The Unknowns (3 page)

I’m in no shape to think about this. I’m just going to walk off the rest of this buzz, go home, get some sleep. Tomorrow I’ll do the math, figure out what happened, what to do next.

I shouldn’t have told her about the thing.

I get home circa 6:40 a.m. and crawl into bed and put a mask over my eyes. The mask is made of soft foam lined with sateen, and its eyepieces bulge convexly to prevent eyelid contact, which can disturb REM. The mask usually helps me sleep, but this morning there is no sleeping because of the adrenaline racing up and down my spine. My friend Danny claims to have consumed pure MDMA, uncut with amphetamines, manufactured by a CU-Boulder chemistry Ph.D. If I’d taken that I’d be asleep now, although it wouldn’t have kept me from humiliating myself with a stranger. Responsibility for that error lies with the Ecstasy itself, which suppresses faculties of self-consciousness and shame that, although harsh at times, serve a vital regulatory function and shouldn’t be artificially disabled for the sake of some momentary intimacy with a girl who isn’t even the girl I was pursuing. Is Maya going to hear about what happened? Are Lauren and Maya on the phone together right now? By turning my head hard to the left and peering out through the narrow gap between the mask’s edge and the right side of my nose, I can see the
bedside clock, according to which it’s only 7:33. They’re not on the phone. Lauren is lying in bed, trying to lower her heart rate by force of will, thinking about the weird guy she brought home who seemed sort of charming at first and gave her drugs and got her naked and then instead of fucking her took the opportunity to unburden himself of his infantile peccadillo.

Lying here is bringing me no closer to sleep. I should get up, pass a few hours in vigorous exercise, flush the speed from my bloodstream, return to bed around ten, sleep through the day, wake up in the evening and get some breakfast and then stay on a nocturnal schedule, eating lunch at three in the morning, taking vitamin D supplements to substitute for sunlight, never seeing another human being except the clerks working the night shift at the twenty-four-hour Safeway, until one night I run into Maya in the cereal aisle—I’m holding Honey Bunches of Oats, she’s holding Special K—and the two of us leave the supermarket together and drive to the top of Twin Peaks to hold hands and watch the sunrise.

Giving up, I remove the mask and emerge from the bedroom into my apartment’s vast living room/kitchen/dining area. The light through the casement windows is lurid and exhausting, and when I reach the couch I collapse on it and gaze out at the skyline. When I bought this place the view of downtown seemed a thrilling prospect, but four months later it looks like something off a postcard. I’m wearing the same underwear and T-shirt I had on last night, now sour-smelling and soft, and the couch’s coarse fabric is slightly rough against my bare legs. I’m aware that there’s something I’m trying to forget, and the awareness prompts me to investigate, and then I remember last night’s indiscretion and my brain winces and tries to vomit. I go to the fridge for a Gatorade, and keeping my balance requires more concentration than usual. I drink half the Gatorade standing by the fridge with the door open so the cool air prickles the hair on my legs. Is there a way to ensure that I never see Lauren
again? She’s probably just as embarrassed as I am. Obviously she’s nowhere near as embarrassed as I am. She’s probably embarrassed, although not as embarrassed as I am, and wants to forget the whole thing. Or else: over the next few days our five-hour artificially instigated love affair will tug at the back of her mind, and she’ll decide the only way to scratch the itch is for the two of us to meet for coffee and review our feelings about the events in question and start erecting a mandatory friendship. She could get my email address pretty easily. I shut the refrigerator door and flip open my laptop, which is sitting on the granite surface of the kitchen island. Once it wakes up and finds the wireless connection I refresh my email, but of course there’s nothing from her, only an invitation to speak on a couple of panels at the Digital Future Conference in March. She won’t email today—she’ll give me a few days to contact her first. I set the email client to alert me when a new message arrives and wonder if there will be any girls at the Digital Future Conference. Where is Maya right now? It’s 8:12 on Saturday. She’s asleep in Justin’s bed, her head on his shoulder in the morning-after composition familiar from American cinema, a sheet draped over her to hide her nipples from the camera. I can’t remember the specifics of her face, just hair and glasses and an expression of compassionate skepticism. The newspapers are waiting downstairs, and the crossword would occupy me for half an hour. I put on the pants I wore last night and then ride barefoot down to the lobby in the nearly silent elevator. When I bought the apartment I decided I’d take the stairs every time, to build some exercise into my routine, but I’m always in a hurry or tired in a way that justifies taking the elevator, or else I’ve just done something noble and thus deserve to take the elevator as a reward. I am aware that these are excuses that prevent me from gaining the health benefits of taking the stairs, and I’ve started trying to tell myself I should take the stairs anyway, even when I’m feeling rushed or exhausted or virtuous, but this particular unslept serotonin-starved humiliated
morning is clearly not the morning to abjure the elevator at last. The newspapers are just outside the building’s frosted-glass front door, the
Times
in its blue bag, the
Chronicle
in yellow. As I stoop to pick them up I wonder if Maya is sending me an email asking if I want to hang out sometime. I recognize the absurdity of this thought and try to dismiss it, but I nevertheless return to the elevator at a faster pace and am disappointed when the doors don’t open as soon as I press the call button. I shuffle from foot to foot on the cold painted concrete, waiting.

