albay
10-07-2015, 12:40 PM
Aside
A story by A. L. Bay
It is not what she said so much as how she said it to you that bothers you now, and the fact that she’s said those exact same words to you before, in regards to something that you said to her, bothers you even more, that she may have been right about that. About the ‘tone’ you used. Because it was her tone that really drove you over the edge, it was really that that made you lose your cool, so to speak, it’s what made you make sure that the next thing you said wasn’t only hurtful in its tone, which, of course, as you knew it would, made her say something even worse in response, and then you and then her again, until finally you got her to leave, even though you were mad enough to leave, yourself, but it was your place so you really couldn’t, and when she left and you listened to the silence that had followed the slammed door and looked around at all the broken **** in your place, you were still seething, but part of you wished that you hadn’t been so hasty to be alone, and yet there you were.
You’re thinking about this on the 2 train, on a crowded car, and you have a seat and so does he, you see, as you watch him sitting at the other end of it. You’re thinking about the things leading up to that fight, which was the last time you saw her, and which was only about a week ago, and so you are unsure whether or not the whole thing is over or if it is just another ‘fight,’ the normal kind that normal couples have, and this unsureness really makes it impossible for you to forget the whole thing, and you keep finding yourself thinking about it over and over, especially at times when you shouldn’t. Now being one of those times, since Mikey has told you to keep an eye on him, on this guy who you know only by face and not by name (which is the way you prefer it, you told Mikey when you started working for him, and Mikey’s respected this request, so far). So you found him by face, followed him from where he worked onto this train, where you chose a seat far enough away from his so that he wouldn’t see you, although, you notice, he seems to be expecting you, or expecting someone in your capacity, because he’s showing all of the classic signs of being nervous, and keeps looking around, rather erratically.
You wish you weren’t thinking about her now so that you can focus more on him, yet you realize, somewhat ironically, that it may be for the better, since the preoccupied look on your face that you know you’re not hiding well actually helps disguise you, makes you look more like just another person on the train, and the few times that his fearful eyes find yours, they don’t linger, and you’re somewhat thankful for her in those moments, although not really, if you’re being honest.
What she’d said to you was, “I’m not sure if this is as important to you as it is to me,” which sounds normal enough on paper, but you picked up on what she was really saying, you got what she meant. She meant, undoubtedly, that you weren’t trying enough, that she thought that what you were doing for her (which, you know, was a lot more than she knew about) wasn’t enough. And in that moment, you hated her for it, for not knowing what she was talking about, and you told her that, you’d said: “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” which she took just about as well as you thought she would, which wasn’t very well at all.
The main thing that he’s doing that lets you know that he’s nervous is that he’s tugging on his sleeve, his left sleeve with his right hand, every few seconds, so it looks like he’s constantly trying to stop his shirt sleeve from riding up under the sleeve of his pretty-expensive-looking suit. The shirt’s one of those white-with-thin-blue-stripes shirts that you’d seen all over the place when you stood, smoking, across the street from the foot of the building where he works, on probably every other guy who’d walked past you, so much so that you were worried you’d confuse him for somebody else in the shuffle. But luckily he’s got a few odd features about him that made him unmistakable from the photograph that you were then holding in your hand and that is now folded up in your pocket: he’s bald, for one, and incredibly short, maybe 5’2 or 5’3, and across his forehead there’s a scar that doesn’t make him look intimidating at all but rather just makes him look kind of old. He’s somewhere in his 30s, you’d say, but he could easily be mistaken for someone in their 50s. Which is a type you find weird, since you are almost 30, yourself, and you really hope you don’t look that old in only a few years’ time, although, as you know and as she’s reminded you plenty, smoking doesn’t help with the whole aging-gracefully thing. Although to be fair, she never really rides you for smoking, it’s just something she doesn’t want you to do, which sometimes makes you angry but most times is something you understand.
