pendulum-like, until they tired.
He imagined her a few hours earlier, filling the suitcase quickly and efficiently. Her face focused, locked in the concentration of her folding, with Micah standing in the door frame, leaning against it with his hands tucked into the pockets of his jeans. She didn’t look up, didn’t pay attention to his presence. When he asked her questions, asked things like “why?” and “how did we get to this?” and “are you going to say anything?,” she glanced at him for a moment, exhaled in a way that accented her silence with the notion that answers were unnecessary, that it should all be obvious, and then continued with her packing.
Simon rose from the bed and its springs creaked in response. In the bathroom he ran the water, washing his face, his hands. By the sink he noticed two toothbrushes staring out stiffly, judgmentally, from a water-stained glass, a tube of paste curled up timidly by its side.
Everything changes, he thought to himself as he walked back out. Everything changes, all the time, even when we’ve gotten old enough to not want it to anymore.
“Hey,” he said to Micah, who sat spinning the empty wine bottle on the rug, watching it turn methodically. “It’s pretty bad out and it’s getting late…”
Micah looked up and nodded. He reached out his hand and Simon helped prop him onto his feet. He fixed his shirt aimlessly, scratched his nose.
“I should probably go,” Simon continued quietly.
“You can totally crash here,” Micah offered. He peeked up at Simon and shrugged. “I can set you up on the couch.”
Simon looked back towards the door, at his boots sitting in the middle of a small puddle of water, and felt overcome by a mild panic that tugged at his hand, urging him to leave.
“Thanks dude, but I think I need to head out.”
Micah nodded silently.
“I have some stuff to do tomorrow. I wanted to get an early start.”
“Sure, of course. Don’t worry about it.”
Simon hated himself for leaving, but he couldn’t overcome his desire to flee, to escape from the suffocating sense of loneliness he felt himself being pulled into.
“You’re going to be alright?”
Micah put his hand on Simon’s shoulder and smiled. “Yes, I’m going to be alright. Don’t worry, I’m not going to kill myself or anything.”
They walked over to the foyer and Simon pulled his coat back on, slipped into his boots. Micah unlatched the door and opened it for him. From down the hall they felt the electrical hum of a TV and heard the muffled rasping of voices against hollow walls.
“Look,” Simon began as he stepped out of the apartment, feeling the need to add something reassuring before leaving, “this will all fix itself. Just give her some time to breathe, or do whatever it is she needs to do.”
“Yeah.”
“Maybe it’s all a bit stressful for her. I mean it’s such a huge thing, to be getting married. I can see how the realization of what it all means can suddenly hit you and seem freaky.”
Simon stuck his hands in his pockets and felt the ridges of his keys with the tips of his fingers. The sound of his own voice was odd to him, it trailed from a distance, contrived in the manner of things we say because we think we must. He heard it and thought that perhaps someone should silence its noise.
The wind howled at them from the empty stairwell.
“I don’t know,” he continued. “And she loves you dude, which is the most important part, right? You don’t just disappear on someone you love.”
“Right.”
“So I’ll call you in the morning then.”
“I might be sleeping off a scotch-ache but I’ll call you back when I’m up.”
“So I know you’re alive?”
“Exactly.”
Simon walked over to the elevator and pushed the call button. Micah waved and closed the apartment door, leaving him to wait alone in the hallway.
In the lobby, the doorman sat poised in his chair, writing on something hidden behind the counter with the vehemence of a novelist in the middle of a perfect passage. He seemed annoyed to have to look up in response to Simon’s emergence on the marble floor. Simon half-expected to see the old woman with the dog, still waiting to be walked, but they weren’t around anymore. He wondered if they had ever made it into the snow.
“Have a good night,” he said to the doorman who just looked back down to his secret scribing and proceeded to throw the full force of his arm into the motions of his pen.
---
Outside the snow had stopped falling and all was relatively calm. The storm, being pulled helplessly into the late night silence after a full day of activity, laid down its head before closing its eyes and exhaling a final breath. The sidewalks had been mostly cleared and only when he got to the corner did he find the mess of plowed piles, coalescing at a point that made it impossible to cross the street. He took a moment to look back up towards the 7th floor, to Micah’s apartment windows extending out along one line of the brick façade, trimmed by eroding, sand-colored fleur-de-lis moldings. Light from the inside of the apartment washed over the drawn curtains as, he imagined, Micah paced back and forth over the floor beams, biting his nails and fixing his shirt. Eventually he would sit back down into the mess in the living room, on the couch Simon had refused to spend the night on. He would stare at the TV, glance around at some of the photos on the walls, at the little feminine flourishes that decorated the entire place, and wonder about how, no matter what ultimately happened, nothing would ever be the same again.
Simon shook his head. He shouldn’t have left him like that.
A truck engine burred angrily somewhere nearby, trudging forward with effort over the ice-glazed blacktop on another street or avenue. It moved somewhere in the darkness.
The sound created the illusion of closeness, an impression that at any moment it should pass directly in front of Micah’s building. Simon, tricked by the way the City’s grid amplified the noise, began looking around for the source, but saw only the somber side-view mirrors of encased cars poking out from under the snow. Then, from seemingly out of nowhere, a lone walker emerged. The man, his collar upturned and hiding the contours of his face, kept his eyes focused on his feet, to the precariousness of his every step. As he passed Simon, nudged closer by the shoveled snow that narrowed the width of the sidewalk, the man didn’t look up, didn’t acknowledge that two people had found themselves on the same sidewalk, at the same moment, at the tail-end of a storm that had shut most everyone else inside their homes.
After he had passed, Simon turned his attention back to Micah’s apartment, and found that the lights had been switched off.
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