Eventually the metal doors part and reveal the family from the third floor, a young couple with a two-year-old and an infant and a big Akita. I’m standing closer to the elevator doors than is customary, and I must look pretty bad. The mother flinches protectively toward the boy’s stroller.

“Papers,” I say, displaying them, and try to smile reassuringly.

When I get back to the apartment I drop the papers on the island and glance unstoppably at the laptop’s screen, where nothing has changed.

In the bathroom I clean up, gargle, assess the situation. Looking in the mirror is always disappointing—it’s strange that something can be
always disappointing;
you’d imagine that eventually you’d adjust your expectations downward to the point where they’re congruent with reality—but today it’s even more disappointing than usual. My skin is ghastly pale, and my hair has flattened and swollen in random whorls and eddies. The real problem, though, is not these contingent features but the face itself. When we say someone has a big nose, we’re usually talking about the third dimension, the degree to which the nose protrudes into the outside world. My nose, in contrast, is big in the first two dimensions, the x- and y-coordinates. (This corresponds to greater negative space in the nostril area as well.) But my nose is just the most dramatic symptom of a deeper problem: there isn’t enough room on my face. When I was a boy my
features could coexist in peace, but as I emerged from puberty they began to manifest expansionist aims and struck out into the neutral territory between them. I am surveying the battlefield when a chime sounds in the other room, and hope spikes into my heart, and I defer the brushing of my teeth and exit the bathroom to check my email.

I haven’t spoken to my father since I left Denver more than three years ago, and I thought we were both committed to falling out of touch. But there it is:
[email protected]
.

Sic passim. His signature takes up seven lines and lists his job title, employer, mailing address, and phone number, none of which has changed in a decade.

I spend most of the following weeks surfing the Internet to no purpose. I wake in the early afternoons with no memory of any dreams. I compose a brief reply to my father, suggesting that he call me when he arrives. The program coordinator for the Digital Future Conference emails again, and this time I accept the invitation. In the evenings I rotate my three most reliable culinary options: the hamburger place, the burrito place, and spaghetti. Christmas and New Year’s occur without me.

I’m not sure exactly how much time has passed since my last unwise attempt at social contact, but the number of days modulo three must equal two because I’m getting a burrito. The taqueria is painted in kindergarten shades of red and yellow, and the jukebox plays Mexican pop music at an excruciating volume, and the lighting makes everyone more animated than usual. I walk up the aisle
toward the counter and there, at a table on the left, is Maya, and my heart is suddenly audible to the entire restaurant. She’s listening intently to a pale, pierced girl who is talking loudly and gesturing with her hands. Does Maya see me? I lock my eyes on the far wall and walk past her, trying to maintain a natural pace and gait. The possibilities start branching: Either she saw me or she didn’t. If she saw me, did she see me see her? If she saw me see her, does she think I didn’t recognize her? Is it possible she doesn’t recognize me? And this:
What does she know about me
?