Mikey told you that this guy normally gets off after a few stops on the 2, a piece of information that you didn’t ask how Mikey came to know it, since you like to know as little as possible. You didn’t bring a newspaper or anything, but it’s easy for you to sit forward and rest your forearms on your knees and kind of stare into your hands while keeping an eye on him to watch for when he gets up. He seems like the sort of guy that would make a big deal about getting up on the subway, especially since there are a few people in between him and the nearest door. The train you’re on is an express, and it stops for the first time now, and you look up a little too obviously to see if he’s going to get off, which he doesn’t, but he does look around right as you look at him, and maybe you look away too quickly, because you notice, from the corner of your eye (since you are too careful to do anything as stupid as a double-take), that he keeps his eyes on you for a few seconds before pretending to be interested in his sleeve again. Which kind of ****s you, if he’s already seen you, so you cough, plenty loud for the whole train to hear, as if to announce that you are not following anybody, since who in their right mind would be following somebody and cough at the same moment that the person they’re following is looking at them?, is your thought process. The train takes off again, and a few newcomers get settled in the car and hold onto the hanging hand-rail thing in between you two, so that you can no longer see his face but only his very-nervous right hand and left wrist, so you are unsure if you’re little masquerade worked or not, but for the time being it doesn’t really matter, since the train is in motion and neither of you are going anywhere until it stops again.
She doesn’t really bother you about the smoking thing because she, too, used to smoke, back before you met her and through the first few months you were seeing her, until one day she’d come home from her nice, cushy, legal job and told you that her ‘new year’s resolution’ was going to be to try and quit, which you thought was a nice thought that would probably fall through before February. But she’s stuck with it, so far, three months now, which is pretty impressive considering how you yourself haven’t gone a day without a boge since you were probably 14, and can’t really imagine what goes into quitting, which you’ve told her, and she seemed to take as a compliment. Which is fine, because you kind of meant it as such, but really you were telling her to not get any ideas about this whole quitting thing becoming some ‘couples’ thing, since the timeline of her quitting coincided pretty closely to the time when she started using that word, ‘couple.’ Which seemed to be something she’d said before, with how nicely it seemed to roll off her tongue and all, but which was something pretty new to you, you who’s had plenty of pussy in your day, no doubt about it, but has never been involved in anything like a ‘couple,’ nothing you’d describe as such even now that you have the word in your vocabulary.
The train’s slowing, and he stands, just like you thought he would, swishing out the back of the jacket of his nice, rich-guy suit, kind of flapping it at the people around him. He does that “mm-HMM” kind of fake cough that lets everybody know that he wants them to move and that really, really annoys you when you hear it. The two people who are between him and the door, a skinny teenager who looks even taller than you and a rather stocky old guy who probably shouldn’t have been standing in the first place, don’t acknowledge him (which is unsurprising, this is New York City, after all), which seems to make him madder, and you watch as he tries to stand at his full height, which is unimpressive, and again, “mm-HMM.” The teenager breaks, kind of looks down and away and forces himself as far up against metal arm rest at the end of the two seats in the corner as he can, but the old guy still does nothing. The train stops, and he kind of slides in between them, making a big show to sort of squeeze out the door right against the old guy’s back, and he scrunches his face to nobody in particular in that I-can’t-believe-this-guy kind of way, and still the old guy does nothing, and the only reason you don’t laugh at how ridiculous your mark is being is because you don’t want to be noticed. You slide out the car’s other door, about ten yards behind him, and as you walk you notice how angry he seems to be, you can tell even from the back of him, and you realize that in his state of indignance – to which he doesn’t really have a right – he may have forgotten that he’d noticed you watching him on the train, and that this whole thing may have worked to your advantage.
