Already somewhere else

“I can’t see who they are,” he said, “and I can see who they were.”
She looked at him.
“What the hell does that mean?”
“It means I see the kid. The teenager. The person they might still become.”
“That’s wild bullshit,” she said. “Are you saying you’re clairvoyant? Or just an idiot?”
He shrugged. “If you want to tag along, I can show you.”
“You mean sit in the car with you?”
“It’s more than that. And you know it.”

They weren’t that far from the car. They’d just gotten coffee at Daytime.
He’d made small talk with the androgynous barista, present, decent, nice in a way that felt almost intimate for thirty seconds. Not flirty. Just open. The kind of nice that still existed outside Cleveland.
He was aware that it didn’t last.
That kind of openness thinned out the longer you stayed in this town,
In the density, people learning to ration attention.

Back home, you talked to whoever was in front of you because that’s what there was.
Here, everyone was already somewhere else.

Later, they were parked, watching the street.
He noticed her hair.
She’d cut it short. She touched her neck, knowing he was registering it.
He’d loved it long, how he could spot it from a block away, spilling out of her green parka as she came up from the F train, walking down the hill toward him.
Now it was choppy around her face.
Sharper.
Her face seemed wider.
And her eyes were a pale blue, like something rich and faded, with yellow sun-kissed rings.

“How long do we just sit here?”
“Sometimes it takes a while, but it’s worth it.”

The air got sticky. Heavy.
But even as he imagined something relaxing between them, he realized he’d slipped, quietly, from possible romantic partner into friend. Friend zone. Not rejected. Just… redirected.

School was letting out on the corner of Windsor and whatever the fuck that other street was.
Kids spilling out. Color everywhere. Parents waiting.

“See that guy?” he said. “Out of work.”
“You jerk,” she said. “You won’t say that about the moms.”
She was right.
They weren’t out of work.
They were just in the middle of one of their ten jobs.

A crossing guard reached out and touched her jacket—light, automatic—then guided herself back from the curb. Automatic.

“You’re right—that guy’s not out of work. Probably a writer,” he said.
She smacked him.
Not affectionate.
Not angry.
Just enough to register.

She eyed the crossing guard. “Five more minutes and she’d be smoking with the security guard. Pretending she was waiting for a kid in detention, but she’s really just killing time. Saying to the guard, she hates riding the train when kids are on it.”

“Hey,” he said. “You’re getting good at this.”
She smiled. “Who else?”
“What about the guy on the bike. Loose tank top.”
“That’s easy,” she said. “He’s freezing his tits off. And he’s hoping to ride past that boutique on Prospect and flirt with the cute boy who works in the bookstore. He would mention that he ran into Jennifer Egan.”
He laughed.
“Except,” she added, “he’s not totally sure the kid’s gay.”

They watched him pedal by, pretending not to look.

She pointed again.
“Man with flowers. Six o’clock.”
“He’s having an affair.”
“Bammm.”
“He lost his job.”
“Bammm.”
“He forgot her birthday.” (less confident)
“Bammm. Bammm. Bammm.”

She waited.

“Okay. He still has the job. It wasn’t her birthday. But tonight, over dinner, he’s going to keep looking at those flowers like they mean something. Like they mean he might have had the guts to say no to Tulum. He hates the friend’s partner,” he said. “Always one-upping. Never does a dish. Still coasting on something he designed fifteen years ago at Prada.”

“Prada guy,” she said.
“So he buys the flowers,” he said. “Not because he screwed up.”
“Because he’s still going to Mexico,” she said.
“Yeah. To soften the landing for himself.”
“Exactly,” he said. “And she’s going to think that they mean he really does care and that he has real moments of grounded tenderness.”
“And what do they actually mean?” she asked.
“Seventy-five bucks for some tulips and white stuff,” he said. “That’s all he’s going to see.”
She smiled. “Cold.”
“No,” he said. “It’s the last thought he remembers having that felt authentic. And it didn’t require a conversation to convince him he was just having complicated feelings.”

She nodded. “Keep going.”

