Adam Haslett - Imagine Me Gone

“What’s that’s supposed to mean?” I said, withdrawing my hand. The most effective response to the smallness of the testing was to shame the other for doing it. If he felt momentarily guilty, he’d go soft again, at least enough to get us started. And once we’d begun, his diffidence would fall away, and I could forget awhile, under the cover of his wanting.

“Nothing,” he said, pulling me by the shoulders down toward him. On his tongue, I could taste the dinner I hadn’t finished, and suddenly I was starving.

I stepped off the train at Thirty-fourth Street before the doors were even fully open and dashed for the stairs, reaching the turnstile ahead of the crowd and yanking my suitcase up over the bar as I went. Then I was off, dodging and weaving through the choke of befuddled tourists and the loiterers standing by for Jersey Transit, across the shitty low-ceilinged concourse lined with newsstands and juice shops, pleased with my skill at avoiding collisions by fractions of an inch as I dipped and swung through the on-comers, then took the stairs two at a time up to the gates for Amtrak. There, a giant herd milled under the big board, sheep to the holiday slaughter, waiting to be told which stairway to mass at. My track hadn’t posted yet. I pushed my way through, and then down the far staircase, where, by using the lower-level entrances to the tracks, I could circumvent the crush. I’d made it. I wouldn’t be without a seat. The rush and relief together left me almost high.

Thirty seconds after the board flapped my track number, I was boarding the train, even as the passengers from DC were still getting off. I grabbed a window on the right side for a view of the water, and put my computer bag on the aisle seat to dissuade anyone from joining me. The herd was staggering in now, filling the empty doubles.

Several minutes later, when the train finally jerked forward, I felt the secret glee of having avoided a seatmate. Then the car door slid open and a straggler, a thirty-something white guy in khakis and a ski jacket, spotted the empty space, and asked if it was free. If I lied, the woman across the aisle would clock my deception no later than 125th Street. I pulled my computer bag onto my lap and, turning to the window, stared past my reflection at the black walls of the tunnel.

As we rolled slowly through the darkness, the energy of hustling to make the train began to subside, letting the events of the day seep back in. The end of the apartment hunt. In the last two weeks, I’d seen nineteen places — the dregs of December — one more lightless and cramped than the next. In desperation, I’d switched to a new broker two days before I had to leave the city. She had shown me another round of anonymous, immiserating rentals, and then without warning or fanfare escorted me onto a chrome-plated elevator and then into a condo with a fully adult bedroom, a dishwasher, and floor-to-ceiling windows facing south across Nineteenth Street. It was like waking from a nightmare to discover I hadn’t in fact been sentenced to life in a dungeon. Here was a place I could entertain people, friends, colleagues, even dates. They would see the clean, polished floors, the newish appliances, the generous portion of sky, and they would relax in the safety all this implied. New York apartments either reminded you that you lived in one of the most crowded places on earth or allowed you to forget it.

But she had baited me, this new broker. The place wasn’t just slightly out of my price range, it was five hundred dollars a month north of it — plus the higher broker fee. I was in the miraculously clean bathroom — white down into the grouting — stalling for time by pretending to evaluate the fixtures when I heard the front door open. It was another agent. He had two men with him, and he was answering their questions about the building’s management. I didn’t need to see them. Their voices were enough. I glimpsed right away what would happen. How they would move in here with their curated furniture, their dachshund, their two incomes, their plans for children and a larger place in a few years, erasing me with their domestic establishment like a town car swiping a pedestrian at a crosswalk and gliding on through the light. The elect, as Michael called them. The comfortably coupled.

But this didn’t have to be. I could push back. I’d find extra freelance work, take sandwiches to the office, lengthen the schedule of my student loans, pay off less each month on my credit card, buy cheaper groceries, shop discerningly at Banana Republic sales. True, I did most of these things already. But I could do them with more discipline.

I was leaving for Christmas in four hours. When I returned, even the worst of the rentals for January 1 would be gone. I’d be moving my stuff into storage and sleeping on friends’ couches.

I got myself out of that bathroom, and, without so much as a glimpse of my competitors, led my broker into the hall and told her that I’d take it. She smiled knowingly, and hurried me back to her office. By the time I’d filled out the application and frozen the listing with a deposit, I was sure I’d miss the train.

Now, passing over the Bronx River in the dusk, all I could think was how impulsive and ruinous my grabbing had been. How I’d panicked, and sunk the money I’d saved for first and last month’s rent on a place I couldn’t afford. It wasn’t until a half hour after Stamford and half of one of the Klonopins Michael had given me that I could bring myself to start the reading I’d planned to get through. Once I started, though, I didn’t stop. I zipped through one campaign finance filing after the next, highlighting, circling, typing a stream of notes, going at it like the research was due in hours, not days.

As we reached New London, I finished marking up the pile and had nothing left to do but stare again out the window. The lines for the ferry to Orient Point filled the lot and trailed back onto the other side of the tracks, the travelers in their idling cars reading newspapers, smoking out of the slits of open windows, some napping, others appeasing their children. Above their heads, across the estuary, the naval base was lit from waterline to smokestack, a sleek gray sub moored to its giant dock. Off the coast a nearly full moon was rising. My mother would be telling whoever had already arrived to come and see.

As we crept out of the station, I noticed that the woman across the aisle was gone, along with several others nearby, leaving a number of empty seats. I glanced sidelong at the man next to me, thinking maybe he’d move now. But he was reading his book and seemed unaware. There wasn’t much to pick out in the dark. Just the sporadic lights of little houses along the water and the occasional cluster of low-slung shops at the railroad crossings of eastern Connecticut and the beginnings of Rhode Island.

When I leaned my chair back I could see my seatmate’s profile reflected in the glass. He was average-looking for a holiday returnee to the confines of the Northeast, not unhandsome, though carrying a tad extra weight in his face, for which the light beard was maybe a cover, and wearing a slightly dated pair of wire-rimmed glasses — the rims too thick — but he was definitely male and under forty.

Now that I thought back to it, before he took the seat, before he’d even asked if it was free, he had appraised me for an instant. Anyone would, checking for insanity before committing to a journey next to a stranger. But his face had brightened, and he had given me a little nod, which might have been merely relief at the fact that I wasn’t visibly crazy, but which it now occurred to me might have been something happier.

Where was the wife? Where was the girlfriend? There were no children. Suddenly, I was hard. Absurd, but involuntary.