It is a particularly crowded time at the station, everybody seems to be in a suit and just coming out of their jobs, and so it is easy for you to hang back, although you are afraid you may lose his particular bald head in the wave of other heads-over-suits that are bobbing all around you, so you try not to stay too far back, but just far enough to not be noticed. He takes the first staircase that leads up to the street, which, like the rest of the station, is crowded enough to slow the pace of foot traffic down to a shuffle, so that you, a few yards behind him, are now about even with his ankles as you two are confined to the stair case’s crowd for about thirty seconds. During which time he seems to remember that he’s possibly being followed, for at one point you see him spin around wildly, his eyes fairly wide and his eyebrows sharpened, and he finds you, almost immediately, and locks onto you, and you think to yourself, “fu-u-uck.” But you don’t show it, you try and keep looking ahead, you try to react as if you were just somebody else in the station and someone in front of you decided, out-of-the-blue, to spin around and stare at you crazily. You settle on sort of narrowing your eyes, as if to convey, “well, that’s strange,” or, maybe, “what’s this guy looking at?” but at this point you’re not fooling anybody, and when he breaks eye contact with you it’s to try and run up the stairs, which is a rather stupid endeavor, you see, because the stair case is just as crowded as it was before he noticed you, but now at least you know that you’ll have to stay on him at the top, when the crowd thins out enough for him to run.
But he doesn’t do that, which you find strange, because it’s what you’d have done, run. Instead, he starts walking at a speed that you imagine he’d describe as ‘brisk,’ which gives you plenty of opportunity to stay with him and yet keep looking as if nothing is happening, since you know that most people who are being followed alternate from 1) thinking that they are absolutely, definitely, no-doubt-about-it being followed to 2) trying to convince themselves that they are just being paranoid and that everything, in reality, is fine. Which is a rather funny thing about people, you’ve noticed, that they’ll take any excuse to think that everything’s fine. In this instance, the excuse you’re giving him is that you cross the street, as casually as you can, and take your time lighting your boge with a match. You have to stop and cup your hands and spark the thing right up against your chest because it’s a bit windy up here, so that by the time you have it lit and continue walking he’s got almost a full block on you, but it’s easy to keep tabs on him, since he keeps turning around to look at you, and thus is being pretty obvious and making your job a whole lot easier.
Your job being something that she knows nothing about. At least as far as you know. And you think you would know if she found out, because you imagine she wouldn’t be able to hide from you the shock that you imagine she’d feel if she ever found out, since as far as she knows you’re at some warehouse somewhere right now, and where you actually are and what you’re actually doing is quite different than whatever she must have concocted in her mind when you told her you work at a warehouse. Which you only did because she asked, and you had to come up with something. And you realize, now, that her job is something you know nothing about, either, even though you’re sure she must have told you about it before, because you’d never asked her, and had never been curious about it, and so hadn’t paid any attention or took any of it to heart when she told you.
He cuts a quick left, down what looks like a much quieter street, which again almost makes you laugh to yourself, since it’s another move that you’ve noticed people do when you’re following them, they try to ‘get away’ by moving into a less-populated area as soon as they see one, which makes no sense to you but must make some sense to them since you’ve noticed almost all of them do it, in your experience. It’s something you laugh about with Mikey, on the rare occasions that you two talk in that way. You cross the street in a kind of half-jog to get to the corner, stopping just short of it, and you lean against the stone corner of an almost perfectly-clean building in order to steal a glance around it before you yourself round it and keep following him. It’s never a good idea to turn a corner without knowing what’ll be there when you turn, especially once they’ve noticed you. What you see with only your right eye because your left eye is blocked by the glistening stone of the building’s edge is him, maybe about a third of the way down the avenue, sprinting, full-on, so that his jacket is flapping and his tie is flying over his shoulder and his shoes are clapping loudly on the sidewalk. Shoes that are not made for running at all, loafers, probably, if you are remembering correctly from seeing them on the train just a few minutes ago. Unlike your shoes, which are Nike’s and have been double-knotted because you’d figured this was going to end with a run, as it has in almost every other instance, in your experience. They are brand new and particularly ugly, your sneakers are, 100% practical in terms of ‘running efficiency,’ which sounded like bull**** to you when you went in to buy them, and although you were unconvinced by all the sales guy’s phrases like ‘wind resistance’ and ‘lightweight material’, you still paid for them, in cash, as always. She poked a bit of playful ‘couple-y’ fun at you for them, and when you told her they were for running she’d said, “I didn’t know you ran,” and the way she said it let you know in that moment that she thought she’d know things like that about you by now, that if you were a runner it’d be something she should know because you were her man and she knows her man, and you found that strange, and a little uncomfortable, and it reminded you of the first time she said the word ‘couple,’ which also felt a bit strange to you, as if there was something she knew about you that you didn’t know yourself.