“And then Prada guy shows up in his mind, and he’s at the table while he’s looking at her and the flowers,” he said.
“Oh god. Not Prada guy.”
“Prada guy starts his spiel—Did I tell you about Milan?” he said, mimicking him. “A meeting. A screening.”
“Sofia Coppola,” she said.
“Wes Anderson,” he said.
“Some twink,” she said, “whose name no one remembers until he stars in something huge like the Jonathan Richman biopic.”

They both nodded at the same time.

“He’ll nod too,” he said. “At all the right places.”
“And think,” she said, “the flowers and biting his tongue are cheaper than saying I don’t want to go to Tulum.”
“Definitely cheaper than the flight,” he said.

They watched the man adjust the bouquet, careful not to bend the stems.

“So he is still going?” she said.
“Of course he is,” he said.
“And now,” she added, “his wife also has flowers.”

He held up his hand.
She high-fived him.

Then silence.
The car is idling.
The street is moving.

He wondered if she’d cut her hair herself like Ellen Burstyn in The King of Marvin Gardens, that moment by the bonfire, greeting the day with her face naked, no mink eyelashes. Johnny Unitas slipped into his mind, too. His brother had a signed black-and-white photo that came in the mail once, an autograph that felt ceremonial just by arriving. He remembered the careful way it was opened, how meaning attached itself simply because someone, somewhere, had taken the time to sign their name.

One last thing

He had told himself it would be quick. One last thing before heading home. The phrase, one last thing, because it meant usefulness and proof. He was a doer. That was the mark he’d made. He did things, fixed things, handled things. People could count on that.

The car slid where the road curved and the plow had thinned the shoulder just enough to invite a mistake. It wasn’t dramatic. No spin. Just a quiet sideways surrender into the bank.

He sat there for a moment, hands on the wheel, listening to the engine idle. He wasn’t worried yet. Outside, the country road stretched empty in both directions. The last plow had gone by maybe an hour ago—he could still see its shallow ridges, already softening. The light was fading, the sky withdrawing. The engine sputtered then died.

He turned the key.

The engine coughed once. Then nothing. Again. Nothing.

The cold arrived slowly. The heater fan ticked uselessly, Frost began to film the edges of the windshield. He rubbed his hands together and smiled, the way he always did when something didn’t go according to plan. Okay, the smile said. Okay then. Turning his lips up gently but not dramatically it made him feel warm for a moment.

He thought of his home on Fair Street. Of warmth. Of his partner waiting, checking the clock, wondering what had taken him so long. He imagined the kitchen light on, the sound of something being put away. Inside the house, the kids would have abandoned a puzzle mid-corner, someone insisting they were close, someone else bored already, drifting toward another game or the television,  thats if there was still power. The table would keep the shape of their leaving, the chairs pushed out randomly, pieces scattered in a way that suggested intention, then none.

That mattered to him. Being expected.

The dashboard clock glowed faintly. Snow began to fill in the edges of the car, smoothing it. The engine’s warmth was becoming a memory.

That was when he decided to get out.

Practically. You don’t sit forever. You do something.

He pulled his hat down, shoved his feet into his boots, boots he’d settled for,and opened the door. Snow slid off the roof in a sudden collapse, dumping down the back of his neck and straight into his boots, sharp and invasive. He laughed once despite himself. Of course.

The road looked longer now. He shut the door carefully and then started walking.

He wished, abruptly, that he had bought those boots. The Scandinavian ones. Wool-lined, solid, beautifully stitched. He’d had a discount code. He’d balked anyway. Winter was almost over, he’d told himself. They’d just sit in the closet for a year. Now the cold found its way to his feet sending dulled, delayed messages.

He walked until his breathing found a rhythm, until the bend in the road appeared ahead. When he reached it, he stopped and turned back.

For a moment, he didn’t see the car at all. The flakes were small but countless, swirling up and down and sideways, mostly into his eyes. He blinked, wiped his face. Then he saw it, not a car anymore, just a mound bleeding into the bank. Looking around the bend, the trees were almost entirely white, their trunks plastered. The road had lost its shape, its authority quietly revoked.

