Gray (13 page)

In that instant, a desperation had come over me; a panic. I didn’t know what to do but I knew I had to do it
now,
so I sat up in my bed, ran my fingers through my hair, and decided to do something irrational. And now I am hopping around in the dark, pulling my jeans on, trying not to make a sound or break my neck. John Miller is snoring
biblically
at this point, as if he’s got locusts in his throat, and as I slip out of the bedroom, he sputters and snorts, comes close to surfacing, but doesn’t wake up. If he did, I would’ve smothered him with a pillow. Such is my mania.

Before I know it, I am sitting in my brother’s car, trying to figure out how to make the garage door open without waking them up. Did you know that with enough force you can make even a mechanical garage door open? Neither did I, until I found myself squatting and sweating, working my fingers under the lip of the thing, then gritting my teeth and
lifting
. I grunt and swear under my breath, nearly kill myself, and have to rest the door on my shoulder. But, eventually, I get it up, push it over my head, and it didn’t make a sound as it swung open. I step out into the driveway, pale blue in the moonlight, and look up at my parents’ bedroom window to make sure they’re still sleeping. I’m not really sure why I’m doing any of this . . . I am twenty-five years old, I can come and go as I please. But something about tonight lends
itself to secrecy. I start the car as quietly as I can, wincing as the engine wakes from its sleep. It hasn’t moved since my brother went away to college, and it takes a few seconds to shake the cobwebs. Then I drive out and onto the street, slowly, no headlights on, and I’m off. At the very least, I know now I can break into my parents’ garage if the situation warrants it.

The streets of the North Shore are deserted, dead. The neat brick houses are sleeping, their shutters closed tight. Even the lampposts have dozed off. I drive around for a bit, past Avoca Park, where I used to play Youth Soccer, down to the Baha’i temple, its dome illuminated for no one in particular. I don’t know where I’m going, so I just keep driving, my bones buzzing and my head fuzzy, that kind of feeling you only get when you’re awake while the rest of the world is asleep. An uninterrupted stream of classic rock is on the radio, the DJs playing long songs like “Layla” so they can go for smoke breaks. I am driving with the windows down, and the night feels damp on my face. I’m the only one breathing it in right now, the only one alive. I glance down at the clock on the dashboard. Jesus, it’s three thirty in the morning. It’s Monday now. Off in the distance, I see a truck stopping at each house, tossing newspapers out of the passenger door. I throw the car in park and turn the radio down, listen to hear the thump of the Monday edition landing on each driveway. It’s a sound most people don’t ever get to hear, but if you’ve heard it once—if you’ve been wandering the streets while the businessmen sleep—then you never forget it.

I decide to drive into the city. Maybe I will call Her
and wake Her up. I reach into my pocket and realize I’ve left my cell phone sitting next to my bed. Oh, well. It will have to be a surprise then. I don’t know what time she wakes up for class, or even if she
has
class, but I’m pretty sure it’s not going to be for a few hours now. I’ve got time to kill and nowhere to kill it. I steer the car back toward Sheridan, take it over the harbor, pass the Baha’i again, its dome still lit. I follow the road as it twists through the campus of Northwestern, all sandstone monuments to higher learning, through Centennial Park, with Lake Michigan in the distance, inky black and refracting the moon into a million shards that dance on its choppy waves. There are lights even farther off, ships maybe, blinking red and white. I wonder if she’s awake right now? I wonder if I should try to call Her from a pay phone?

Sheridan presses on, past Kedzie, which isn’t the Kedzie where the philosopher and I brawled, but close enough, cuts around the cemetery, so big and full of ghosts right now, dives through the campus of Loyola, red bricks and Jesuit priests, and finally tosses me into the mouth of Lake Shore, that great road hugging the banks of the lake, the site of many an existential episode. Cars are on the opposite side of the road now, and their headlights make me jump. For a while there, I had sort of forgotten about the possibilities of other people because my pulse was hopping and I was thinking of Her and reveling in the solitude of the night. I wonder where these other people are going, and who’s waiting for them when they get there? Maybe no one. I think of John Miller and his
garbage bag full of clothes and heart full of crisis. I think of his dead son. I press on and Lake Shore unwinds in front of me, the great lights and buildings of Chicago appearing through the passenger window of the car.