It takes you almost no time at all to catch up to him, since he’s so short and ill-equipped for the chase, and he starts looking over his shoulder when he hears you, and the half-face that you see when he turns is one of pure terror, like an uninhibited, ‘dance-like-nobody’s-watching’ kind of thing, which has also been your experience, for the most part, since you can only imagine how off-putting the image of somebody your size barreling down and gaining on a person would look to that person. When you are within a few steps of him he takes a sharp right turn, down an alley way that is wide and lined with garbage bins on one side and has nothing else in it, no people or anything as far as you can tell, and this time you do kind of laugh, since it’s the exact wrong place for him to choose to go in terms of his best interests, and the exact right place in terms of yours. The first time you two met each other for a ‘date’ being at the movies, and the movie being a horror movie, you’ve had this conversation with her a few times, about how stupid people can be in life-or-death situations, and she had a good laugh about it, probably the first good laugh that you got out of her, and it felt good to talk about something that you knew about from your life with her, you remember, even though you weren’t explicit about what it is you were talking about and used the context to let her believe that you were talking about a movie. You don’t usually like to tackle on pavement, since you find that you tend to land rather hard, seeing as how heavy and large you are, so what you do when you catch up to him is to grab two fistfuls of fabric from above each of his shoulders and sort of follow both of your momentums for a few steps, making sure you have a good grip and widening your legs a bit, and then you cut your torso, nice and quick, without slowing down, so that you keep running and stay on your feet but he is ripped off balance from the top down and goes down hard, landing in a space between two dumpsters and sort of bouncing along the ground until he crashes into the side of one of the dumpsters and abruptly stops. The crash being loud enough to let you know that he is done running for the day, you grant yourself a few warm-down like steps before circling back and walking back over to his body, which is now half-sitting, half-lying, backed against the corner formed by the side of the dumpster and the bricks of the alley’s wall.
He doesn’t look awake until you are just about upon him, until you are crouched down right in front of him and have reached into your pocket and have found it and have pulled it out, and when he sees it in your hand he flips out, he completely loses his mind, you think you can actually hear the sound of him ****ting himself, his eyes are huge and his mouth looks like it’s hurting his cheeks it’s so open, and his head keeps jerking from side to side, and his legs keep doing like this back-pedal thing that has his feet sliding towards you on the ground, as if the brick-wall-and-dumpster corner is going to let him go anywhere, and he’s looking at it in your hand and not actually at you, you know, because when he does look at you, for a split second, into your eyes, you can see a hint of confusion just barely peek out from behind all that fear in his face, which, again, is a normal part of your experience, and which you’ve discussed in length with Mikey, who guesses (and you agree) that it is probably that they expect some kind of reciprocal emotion on your face, i.e. that if they are so terrified that they are literally ****ting their thousand-dollar suit pants and wearing out the bottoms of their loafers trying to back themselves into the quite-solid corner of a brick wall and a dumpster, they probably expect you to look like you are feeling something equally strong, like vengeful or crazy or, at least, angry. Which, you know, you are not. Angry, that is. In fact, you are as calm as you can be, in this moment, when you’ve caught your breath and you’re squatting in front of this particular mark and are simply preparing to do what you’re paid to do, you are a level of calm that you retroactively wish you could have been before she’d slammed the door and left you uncertain as to whether or not you were still ‘her man,’ because at the time, there with her, you were almost uncontrollably angry, you were hearing what she was saying and not only getting angrier but were like also daydreaming about how angry you could get, you were already picturing yourself knocking over shelves and breaking dishes and screaming until your throat felt sore, and in that state you told her, thinking about moments like this one with other marks, you’d said: “You don’t know what I do for you.” But what took you by surprise was that when she turned around, with the doorknob in one hand and pointing at you with the other, and had said: “You know what, I don’t think you know what I do for you, either,” most of you still felt angry enough to think about breaking **** and flipping out and just having a completely destructive evening, but one part of you, one part that was significant enough for you to hear it, said to you, very clearly and very calmly: “you know, I think she may be right about that.”