The snow began to move with purpose, skimming low along what had been the road.  Wind kicked up and it was white in all directions. A tree, perhaps. A mailbox knocked over by a plow, its metal mouth open in complaint. He turned again.

The mound was gone.

Where the car had been was now only another drift. He stood still, waiting for his eyes to correct themselves, for the shape to return. It didn’t.

For the first time, something shifted. Not panic. Just understanding, arriving gently, the way snow does. There was no one checking the clock. No light left on. No sentence forming somewhere that ended in relief.

Home was not waiting.

He took a step, then another, footprints filling in almost immediately behind him. The snow kept falling.. And the man, who had done things, always walked on, carrying with him the idea of a house that existed now only because he kept thinking it did.

How old are you? how young am I?

At first it sounded like a beat.
Not loud. Not fast.

I realized I was hungry. Not suddenly, more like I had been for a while and only just noticed. I found myself staring into the rings of a slice of petrified wood. Dark caramel, pale beige, thin white lines repeating, widening, thinning as they moved outward. Each band a measure. Years laid down in time, adding, never returning.

Water had been there once.
Then less of it.
Then almost none.

I had good years with water too. And some very dark rings. The dark ones hold the longest.

Water. Wood. Stone.
A seed. A sprout. A tree.
A life.
A long time after.

It took six men and a ladder to hang the New Year’s lights. Tomorrow they would take them down. Temporary work, steady effort. People passed beneath it like it had always been there.

A couple passed, him bearded, tattooed; she mostly breasts, an average face. Earlier they had staged uncomfortable, sexy photos in good light, phones held high, bodies angled just so. They checked the screen between poses, adjusted, tried again. Proof that the vacation counted, that it would be remembered later.

Others found solace in thong bikinis, if that was still the name for them, sharp tan lines cutting across their lower back. I waited. Waiting sharpened the hunger. I wondered if the darkness would thin enough this year to let some light through.

Just off the main road was a quiet taco stand, tucked along a bumpy side street pocked with potholes, faded murals peeling in the sun, high stone walls holding the heat. An older woman worked the grill, her face transforming when she smiled, the wrinkles deepening into something generous. I stared at the menu, confused, pretended to understand, and pointed at the thing that looked most like something I recognized. She spoke. I nodded.She left to gather ingredients. I waited again.

When she returned, she set the grill on the narrow sidewalk and began. Onion. Cilantro. Meat. Chop. Chop. Chop. Steam lifted into the dry heat. A tortilla, marked by human hands, warmed. The pieces gathered. Folded. Handed over.

It was finally the new year, and with it another ring. Another trip around the sun. Would there be water this time, or would it leave a dry band in the time capsule—something beautiful to look at, but hard to have lived through. I struggled to stay present when even what I was seeing a few dozen yards away had already slipped into the past.

The taco tasted so good it was as if the woman’s smile had been part of the recipe.
It held me there.

Changeover

Tom was a projectionist, one of a rare few, and he got there through unwavering determination and a series of acts that left people in his wake. His best friend Jake, who had been next in line for more than one job. His on-again, off-again longtime girlfriend, Sandra. By the time it was over, there was no one left to argue it.

And for what, to wait for the little dot, the reel nearing its end, and start the next of five or six reels. To keep the seamless flow of the story flickering before the audience’s eyes. How did it start. When did he lose all perspective.

Tom had tried running a digital projector once, but even the dust in the beam was different. He felt he would soon be replaced by a Roomba. When he heard from Jake that a new film cinema was opening, he found himself changing his route to check on the building’s progress. One day there was a marquee. The Astor Picture House.

This was not going to be an easy get. Every reel flipper from here to Cleveland was going to go after that job. He’d even heard a Milanese projectionist, Giovanni Mezzaluna, was flying in for the interview. It kept Tom up at night, trying to figure out how to get an advantage.