I turn off at Roscoe, cross over Broadway, and suddenly I am parking the car on Clark. Up ahead, the lights of the diner shine forlornly onto the empty streets. I’m drawn to them like a moth. It seems like I always end up here, in this diner, in this booth, and it’s always night. I haven’t been back downtown since the night of our record-release party, when I got drunk and went home with that girl who shouted all those
Oh, God
s and wrote
Bastard
on my hand. I wonder if anyone ever told Her about that. I wonder if she cared. The diner is practically vacant right now, at what I’m guessing is around 5:00 or 6:00 a.m. (I don’t own a watch). A few loners seated at the counter. A cute lesbian couple cuddled together by the window. A cook with tattoos on his forearms. A waitress who looks like a purple-haired librarian. Me. The lights make it feel yellow in here, the way all-night diners always feel when they’re empty and the morning skies are still dark. Or maybe that’s just me; my eyes never adjust to the light.

I order a coffee from the librarian. Ask her what time it is. She tells me it’s four forty-five. Fuck. We used to kill hours here, splitting coffees, cracking jokes. We had no place to go, and we were in no hurry to get there. Things are different now. I’m older and impatient. It’s because of the road, of the lost hours spent wandering the streets of strange cities after sound check, or slumped in a chair backstage, killing time before the show, listening
to the kids shout on the other side of the wall. There are only two constants on the road: waiting around, and the knowledge that you’ll be doing it again tomorrow, only in a different city. It
kills
you eventually. Now, I hate waiting for anything. But at this moment, I’ve got no other choice.

I drink my coffee slowly. Stare at the lesbians in the window. Occasionally, they notice, and I avert my eyes, pretend I’m studying the menu intently. My brain is still trying to convince me that I don’t love Her, replaying a million conversations about Freud and the unconscious self, conversations I entertained only out of politeness but never made an attempt to comprehend. My brain shows me highlights of our greatest hits, the fights, the tears, the doubts. It unspools footage from the future, of our place in Berkeley, of the two bookish kids we will raise, of the co-op market on the corner. I am fat and unhappy, prone to gazing out the window, thinking about what could have been. I have glasses and am wearing a sweater. Have gone soft. It is boho-intellectual-postmodern-think-globally-act-locally-organic-produce-petition-signing-expensive-coffee-drinking hell. I shudder a bit. Call the librarian over and order breakfast.

Someone once told me that digging up the past has two sides: The pro is that you remember things you had forgotten about. Unfortunately, the con is the exact same thing. That may scare some people away, might force them to always be moving forward, never looking back, not for a second. But not me. I’m a believer. In my heart, I know that nothing is ever finished. I can’t close the door on anything. Right now, I need to follow my heart; I need to have
a little faith. So, against my brain’s advice, I wolf down some eggs, slurp up my coffee, and leave the diner with a newfound sense of purpose. A mission. I walk Clark with a full head of steam, burning seconds with each step. But then I realize that it’s still too early to accomplish much of anything, so I go back to my brother’s car, fall asleep in the backseat. I awake to somber, light purple skies and the sound of early rising commuters. For a second, I think about what my parents will think when they discover John Miller and one empty twin-size in my bedroom. Then I think about John Miller, and what
he’ll
do when my parents find him there. But only for a second. Then I’m off to Her place.

I cut through Cabrini, hoping to avoid the early morning traffic. I’m not actually sure why . . . it’s barely 6:00 a.m., and I’m in no hurry to get to Her apartment. The city is beautiful now, the Near North Side still slumbering in its affluence, the coffee shops and charcuteries still shuttered tight. I’m watching Chicago awaken. A ghost with no real place to go. But I’m getting antsy, so enough of the ethereal shit. I drive to Her building, slanted and slightly crumbling, the kind of decay rich people pay good money for. I park the car and sit for a few minutes, studying Her window for any sign of life. The same curtains are starting to glow in the early morning sun. I’m suddenly nervous, my throat dry. I study myself in the rearview mirror, just a collection of lines around my mouth and dark circles beneath my eyes. I look like I slept in the backseat of a Toyota.