A story by A. L. Bay
It is not what she said so much as how she said it to you that bothers you now, and the fact that she’s said those exact same words to you before, in regards to something that you said to her, bothers you even more, that she may have been right about that. About the ‘tone’ you used. Because it was her tone that really drove you over the edge, it was really that that made you lose your cool, so to speak, it’s what made you make sure that the next thing you said wasn’t only hurtful in its tone, which, of course, as you knew it would, made her say something even worse in response, and then you and then her again, until finally you got her to leave, even though you were mad enough to leave, yourself, but it was your place so you really couldn’t, and when she left and you listened to the silence that had followed the slammed door and looked around at all the broken **** in your place, you were still seething, but part of you wished that you hadn’t been so hasty to be alone, and yet there you were.
You’re thinking about this on the 2 train, on a crowded car, and you have a seat and so does he, you see, as you watch him sitting at the other end of it. You’re thinking about the things leading up to that fight, which was the last time you saw her, and which was only about a week ago, and so you are unsure whether or not the whole thing is over or if it is just another ‘fight,’ the normal kind that normal couples have, and this unsureness really makes it impossible for you to forget the whole thing, and you keep finding yourself thinking about it over and over, especially at times when you shouldn’t. Now being one of those times, since Mikey has told you to keep an eye on him, on this guy who you know only by face and not by name (which is the way you prefer it, you told Mikey when you started working for him, and Mikey’s respected this request, so far). So you found him by face, followed him from where he worked onto this train, where you chose a seat far enough away from his so that he wouldn’t see you, although, you notice, he seems to be expecting you, or expecting someone in your capacity, because he’s showing all of the classic signs of being nervous, and keeps looking around, rather erratically.
You wish you weren’t thinking about her now so that you can focus more on him, yet you realize, somewhat ironically, that it may be for the better, since the preoccupied look on your face that you know you’re not hiding well actually helps disguise you, makes you look more like just another person on the train, and the few times that his fearful eyes find yours, they don’t linger, and you’re somewhat thankful for her in those moments, although not really, if you’re being honest.
What she’d said to you was, “I’m not sure if this is as important to you as it is to me,” which sounds normal enough on paper, but you picked up on what she was really saying, you got what she meant. She meant, undoubtedly, that you weren’t trying enough, that she thought that what you were doing for her (which, you know, was a lot more than she knew about) wasn’t enough. And in that moment, you hated her for it, for not knowing what she was talking about, and you told her that, you’d said: “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” which she took just about as well as you thought she would, which wasn’t very well at all.
The main thing that he’s doing that lets you know that he’s nervous is that he’s tugging on his sleeve, his left sleeve with his right hand, every few seconds, so it looks like he’s constantly trying to stop his shirt sleeve from riding up under the sleeve of his pretty-expensive-looking suit. The shirt’s one of those white-with-thin-blue-stripes shirts that you’d seen all over the place when you stood, smoking, across the street from the foot of the building where he works, on probably every other guy who’d walked past you, so much so that you were worried you’d confuse him for somebody else in the shuffle. But luckily he’s got a few odd features about him that made him unmistakable from the photograph that you were then holding in your hand and that is now folded up in your pocket: he’s bald, for one, and incredibly short, maybe 5’2 or 5’3, and across his forehead there’s a scar that doesn’t make him look intimidating at all but rather just makes him look kind of old. He’s somewhere in his 30s, you’d say, but he could easily be mistaken for someone in their 50s. Which is a type you find weird, since you are almost 30, yourself, and you really hope you don’t look that old in only a few years’ time, although, as you know and as she’s reminded you plenty, smoking doesn’t help with the whole aging-gracefully thing. Although to be fair, she never really rides you for smoking, it’s just something she doesn’t want you to do, which sometimes makes you angry but most times is something you understand.