Jake told Tom he thought the job was his. He said it plainly, without bravado. But when Tom sat down with the interviewer at the Astor, Jake’s name came up. Tom said Jake was strictly digital.

Jake did know digital systems. Everyone did by then. It sounded smaller when Tom said it aloud. He mentioned it casually to Jake afterward, as if it were nothing.

It wasn’t.

Sandra was drowning in loneliness. Tom missed dates, forgot to call when he got home, and when they were together it wasn’t much better. She was being worn down by his ambition.

Isn’t it enough that you work almost every night?
My job takes place at night.
Aren’t there daytime projectionists?

There was little Tom could do to explain the depth of it. The sound of film rattling through bright light. The warmth coming off the lamp. The vibration in the room behind the audience. The reflection in the projection-room glass, a miniature version of the larger flickering story unfolding on the screen. Some films asked more of you. Not just more reels. More care.

There were quiet films and dark ones. Old prints arrived wound backward and needed gentle handling on the bench. Sometimes the director or an actress sat somewhere in the back of the theater. Once, Tom was sure he saw Amos Poe, slouched low in a rear seat. Sometimes Tom could feel it. This was a special screening. He never told anyone, but he made sure the transitions were seamless and the sound was full but never peaked. A low screening was a death knell for any film. When people could really hear their own thoughts in the dark, they started following them out of the movie. Worse than candy wrappers. Worse than screen talkers.

Like the midnight screening of The Elephant Man at the Astor. The last show of the night. A man in the middle of the theater kept repeating, John is fucked up. John is really fucked up. That was not bad, Tom thought. The people around him seemed to agree. It reassured them that they might not be.

Sometimes there are things you love so deeply you want to share the with friends, with lovers, with family.but when you try, they just can’t see it.

Tom interviewed for the job and brought his meticulous records. Films, screenings, theaters. Dates, gauges, notes about prints that arrived brittle or needed careful sound levels. He composed the follow-up email late at night, revising it sentence by sentence, the glow of the screen faint but insistent.

He listed the films the way he always did, not as taste but as proof. Work done cleanly, end to end.

Late Spring.The Match Factory Girl. The Passenger. A Man Escaped.Pale Flower. Performance.

All 35mm. All run without incident. He added a line about careful handling, precise changeovers, attention to sound and pacing. He deleted a sentence about the booth heat. It sounded indulgent.

He referenced Jake once. In a separate line. He noted that Jake had participated on select screenings in a support capacity, assisting with sound checks and digital coordination when required. The phrasing was careful. Neutral. It wasn’t false. It was just incomplete.

He hovered over Pale Flower and added a parenthetical about additional booth support during sound checks. It read technical.  He closed the laptop quickly after sending.

Weeks passed with no word. Doubt set in. Tom started sitting in his car across the street from the Astor Picture House. He left it parked there, night after night.

Sandra departed back to Wisconsin to see her mother. Her mother had always thought dating a projectionist was asking for trouble. Sandra final concurred, yelling I would rather live in Siberia than with a man who only wants to be in the dark.

Tom had tried to clarify what his job really was. He told himself there would be another act. Something would intervene and she would come back around.

He watched for the owner of the Astor close the theater exit the building. The marquee went dark. No one was around.

Finally she exited and  and stood with someone for a moment. Tom leaned forward to see who it was, It was Jake.

The owner and Jake spoke briefly. She laughed. Jake nodded. She reached out and touched his arm. Not ceremonially.

Tom stayed where he was.

The owner locked up and walked off with Jake, their voices fading down the block. Rain started to fall, light at first, then steadier, collecting on the windshield. The city lights broke up in it, street lamps, traffic signals, a few open storefronts.

Tom sat there as the light moved across him. Red, then white, then green. The glass turned the street into a screen. The images falling across his hands, his jacket, his face.

He had tried to switch things, anticipating the moment, preparing the changeover. But he had been watching the wrong mark.

A pool

The message read, Sorry, we cannot take bookings for, on my Airbnb home page. I erased it and left the cursor blinking.

Standing over the empty hole that had been my house, I thought this might be the right moment for a swimming pool.