In a dreamlike daze, I drift across the street, take up
position outside Her door. I don’t want to buzz up to Her place, for reasons I probably don’t want to admit to myself. Catching Her in the act and all of that. Delivery drivers unload boxes from their trucks, businessmen hustle to the El train. No one notices me. Her door swings open, but it’s just another guy in a suit and power tie. He eyes me suspiciously as he goes on his way, arrogantly slinging a backpack over his single-breasted jacket. Prick. Nothing happens for a long while, and I shift my weight from one foot to the other, my hands jabbed deep in my pockets. What am I doing here? Maybe this is a terrible mistake. Maybe I am going crazy again. Another motion at the door, but it’s just an old lady, stern and buttoned-up in her sadness. She looks like a principal or something.

An hour goes by, I think. People leave the building. None of them are Her. I stand there, sweating in my early morning mania. By now, everyone is awake at my parents’ house. They know that I’m missing, have probably called my cell, have heard it ringing upstairs in the bedroom. They are probably worried about me. I am thinking that maybe I should find a pay phone, should let them know that I’m alive and only slightly insane. But then, the door of the building swings open, and I turn and she walks right into me. Textbooks fall to the street. In slow motion Her eyes look up, meet mine. Her face goes blank. The smile exploded across those wonderful lips. She buries Herself in my chest, wraps Her arms around my shoulders. She’s shaking like a child, so small in my arms. It’s everything I could’ve imagined it would be. Actually, that’s a lie. It’s even more.

“You came for me” is all she says. It’s all she has to.

There are no apologies. No explanations. None are necessary, not now, probably not ever. The tears well up in Her big eyes. Somewhere deep inside me, something comes alive again. We go up to Her apartment, kissing on the stairwell. We go into Her bedroom. I go inside Her and stay there all day. The world spins along outside, the sun rises and sets, the streets go dark, the lights come on. The future is happening, but it can wait until tomorrow. Neither of us knows what will come next, or where we go from here, or even what anyone will say about us, but none of it matters. We’ve got each other right now.

Later that night, as she’s taking a shower, I call my parents from Her phone. It was largely anticlimactic. They weren’t even mad that I took my brother’s car. Turns out John Miller had told them where I was going that morning, over breakfast and coffee in the kitchen. I never told him my plans, but he probably knew them even before I did.

O
happy,
blustery Chicago days, the sky getting heavier, the leaves changing colors. O endless fall nights, the wind getting colder, the stars brighter. Everything is beautiful when you are mindlessly in love, when you ignore your fears and doubts and focus hard on the here and now. We are inseparable again, she and I, making the scene at the bars, walking the campus of Columbia arm in arm. There are doubters, those who shoot us disapproving glances from across tabletops and crowded rooms, but they all seem insignificant and far away. Her friends aren’t talking to Her anymore. The guys in the band just sort of nod in that knowing, weary way. None of them matter to us. I haven’t had a rational thought for weeks now, haven’t felt the need to worry. She does something to me, something no one else on the planet can do. She makes me normal, she makes me free.

We never even forgave one another for the past. It didn’t seem important. We just picked up right where we left off, before it all went bad and I lost my mind. I
haven’t thought about the band in a long time, haven’t felt the promise of the open road course through my veins. Everything goes into Her. We talk about getting married, we think up names for our children (I want to call my son Martin, she prefers Oliver). We are perfect and in love and we are making everyone around us sick. At night, when I lie next to Her in bed, sometimes I worry that I am delusional, that perhaps I am rushing things. My heart may be in the driver’s seat at the moment, but my brain is still shouting directions from the back. Why? How? Really? But then she’ll stir, will turn into me to protect Her from whatever bad dream she’s having, and the doubting stops. I am a believer. I want to believe.