Mikey told you that this guy normally gets off after a few stops on the 2, a piece of information that you didn’t ask how Mikey came to know it, since you like to know as little as possible. You didn’t bring a newspaper or anything, but it’s easy for you to sit forward and rest your forearms on your knees and kind of stare into your hands while keeping an eye on him to watch for when he gets up. He seems like the sort of guy that would make a big deal about getting up on the subway, especially since there are a few people in between him and the nearest door. The train you’re on is an express, and it stops for the first time now, and you look up a little too obviously to see if he’s going to get off, which he doesn’t, but he does look around right as you look at him, and maybe you look away too quickly, because you notice, from the corner of your eye (since you are too careful to do anything as stupid as a double-take), that he keeps his eyes on you for a few seconds before pretending to be interested in his sleeve again. Which kind of ****s you, if he’s already seen you, so you cough, plenty loud for the whole train to hear, as if to announce that you are not following anybody, since who in their right mind would be following somebody and cough at the same moment that the person they’re following is looking at them?, is your thought process. The train takes off again, and a few newcomers get settled in the car and hold onto the hanging hand-rail thing in between you two, so that you can no longer see his face but only his very-nervous right hand and left wrist, so you are unsure if you’re little masquerade worked or not, but for the time being it doesn’t really matter, since the train is in motion and neither of you are going anywhere until it stops again.
She doesn’t really bother you about the smoking thing because she, too, used to smoke, back before you met her and through the first few months you were seeing her, until one day she’d come home from her nice, cushy, legal job and told you that her ‘new year’s resolution’ was going to be to try and quit, which you thought was a nice thought that would probably fall through before February. But she’s stuck with it, so far, three months now, which is pretty impressive considering how you yourself haven’t gone a day without a boge since you were probably 14, and can’t really imagine what goes into quitting, which you’ve told her, and she seemed to take as a compliment. Which is fine, because you kind of meant it as such, but really you were telling her to not get any ideas about this whole quitting thing becoming some ‘couples’ thing, since the timeline of her quitting coincided pretty closely to the time when she started using that word, ‘couple.’ Which seemed to be something she’d said before, with how nicely it seemed to roll off her tongue and all, but which was something pretty new to you, you who’s had plenty of pussy in your day, no doubt about it, but has never been involved in anything like a ‘couple,’ nothing you’d describe as such even now that you have the word in your vocabulary.
The train’s slowing, and he stands, just like you thought he would, swishing out the back of the jacket of his nice, rich-guy suit, kind of flapping it at the people around him. He does that “mm-HMM” kind of fake cough that lets everybody know that he wants them to move and that really, really annoys you when you hear it. The two people who are between him and the door, a skinny teenager who looks even taller than you and a rather stocky old guy who probably shouldn’t have been standing in the first place, don’t acknowledge him (which is unsurprising, this is New York City, after all), which seems to make him madder, and you watch as he tries to stand at his full height, which is unimpressive, and again, “mm-HMM.” The teenager breaks, kind of looks down and away and forces himself as far up against metal arm rest at the end of the two seats in the corner as he can, but the old guy still does nothing. The train stops, and he kind of slides in between them, making a big show to sort of squeeze out the door right against the old guy’s back, and he scrunches his face to nobody in particular in that I-can’t-believe-this-guy kind of way, and still the old guy does nothing, and the only reason you don’t laugh at how ridiculous your mark is being is because you don’t want to be noticed. You slide out the car’s other door, about ten yards behind him, and as you walk you notice how angry he seems to be, you can tell even from the back of him, and you realize that in his state of indignance – to which he doesn’t really have a right – he may have forgotten that he’d noticed you watching him on the train, and that this whole thing may have worked to your advantage.
It is a particularly crowded time at the station, everybody seems to be in a suit and just coming out of their jobs, and so it is easy for you to hang back, although you are afraid you may lose his particular bald head in the wave of other heads-over-suits that are bobbing all around you, so you try not to stay too far back, but just far enough to not be noticed. He takes the first staircase that leads up to the street, which, like the rest of the station, is crowded enough to slow the pace of foot traffic down to a shuffle, so that you, a few yards behind him, are now about even with his ankles as you two are confined to the stair case’s crowd for about thirty seconds. During which time he seems to remember that he’s possibly being followed, for at one point you see him spin around wildly, his eyes fairly wide and his eyebrows sharpened, and he finds you, almost immediately, and locks onto you, and you think to yourself, “fu-u-uck.” But you don’t show it, you try and keep looking ahead, you try to react as if you were just somebody else in the station and someone in front of you decided, out-of-the-blue, to spin around and stare at you crazily. You settle on sort of narrowing your eyes, as if to convey, “well, that’s strange,” or, maybe, “what’s this guy looking at?” but at this point you’re not fooling anybody, and when he breaks eye contact with you it’s to try and run up the stairs, which is a rather stupid endeavor, you see, because the stair case is just as crowded as it was before he noticed you, but now at least you know that you’ll have to stay on him at the top, when the crowd thins out enough for him to run.