The trauma came with inventory, smoke, flames, melted plastic, and a fine particulate matter that would almost certainly get its own class action lawsuit. My memory was slightly scrambled. Not dramatically. I still knew right from left. But certain words had gone missing. I would stare at things and wait for their names to return. A specific kind of tree. A waxed rain jacket. A type of clam. The tiny ones. What were those called? Maybe I never knew.

At Target, the scale of it hit me. I needed a new one of everything. Everything I owned was either destroyed, melted, or embedded with soot. Even the things that technically survived were compromised, like they had seen something they could not unsee.

I stood in front of the display of electric toothbrushes. Aggressively expensive. I should steal one. Not out of desperation. When you need to replace your entire life, it seemed reasonable to begin by not paying for a toothbrush.

At the house, I watched from my car, praying to hear the blare of a siren. By the time a fire department SUV arrived, smoke was still pouring out of the front window. The first to arrive was Larry, who struggled with his fire overalls, putting them on backwards, then wrestling out of them like an angry five year old before getting them right. The rest of the trucks were even later. Let’s call them Curly and Moe.

I imagined the Target cashier with her translucent skin, dyed black hair, watching me slip the toothbrush into my coat and tracking me all the way to the counter. Her look would break me. I would place the toothbrush on the counter, then slowly empty my pockets, toothpaste, floss, mouthwash, a night guard I did not even need. I would arrange them in front of her like a confession.

Yeah, I would say. You got me.

She would take my arm, lead me to the front of the store, pull the large key ring off her belt, lock me in the little room between the automatic sliding doors. The doors would hiss shut behind me. The police would come. I would sit on the bench and wait. It would be fine. Possibly restorative.

It was not like Moscow.

In Moscow, they took my passport at Sheremetyevo Airport. A pimply faced officer walked me down a long, windowless hallway clearly designed to remove hope. Door after door. Finally, a small room. One table. One chair. One gun.

The officer’s name was probably Alexey. It was always Alexey.

Alexey looked at me, then at my carry on, and reached for it. That was a hard no. He said, Not fly.

His skinny frame blocked the door and I said, Yes fly.

He shook his head. I attempted insistence. Yes, fly. I have a ticket. I go.

This was optimistic, given that Alexey now had both my ticket and my passport.

Three thousand dollars, he said.

The number landed badly. I said no, firm, automatic, American. The kind of no that assumes systems exist.

Alexey recalibrated. One thousand.

The sudden price drop surprised me. We were negotiating now. I wondered if I could have offered the Target goth a cut of the dental materials. Some sort of revenue share. Maybe I would bump into her at the Stockade bar a few days later, dressed in her real clothes, black and veiled, and we would shoot each other gleaming white smiles.

One hundred, I said.

Alexey actually considered it. Then his radio squawked, garbled, metallic, like the 4 train speakers announcing something in three languages at once, none of them meant for me. He ignored it.

Five hundred, he said quickly. This was going the right way.

I opened my wallet and fingered the cash. Passport and ticket first, I said. Another squawk. Louder.

Nervously, I added, Seems like you are needed somewhere.

Not even a nyet from dear old Alexey.

Alexey reached into his jacket and placed my passport and ticket on the table. He put a hand on them and slid them closer.

That was enough.

I peeled off a little over two hundred and fifty dollars, crumpled it, and pushed it into his hand. He did not count it. My passport was already back in my coat, my carry on in my grip, and I was pushing past him. The man who had seemed immovable only moments before let me slip right by.

As I did, I said, You scared me with the opening number.

That was when I understood the full extent of his English, no fly, numbers with zeros.

Walking back down the long hallway, I understood traveling the hall in the opposite direction was not designed to restore hope. But I felt a little buoyant.

From the gate, I saw him again. He was sitting with his work friends, quiet, drinking tea. His face unchanged. Our negotiation already gone from him. It occurred to me he might not even remember me. And yet he was now with me.

Back home, I started again.

Sorry, we cannot take bookings for the next six months.

As if fire were something you could block off on a calendar.

