Adam Haslett - Imagine Me Gone

Seth had put aside his computer and was lying next to me again. The song went on like this for a while, balancing between restraint and release. I’d expected either a trashy pop hit shared in irony or some aficionado’s serious band, but this was neither. The longer it went on, the more I thought Michael would like it. He didn’t care who made a thing if it had that particular ache to it. And this did. Whatever safe, old-world reference it had begun with was slipping away now. The opening shyness of the singer had been a feint. Her voice had power, and she knew it.

You’re not anywhere else, she seemed to be saying. You’re here now, with me, in this room.

As we lay there together listening, Seth, like a nervous kid on a first date, reached over and took my hand in his. It was so unexpected, and so tender, it caused me to shudder. A few minutes ago we’d had our dicks in each other’s mouths. We’d kissed and tongued. But all that had been routine. This was different, and riskier. It hinted at intimacy. He was actually touching me. And I was letting him do it.

The muscles of my neck let go, and my head sank deeper into the pillow.

Holding hands listening to a favorite song? As if we hadn’t met two hours ago? As if we hadn’t both got off like this with strangers who knew how many times before? Did he think he was a magician, that he could just wish the anonymity away?

Whatever the singer was doing now it wasn’t cool anymore. Her voice had opened wide, edging toward the point of failure, making it clear she wasn’t faking it, that the trouble in the song was her own, that she was in some kind of real danger, which no producer’s smoothing edits could save her from. Not that she was crazy. She wasn’t letting her audience off the hook that easily, by offering the safety of distance that would open up if she were just to make a spectacle of herself. She was staying close, continuing to bear the weight of herself.

Without thinking, I interlaced my fingers more tightly with Seth’s. As though I had traveled back into some younger, more trusting self. When he squeezed my hand, I fell into pure nostalgia. The keen memory of a thing I’d never had. A nostalgia for a moment just like this. As if back when I was a teenager and I’d wanted it so achingly bad, I had met a boy and we had fallen in love, and been together in private ecstasy. And as if, at last, I could mourn the loss of that imagined happiness.

The voice was in full flight now, skipping up and out of any world that could possibly last, into sheer bliss, giving me the ridiculous hope that Seth and I could be together. That he could give me back what I’d lost. Lying beside him, I prayed for it.

When I left the next morning, he gave me his number and e-mail and I gave him mine. I walked onto the street I had seen only in the darkness of the night before. Trash cans were lined up at the sidewalk and the cars were double-parked, the pavement wet from an early-winter snow. Men in suit pants and ski jackets with laptop bags over their shoulders and women in tailored suits and knee-length winter coats made their way in silence to the train. Like a college freshman who’d just had sex for the first time, I studied their faces to see if I could detect which of them had come from the warmth of a drowsy morning fuck, who among them were the elect, as Michael called them, and who had slept and eaten by themselves, their mornings spent in the little disciplines of solitude. An absurd perch for me to assume on the basis of one night, as if I were elect now, a giant presumption, but as I joined the sidewalk traffic, trailing with it down toward the subway, that was the difference: the spell of the night before seemed for once strong enough to countervail the evidence of the world unchanged.

I’d experienced this before, but only while still drunk. If my high happened to dissipate gently enough, I could sometimes make it back to my shower and bed before the soreness caught up with me. But hooking up most often meant knuckling through a contraction of hope the following morning. A rescission of the pleasures of a few hours earlier. It drew down my workaday armor — the belief in the worthwhileness of ordinary things — leaving me raw and tightened against the rawness. But not this morning. It seemed as if a glaze had been washed from my senses, brightening the sound of the traffic up ahead on the avenue, separating the bus’s pneumatic brakes from the bass chug of the delivery-truck engines and the whir and bump of gliding taxis.

I had nothing to read on the subway and I didn’t want to listen to music that would displace the echo of the song Seth had played me. I looked at my fellow passengers instead, taking in their shorn, wary affect, the aspiration to undisturbed nonpresence guarded by newspapers, gaming devices, books, and headsets. They avoided my open gaze as they would a beggar or lunatic. Normally, I would be full of tiny aversions, or avarice for other people’s lives. The absence of all that disoriented me. That I could stand there swaying with the motion of the train, badly late to work, in a state of such democratic calm, almost affectionate toward my fellow riders — how sappy! But even my cynicism didn’t last more than another stop. The heedless goodwill stayed with me all the way home.

By lunchtime, Seth had texted and we had made a plan for dinner the following night. I hadn’t dreamed it. Something had happened.

The next evening, he showed up at the restaurant dressed for a date. He had shaved and put on dark fitted jeans and a blue oxford shirt. I stood up from behind the table, and awkwardly put my hand out for him to shake. The obviousness of his nerves took the edge off mine. He clearly wanted to be here. And I wanted us to skip over comparing notes on life in the city and dive right back into where we had left off. But that would risk a look of incomprehension on his face, an indication that I had, in fact, been alone in the moment I thought we had shared. That I was the corny, besotted one who needed to grow up and take it easy. I had picked the restaurant because it was quiet, but I regretted that now, wishing for the distraction of voices and music and waiters squeezing past.

Soon I had fumbled into a question about what kinds of things he designed, falling right into the script of the Internet date I had wanted to avoid, that face-off across a table stripped of all context and fellow feeling, and supported by nothing more than the mutual assumption of loneliness, a social form that had always struck me as rigged to fail. It didn’t matter to me what he designed so long as he would go home with me after dinner.

He talked about graphics and websites. I wanted to stop him and say, Wait, not yet. But I said nothing, and he went on, about album covers, freelance work, and projects of his own. Caught in the train of it now, I asked more questions, realizing as I half listened to his replies that the relief his nervousness had allowed me was being replaced by a sense of deflation. He had put some kind of gel in his hair to keep its mildly disheveled look in place. His lightly freckled skin was scrubbed and moisturized. He had prepared for tonight, he had considered carefully what to wear, trying on different outfits, looking at himself in the mirror, keen to make a good impression. How could this person, who had seemed to have none of this self-consciousness before, take us back to where I thought we had been? Had he just accidentally opened a vein in me through which that song had entered? Did he even register the difference between this moment and that?

He asked if I’d like to share an appetizer, and what wine I preferred. He was tangled up in politeness, which by default I matched and parried, moving on to social autopilot.

I wanted the evening to start over. I wanted to whisper something suggestive in his ear as soon as he arrived, preserving the mystery by ushering us back through the curtain again into the vaguer, richer world of romance. None of this disastrous self-reporting, this checklist discovery of “things in common.”