But he doesn’t do that, which you find strange, because it’s what you’d have done, run. Instead, he starts walking at a speed that you imagine he’d describe as ‘brisk,’ which gives you plenty of opportunity to stay with him and yet keep looking as if nothing is happening, since you know that most people who are being followed alternate from 1) thinking that they are absolutely, definitely, no-doubt-about-it being followed to 2) trying to convince themselves that they are just being paranoid and that everything, in reality, is fine. Which is a rather funny thing about people, you’ve noticed, that they’ll take any excuse to think that everything’s fine. In this instance, the excuse you’re giving him is that you cross the street, as casually as you can, and take your time lighting your boge with a match. You have to stop and cup your hands and spark the thing right up against your chest because it’s a bit windy up here, so that by the time you have it lit and continue walking he’s got almost a full block on you, but it’s easy to keep tabs on him, since he keeps turning around to look at you, and thus is being pretty obvious and making your job a whole lot easier.
Your job being something that she knows nothing about. At least as far as you know. And you think you would know if she found out, because you imagine she wouldn’t be able to hide from you the shock that you imagine she’d feel if she ever found out, since as far as she knows you’re at some warehouse somewhere right now, and where you actually are and what you’re actually doing is quite different than whatever she must have concocted in her mind when you told her you work at a warehouse. Which you only did because she asked, and you had to come up with something. And you realize, now, that her job is something you know nothing about, either, even though you’re sure she must have told you about it before, because you’d never asked her, and had never been curious about it, and so hadn’t paid any attention or took any of it to heart when she told you.
He cuts a quick left, down what looks like a much quieter street, which again almost makes you laugh to yourself, since it’s another move that you’ve noticed people do when you’re following them, they try to ‘get away’ by moving into a less-populated area as soon as they see one, which makes no sense to you but must make some sense to them since you’ve noticed almost all of them do it, in your experience. It’s something you laugh about with Mikey, on the rare occasions that you two talk in that way. You cross the street in a kind of half-jog to get to the corner, stopping just short of it, and you lean against the stone corner of an almost perfectly-clean building in order to steal a glance around it before you yourself round it and keep following him. It’s never a good idea to turn a corner without knowing what’ll be there when you turn, especially once they’ve noticed you. What you see with only your right eye because your left eye is blocked by the glistening stone of the building’s edge is him, maybe about a third of the way down the avenue, sprinting, full-on, so that his jacket is flapping and his tie is flying over his shoulder and his shoes are clapping loudly on the sidewalk. Shoes that are not made for running at all, loafers, probably, if you are remembering correctly from seeing them on the train just a few minutes ago. Unlike your shoes, which are Nike’s and have been double-knotted because you’d figured this was going to end with a run, as it has in almost every other instance, in your experience. They are brand new and particularly ugly, your sneakers are, 100% practical in terms of ‘running efficiency,’ which sounded like bull**** to you when you went in to buy them, and although you were unconvinced by all the sales guy’s phrases like ‘wind resistance’ and ‘lightweight material’, you still paid for them, in cash, as always. She poked a bit of playful ‘couple-y’ fun at you for them, and when you told her they were for running she’d said, “I didn’t know you ran,” and the way she said it let you know in that moment that she thought she’d know things like that about you by now, that if you were a runner it’d be something she should know because you were her man and she knows her man, and you found that strange, and a little uncomfortable, and it reminded you of the first time she said the word ‘couple,’ which also felt a bit strange to you, as if there was something she knew about you that you didn’t know yourself.