I stood there a long time after sending it, looking at the empty hole where the house had been.

If I was honest, the pool did seem like a good idea.

I’m better now

Lori vaped behind the CVS, tucked into the narrow strip of space where deliveries came and nothing lingered long enough to matter. She stood with her back to the brick wall, which had a feebly graffiti-ed penis outlined. Her hood up, she watched smoke dissolve into the gray. She knew Tommy was there even before she saw him.

Tommy stood just inside the loading dock door, half-hidden, pretending to check something on his phone. He was watching Lori through the glass, through the angle of reflection, through the excuse of supervision. He stayed inside because of the rain and because of his hair. He’d combed it back carefully that morning, the way that suggested fullness if you didn’t stare too long.

He watched the way Lori held the vape like it was an extension of her hand, the way she leaned her weight into one hip. He watched because watching was easier than speaking, because it gave him time to rehearse. He told himself he was a manager. Nineteen and already responsible. Nineteen and already exhausted by it.

Lori knew she was being watched. She didn’t turn around. She let him have the outline of her back, the red puff of her jacket fading to something pink with a few holes where feathers exited. She thought she looked like a broken version of Red Riding Hood, the kind that never quite gets to the forest or the wolf.

She had slept at Rodney’s. She could still feel it, the stale beer, the couch smell. No shower. No food. Just the aftertaste. She felt hollowed out, like a room someone had moved out of too quickly.

Inside, Tommy felt himself tightening. The watching was supposed to give him strength. His chest buzzed. The sweater itched. He pictured himself stepping outside, imagining the sentence forming correctly this time.

He pushed the door open and let the rain hit his scalp before he could stop himself.

“Don’t do it on the clock,” he said too fast, the words tripping over each other.

Lori turned just enough to flip him off. Not dramatic. Efficient.  Tommy sighed with exasperation.

“Hey,” she said, almost kindly. “You’ve got a stain.”

A string of curses blurted out of his mouth before he abruptly cut himself off, rose onto his toes, and took a breath that didn’t fix anything. Then he turned and went back inside.

Lori watched him retreat. She watched the door close. She watched the reflection swallow him. Watching him leave gave her something solid to hold onto. It made her feel briefly in control.

She wasn’t gonna take her jacket off today. Yesterday’s clothes felt like armor. She vaped and thought about the band from the night before, The Last Train to Albany; they were nothing special, covers mostly, songs that wandered too far from themselves. Accidental Experiment, That’s the part she liked. Things that didn’t quite land.

She exhaled and watched the smoke thin out, the way Tommy’s confidence had thinned when he stepped back inside. Strong, bitter, and natural, she thought not the weed, not the night, but the feeling of being seen and choosing not to care.

Inside the store, Tommy stood still longer than necessary, pretending again. Watching again, even though he couldn’t see her now. Both of them are waiting.

A car pulled into the lot. Slow. Careful. A turn signal is ticking longer than necessary. A flurry or two fell through the air, mixing with the rain. It idled longer than normal, the way people did when they weren’t sure they meant to stop.

Inside the car sat Tommy’s mom. Lori’s sister.

Small town stuff. No matter how far you stood from something, you were still inside it.

Tommy saw the car through the front windows and felt something drop in his stomach. He watched it the way he’d watched Lori. hoping it would do something different than what he already knew it would do.

Lori stayed where she was. She didn’t hide. She didn’t wave. She let the vape hang at her side and watched her sister through the windshield, watched her sister watch her.

She’d missed family dinner to hang with Rodney. That sentence kept repeating itself, stripped of excuses. As if that were the crime.

The last song from the night before slipped back into her head, uninvited. The lyric lodged there like a splinter:

I’m better now
I’m better now
I’m so much better now
and when you look at me, you..

It cut off before finishing, which felt right. The band had done that too. Left it hanging. Let the room decide what came next.

Her sister didn’t get out of the car right away.

Inside, Tommy pretended to straighten a display he’d already straightened. He watched his mom through the glass, then flicked his eyes back toward the loading dock, trying to triangulate where Lori might still be standing. He felt caught between them, a hinge nobody asked to exist.