The guy taking the orders calls me
amigo
, which he only started doing a month ago and which usually makes me feel good but not today.

I’ve never been able to figure out how much girls tell each other. I used to assume that information is a status symbol in GirlWorld, and so anything you tell a girl will be displayed like a piece of jewelry. But I’ve come to think it works more like money, something to be judiciously invested for maximum returns. If I’m right, Maya doesn’t necessarily know about my, what, my
Oedipal thing
. Let’s say she doesn’t. Let’s say she thinks I’m just some guy she met at a party, and I sit down and eat a burrito with her and her friend. The next time Maya sees Lauren she says,
Guess who I ran into at El Submarino the other night
? and when Lauren hears this she smiles cryptically and says,
Oh, what was
that
like
? in a funny tone of voice that prompts Maya to start saying
What? What
? until, after demurring for a suitable interval, Lauren tells Maya what I told her about ejaculating and the voice in my head and
I love you, Mom
, and first shock and disgust ensue, and then eventually hilarity, and by the end of the conversation I have become an anecdote to them, a strange, sad boy-man they once met who disguises his creepy little perversion behind reflexive flirting, and just imagining that makes me want to kill myself.

So while I wait for the line cook to assemble the burrito I stare fixedly at the refrigerators full of soda and beer. The sodas are
imported from Mexico; they are made with cane sugar rather than corn syrup and bear stickers warning that they’re not to be sold in the U.S. Finally the cook calls out, “Forty-four,
cuarenta y cuatro
!” and I’m clutching my burrito and chips and heading for the door. And then there’s that business of pretending you haven’t seen the person without making it look like you’re ignoring her. It’s impossible to know how successful this deception ever is. You don’t know if she genuinely doesn’t know you’re there, or if she sees you but thinks you don’t see her and prefers not to announce herself, or if the two of you are collaborating on a little play in which you pretend not to notice each other. Accurate data is almost impossible to come by, and in its absence I have the feeling of flying blind into a whirlwind. Of course, I could just talk to her. Even if she knows. I could say hello and introduce myself to her friend and start talking to her and see what happens, and if she gives me a knowing look and says,
I heard you and Lauren had quite a time the other week
, I could smile and say,
Yeah, we had a time
. My eyes are fixed dead ahead and I’m standing too straight, in a way that feels unnatural and probably looks stupid. I could just sit down next to her. Instead I walk past her, through the door, out to the sidewalk, and think,
I’ve made it
.

NICKY BOONT AND I
were making an adventure game: lines of text on the screen that said things like
You are in a dungeon filled with skulls. There is a door to the north and one to the east
. Together we made elaborate maps of underground architecture, wrote adjective-studded descriptions of caverns and weapons and monsters, cultivated the pseudomythological backstory. Every school day we met at lunch in the computer room, an L-shaped cubicle that had been freed up when the office supplies were moved to larger quarters. There we catalogued each object the player might find in the dungeon—weapons, keys, potions—and every action he might perform.

When I walked in, Nicky’s chair was turned away from the Commodore 128 toward the door, his legs crossed professorially. His pale hair was cut in a perfect bowl that made him look like a mushroom. “We need a hide command,” he said by way of a greeting. Theoretically we’d finished the actions two weeks earlier.

“You mean like hide yourself, or hide an object?” I asked. It’s hard to develop an entire syntax when you don’t know words like
transitive
and
intransitive
, but that was the project we had assigned ourselves.

“Both, obviously,” Nicky said, in a way that suggested he had only been thinking of one or the other. “It has to be hiding in a specific place. Like, you can’t hide in an empty room.”