It takes you almost no time at all to catch up to him, since he’s so short and ill-equipped for the chase, and he starts looking over his shoulder when he hears you, and the half-face that you see when he turns is one of pure terror, like an uninhibited, ‘dance-like-nobody’s-watching’ kind of thing, which has also been your experience, for the most part, since you can only imagine how off-putting the image of somebody your size barreling down and gaining on a person would look to that person. When you are within a few steps of him he takes a sharp right turn, down an alley way that is wide and lined with garbage bins on one side and has nothing else in it, no people or anything as far as you can tell, and this time you do kind of laugh, since it’s the exact wrong place for him to choose to go in terms of his best interests, and the exact right place in terms of yours. The first time you two met each other for a ‘date’ being at the movies, and the movie being a horror movie, you’ve had this conversation with her a few times, about how stupid people can be in life-or-death situations, and she had a good laugh about it, probably the first good laugh that you got out of her, and it felt good to talk about something that you knew about from your life with her, you remember, even though you weren’t explicit about what it is you were talking about and used the context to let her believe that you were talking about a movie. You don’t usually like to tackle on pavement, since you find that you tend to land rather hard, seeing as how heavy and large you are, so what you do when you catch up to him is to grab two fistfuls of fabric from above each of his shoulders and sort of follow both of your momentums for a few steps, making sure you have a good grip and widening your legs a bit, and then you cut your torso, nice and quick, without slowing down, so that you keep running and stay on your feet but he is ripped off balance from the top down and goes down hard, landing in a space between two dumpsters and sort of bouncing along the ground until he crashes into the side of one of the dumpsters and abruptly stops. The crash being loud enough to let you know that he is done running for the day, you grant yourself a few warm-down like steps before circling back and walking back over to his body, which is now half-sitting, half-lying, backed against the corner formed by the side of the dumpster and the bricks of the alley’s wall.
He doesn’t look awake until you are just about upon him, until you are crouched down right in front of him and have reached into your pocket and have found it and have pulled it out, and when he sees it in your hand he flips out, he completely loses his mind, you think you can actually hear the sound of him ****ting himself, his eyes are huge and his mouth looks like it’s hurting his cheeks it’s so open, and his head keeps jerking from side to side, and his legs keep doing like this back-pedal thing that has his feet sliding towards you on the ground, as if the brick-wall-and-dumpster corner is going to let him go anywhere, and he’s looking at it in your hand and not actually at you, you know, because when he does look at you, for a split second, into your eyes, you can see a hint of confusion just barely peek out from behind all that fear in his face, which, again, is a normal part of your experience, and which you’ve discussed in length with Mikey, who guesses (and you agree) that it is probably that they expect some kind of reciprocal emotion on your face, i.e. that if they are so terrified that they are literally ****ting their thousand-dollar suit pants and wearing out the bottoms of their loafers trying to back themselves into the quite-solid corner of a brick wall and a dumpster, they probably expect you to look like you are feeling something equally strong, like vengeful or crazy or, at least, angry. Which, you know, you are not. Angry, that is. In fact, you are as calm as you can be, in this moment, when you’ve caught your breath and you’re squatting in front of this particular mark and are simply preparing to do what you’re paid to do, you are a level of calm that you retroactively wish you could have been before she’d slammed the door and left you uncertain as to whether or not you were still ‘her man,’ because at the time, there with her, you were almost uncontrollably angry, you were hearing what she was saying and not only getting angrier but were like also daydreaming about how angry you could get, you were already picturing yourself knocking over shelves and breaking dishes and screaming until your throat felt sore, and in that state you told her, thinking about moments like this one with other marks, you’d said: “You don’t know what I do for you.” But what took you by surprise was that when she turned around, with the doorknob in one hand and pointing at you with the other, and had said: “You know what, I don’t think you know what I do for you, either,” most of you still felt angry enough to think about breaking **** and flipping out and just having a completely destructive evening, but one part of you, one part that was significant enough for you to hear it, said to you, very clearly and very calmly: “you know, I think she may be right about that.”