His mom finally opened the door. The cold rushed in. She paused, looked toward the back of the building, then inside at Tommy. A look passed between them not approval, not anger, just recognition.

Outside, Lori took one last pull from the vape and let the smoke drift where it wanted. She let herself be seen. She thought about the lyric again, about how sometimes “better” was just what people said when they wanted the watching to stop.

But the watching never stopped. Not here. Not in a town this small.

Something, going somewhere

Bitterness like the cold snow encasing his window. A cousin slept on the couch in the living room. He had deliberately never bought a fold-out sofa so there wouldn’t be random guests drifting into Brooklyn and staying for indeterminate amounts of time, answering every question with I don’t know and I have an open ticket.

So he went out on a snow day, when there was no need to move the car, and sat behind the wheel as if he were about to switch sides for alternate parking—though he was really just sitting there. The window was frozen inside and out. A fine line of ice bubbled beneath the snow. His hands went numb. The car wouldn’t start. He blew on the windshield in one small circle and watched it fog. He thought maybe he could wait out the winter. His failing marriage. The unwanted guest in his modified igloo.

His wife hadn’t said much. He displaced his anger in the tiny cold-water kitchen, snapping WHAT, NO COFFEE, as if it were supposed to appear. On the stairs there was Beverly, who kept the building at seventy-eight. A temperature chosen to punish sleep. The windows stayed open. The heating bill climbed. Everyone lost.

What was this life—work, cold, unspoken emotions. He looked at the frosted window and thought they might find his body here in the spring. A short funeral. Not much accomplished. Not much impact. The bugs would get something out of it.

He imagined the cousin pouring coffee from a metal urn, smiling. “What, no coffee?” At least it would get a laugh. Someone would ask how long he was staying. Don’t know. Open ticket.

Maybe he was just hungry.

There was one hole in the snow on the windshield. Through it, the top of a building on Willow Street. At the roofline, a gargoyle he’d never noticed. It was perched there like it had been keeping notes.

In the glove box, an old pack of peanut butter cups. Stale, but not bad. Things felt like they might be turning around.

The gargoyle remembered when people struggled here before coats stopped mattering, before feeling winter became optional. He thought about money, how it moved without touching anyone, how jobs disappeared and people profited from it, thinking they were geniuses because they had a lot of zeros on the end of their checks.

He stopped. Who was he to judge. He worked in advertising. And self-loathing.

Oh yeah. He was doing his best work. Filming Tomogatchi Angels. Saving children from the despair of forgetting to feed their digital pets. The pets died. The kids blamed their parents. So angels were invented, an afterlife for the ones and zeros. An afterlife for neglect. This was how he helped.

It was something they could put on his tombstone: He now rests with the ones and zeros.

Really, though, he needed a coffee more than he needed to freeze to death.

There was a knock on the car door. Only the gargoyle seemed to notice.

His cousin stood there, lanky, underdressed, holding two coffees.

“I don’t think you need to sit in the car today.”

“You can never be too sure.”

They laughed, briefly.

They walked toward the water. On the promenade, his cousin said, “I’m taking off tomorrow. It’s too cold here for me.”

He felt a small, misplaced wistfulness. Already.

“I’ll come back sometime,” his cousin added. “We’ll see.”

Then, as if closing an account: “Thanks again. Really. For everything.”

He stood there with the warm cup and watched the steam rise. When a ship passed, he lined the cup up with its stack, letting the steam pretend it belonged to something going somewhere.

Almost, almost

The parking lot sat just past the condos of tolerance, a cracked expanse off Route 28 where nothing ever seemed officially wrong. No signs. No lighting. Just enough asphalt

The high point of Tony’s day so far had been a fresh slice at Slices in Saugerties. He’d learned that getting there early meant the pizza had just been made, the cheese still loose, the crust blistered and soft in the middle. It felt like timing working in his favor, which was rare enough to notice.

Tony was early now.

