Sam Pink - Person

“What.”

He turns the key and opens our apartment door and he says, “The piece of paper that would make everyone agree to be friends. Would you sign it.”

“Fuck that,” I say.

We stand in the hallway.

The door to our apartment is open to us.

I adjust the beer in my arms, uncomfortable.

I say, “I think like, whenever the next time somebody buys something off me, and they want to know how much it costs, I’m going to be like, ‘Fifty clams.’ And then wait a second and say, ‘Actual clams.’”

My roommate is looking into the apartment.

“Sounds good,” he says.

I adjust the beer again.

“You aren’t listening to me,” I say.

“Yeah, I know. I just kind of feel shitty.”

And he is the winner.

We go inside.

When we get back to our apartment building we stand in the hallway.

I adjust the beer in my arms and I say, “I don’t have my keys with me.”

My roommate gets his keys out.

He says, “Hey would you sign it.”

“Sign what.”

He turns the key and opens the door.

“The piece of paper that would make everyone agree to be friends,” he says. “Would you sign it.”

I say, “I’d have to see who else signed it.”

We stand outside in the hallway, looking into the open apartment.

My roommate says, “Me too.”

And we stand there staring.

We are the maggot philanthropists.

“Are you going to go in,” I say.

“I was going to wait to see who else would,” he says.

“Ha ha,” I say. “I love you.”

He nods toward the open door and he says, “Love you too.”

I say, “We are both winners here.”

We go in.

My dinner is a handful of mints taken from the entryway of a restaurant on the walk home.

I have fun.

It’s nighttime.

I’m sitting in the empty bathtub in our bathroom, fully clothed.

I’ve been reading one of my roommate’s old yearbooks from like his freshman year of highschool.

He keeps it in the bathroom for some reason.

There are many people in the yearbook.

I touch the people’s faces with my fingers.

I read about fun dances and experiences.

I read about science contest winners and sports things.

The word “distance” flashes through my headhole on loop, in buzzing neon letters, and I sit there.

The pictures seem so beautiful to me.

There is no relief from the feeling of the beauty of the yearbook pictures.

Goddamn.

I bite my nails and I write letters to the people in the yearbook, but I only write them in my head.

It feels good.

It feels like practice.

Overall, I am comfortable.

I’m celebrating my new status as the master-champion of the entire galaxy.

And I know that when I run from something, there is a bigger part of me that hopes I get caught than there is that hopes I get away.

My defense is that I taste horrible.

That’s my defense.

My roommate knocks at the bathroom door.

From the other side, he says, “Did I leave a shoe in there. If it’s in there, can I get it.”

I see no shoe.

The girl on the first floor hasn’t had a job for a while either.

She invited me over tonight.

It’s too cold to sleep in her room so we sleep in the livingroom on the couch pullout bed.

The pullout bed smells bad to me.

Maybe she is thinking the same about me.

Who knows!

We lie down together and our only light comes via tv, where a friendly old man is trying to sell necklaces.

At the bottom of the screen there is a phone number and a counter.

I watch the counter while she adjusts the sheets on the pullout bed and distributes them evenly between us.

She always does that.

It’s nice.

“It’s much warmer out here,” she says. “Why is it so cold in my room.”

I ignore her, watching the counter rise.

What’s the counter for.

The word “intriguing” scrolls across my headhole in neon letters.

Maybe that’s the amount of friends the old man has.

Fuck yeah.

You know what, I’m one of them.

I am part of that bigger number.

He just looks so friendly.

The old man I mean.

We could do everything together.

We could go bowling together.

We could dress alike.

Me and the friendly old man, we could have dates.

Try on necklaces.

Play catch with a football.

I’d always make sure to just loft the football so I wouldn’t destroy his little old-man arms.

What a good guy I am.

What a good guy he is.

I understand now why the counter is rising.

Yes.

Yes this makes sense.

What doesn’t make sense is how the counter on the screen isn’t exploding.

Like, I’m surprised it doesn’t just begin to ascend rapidly and then melt.

“I think he just winked at me,” I say.

“What.”

She turns over a little.

“The old man winked at me,” I say. “And it’s because we’re friends.”

She looks at the tv and scratches her nose with the knuckle of her forefinger.

“There’s no way they’re selling that many necklaces,” she says. She turns back to me and she says, “Hey remember that magician we saw the other day on tv. He was so good. It makes me think like, maybe some of his stuff is real.”

We are quiet.

We watch the tv.

This is magic.

The counter continues to rise and the old man continues to smile, holding necklaces.

And I realize I have never once actually been happy in my life.

And also never felt any kind of care that didn’t threaten to give up when challenged.

“Man, I just remembered when I was in like, kindergarten,” I say. “Me and a bunch of other kids were in the plastic playhouse thing during inside recess. We were reading a book. I was always the guy who read for some reason.”

“That’s funny,” she says.

I swallow and cough.

Then I continue.

“My best friend in class, he was this black kid named Ernest. And while I was reading, I stopped at one of the pictures and pointed at the black kid in the picture. I said, ‘Hey look there’s a little nigger one in here.’ And like, I didn’t even know what it meant. I just knew I’d heard other people say it. So it didn’t make sense to me, but then when I looked at my friend Ernest, he looked so hurt. Like he already knew what that meant. Like, I didn’t even realize it, but then I did. The look on his face was — he looked like he was mad at himself for being my friend. It felt stupid and terrible. Man. It’s fucking shitty I think. I feel really stupid and bad when I think about myself in situations like that.”

When I’m done talking I just want to keep talking so there is no quiet.

But I don’t.

She gets on her elbow again and looks at the tv.

I can see part of her nipple down her shirt.

The word “sex” scrolls through my headhole in big neon letters.

“I don’t know,” she says. “Maybe they’ve sold that many. They could’ve sold that many. How many people buy necklaces at night though.”

I stare at the ceiling, on my back.

“Shit,” I say. “In that same class I had my first sexual experience. I was like, standing in line to get my homework checked and Ernest elbowed my arm and when I looked up I saw the teacher bending over. I could see her tits pretty good. The feeling was like, ‘I’m alive.’ That was a pretty significant class for me now that I think about it. I learned a lot then.”

She turns to me like I have just happened.

She says, “Huh I remember my kindergarten teacher used to tell us about how he worked at like, some industrial job once and how he’d have black crust in his nose at the end of the day and then he’d have to scrape it out with his fingers every night. I remember that scared me — when I’d think about him doing that.”