On the train to her first date, she sipped a hard seltzer and daydreamed about bleeding profusely in the man’s bed while he called an ambulance. She pictured him telling her it was gonna be okay until the sirens rang and he carried her down the stairs. She looked out the window at the crumbling neighborhoods and imagined him falling in love with her in the waiting room while she approached death but didn’t quite get there. She’d stop right before its door and turn around and reenter life just for him.
He was a filmmaker and a comedian. When she was younger, she became enamored with many Brooklyn comedians and subsequently hurt by them. She found out the hard way that comedy could be a shield, an excuse to not take anything seriously, to view everything as one big joke; no matter how hard she’d tried, she couldn’t transcend the barrier. This man, though—she hated thinking of him as a man, for he was only twenty-six and living in a basement in Bed-Stuy, he was more accurately a boy—seemed surprisingly sweet, hopefully different from the rest. She’d watched a short film of his that he sent her and enjoyed it, appreciated its unsettlingly hushed atmosphere and the intense color palette, the deep blues and bright reds juxtaposing the muted colors in other scenes.
Sweaty and tired from the two-hour commute, she weaved through the crowded bar and discovered him in the back looking at turtles in a tank. He was tall and wearing a red polo and talking about the turtles. She was drinking and resting her legs on his lap and unbuttoning his polo as a way of flirting. “I want to be in one of your movies,” she said, immediately regretting using the word movies, sounding like a fucking child, she should have said films. She’d never acted before and never had the desire to so she didn’t know why she’d said it at all. Nevertheless his eyes lit up and he said he was actually working on something that she would be perfect for. It was about a girl having a panic attack in a parking lot. All she had to do was sit in the driver’s seat of a car and freak out for ten minutes. She said okay; she would just not take her Lexapro the morning of.
A pile of cigarette ash, tangled wires, a Windex bottle, a poetry chapbook, and dirty dishes decorated his desk. A black cat meowed on the other side of the door. She picked up the poetry chapbook and read: “He was twelve / When his father died / Drunk on a motorcycle / Just outside Philly.” She contemplated discretely slipping it into her bag, but it looked rare and important and she didn’t want him to hate her.
She wouldn’t let him fuck her until midnight. They made out and talked about music in his bed for the preceding hour; they got more wasted and she remained shy, almost scared. At one point he had to step away to make a call; his friend was in the hospital from taking too many Percocets, but she was too drunk to register the gravity of the situation. When the clock struck twelve she put her lips around his dick, then climbed on top of him. They tumbled around in different positions for an indiscernible amount of time. The entire time she kept her eyes closed. She felt horrifically disoriented and embarrassed when she opened them afterward; she saw him looking at her, and she felt as if she hadn’t seen him in a while, like she’d forgotten who she was fucking while he was fucking her.
The next morning he petted her head and fucked her again. In the living room they played with the cat and he showed her the chessboard he built. She asked if he would build her a house. “I think that’s the next step after building a chessboard,” he said. She was rubbing the cat’s stomach when she was struck with the realization that today was ten years since her dad died. It didn’t feel like anything. She then recalled her vision on the train the day before, the fantasy of near-death on her way to the date. She no longer understood where that strange desire came from. “She usually doesn’t like strangers,” he said, breaking her out of her daze. She looked at him and he was absentmindedly cracking his fingers, one by one.