He sat in his heated car, engine ticking, the windshield fogged just enough to blur the edges. He’d been in the Hudson Valley for eight months, so long enough to claim it, not long enough to say that out loud to anyone. He’d met very few people, and fewer he wanted to see again.

There was Byron. Byron drank and offered to paint Tony’s house if Tony would pick him up every day. Byron didn’t have a license, which Tony quickly deduced was not an oversight but a résumé, three DUIs, a tragic trifecta.

As if Tony has already agreed to hiring Bryon he insistent that part of the deal was they would needed to stop at the library to return his ex-girlfriend’s DVD. She’d kept it too long. Now there were fines. Some people turned rules into crimes without meaning to.

Tony felt light-headed. His mouth still burned from the mouthwash he’d swallowed before leaving the house.  To counter the sting  he took a gulp of Night Quill from the cup holder. The tiredness came on fast.

He hoped Michelle would show.
He hoped she wouldn’t.

They’d agreed to meet “by the highway.” He checked his phone. Nothing. Twenty minutes passed.

Then a green Chevy pulled into the lot.

Tony watched it slow and stop. A woman sat in the driver’s seat. For a moment, he thought it was her. Then he wasn’t sure. Older, maybe. Different hair.

She didn’t look over.

She looked like a girl from Vassar he’d liked—warm, smart, lots of curly hair. They’d never talked, not really, but he’d always assumed they might have gotten along. An almost almost.

Tony adjusted his window until he could see her car reflected faintly in the glass.

The woman took off her sweater. Then her skirt or pants. Tony couldn’t tell which. She reached into the back seat, pulled something over her head, smoothed it out. She checked the mirror. Fixed her hair. Put on makeup.

Then she saw him.

She paused. Not startled. Just recalculating. Tony looked back. Neither smiled.

She put the car in reverse. Before backing out, she gave a small wave. Polite.

She made a careful K-turn and left. The lot emptied again.

Tony stayed where he was.

He checked his phone. Still nothing from Michelle.

This, he realized, was probably the version of her that would last. In messages she’d been curious. In person she was efficient enough not to arrive. He imagined they might have gotten along for a drink. Maybe two. Not a story.  Just a proof of concept.

Almost almost.

He pulled out of the parking lot of humiliation, passing the condos of tolerance on his way back, the memory of the pizza already gone, replaced by the quiet relief of having made it through the day without anything actually happening.

That enough?

Max wanted to be a filmmaker.

That’s how he ended up sitting in a beat-up Volvo with no heat, parked on Prospect Park West, filming strangers for an insurance company. The camera was small. The pay was hourly. The waiting was endless.

His subject was Louis.
Last name blacked out on the paperwork. Just a photo and an address.

Louis lived in Windsor Terrace, near the circle. He was overweight. He moved carefully, like every step required permission from his back. The file said the injury came from a slip in front of a bodega, Smiley’s. The same place Max got his coffee in the morning. The guys there were friendlier than the coffee was good.

Louis claimed the pain was ongoing.
Debilitating.

For weeks, Max watched him do very little.

Out the door.
Down the block.
Pharmacy.
Bench.
Home.

The footage was dull. Max tried to make it interesting. Zooms. Long holds. Pigeons. Meaning where there wasn’t any. He imagined it was a film. He imagined an audience discovering the beauty of the quotidian, declaring Max a genius.

The Volvo smelled. His feet went numb. He wondered when wanting to make movies had turned into this.

Then one morning, a truck pulled up. A piano came off the back. Louis stepped outside. Looked at the piano. Talked to the movers. Rolled up his sleeves. He bent. Lifted. Pushed.

Max filmed..When the paino , Louis stood still. One hand on the wall. Breathing.

Then he looked at the car. A pause.

He crossed the street. Max lowered the camera. “Insurance?” Louis said. Max nodded.Silence. “That enough?” Louis shifted. Winced. “I  just wanted to play,” Louis said. “You sending it in?”

Max

“I don’t know.”

Louis walked away. Slowly. in the Volvo the camera stayed on.