To Feel Stuff (24 page)

When David walked in on Valentine's Day, all of a sudden I realized that I hadn't talked to or seen him in ages. Spotting him in the doorway was like being put into the Witness Protection Program, and then running into someone from my old, erased life. Like I was living in a town in the middle of nowhere and using a completely new name, and then out of the blue, David showed up in my grocery store to get some milk—that's how I felt.

When I asked him, “What are you doing here?” and he said, “I came to give you another certificate. I registered my penis in your name”—now that you've read about that first visit, you know what he was talking about.

I never showed you the star stuff, I think because it depressed me too much to even look at it. I wanted to be a fresh slate while I got to know you. But I laughed when he said he was giving me his penis, and after that joke, it was suddenly like David and I both kind of understood we'd each been ridiculous the last time we saw each other. I think at that moment, we mutually understood that we should really just toss all of that old shit to the wind.

Sarah came and told you that you had a phone call at the desk, and you left die room.

When we were alone, David told me that Marna had dragged him to a bad party at a frat, and he'd partly left it to go get some cigarettes and partly because he just wanted to leave. On his way to the East Side Market, when he was crossing to get to the other side of Waterman, someone hit him on the head with something heavy and pretty hard. I asked him what he was hit with, he said, “I think I was clocked with medium-sized rocks in a cotton sock.” And then he started laughing because that sounded like the world's worst song. So he began to dance while singing, “Med-ium sized rocks in a cott-on sock. Med-ium sized rocks in a cott-on sock.”

After he got hit, he fell to the ground and cracked open his head on the concrete, and that's why he was in the infirmary that night. The ER said that he needed to be woken up every hour because of his concussion.

When David was in the hospital, the police showed up to question him, but since he'd been hit from behind, he didn't see who did it. He brought up my attack to them, and they were really interested in that connection. I couldn't think of any common enemies we might have, but David and I used to go everywhere together, so maybe there was someone who hated us both. Why, I don't know. Because while I'm not going to say that we're the best people on the planet, it's not like we're the worst either.

I was also laughing when David told me that the cops asked him if he'd gotten any hate mail or strange letters lately, and he told them, “I got an invitation from Hillel last week and I'm not Jewish.” (He is Jewish.)

Then I found out that all these other people had been getting attacked after I landed in the infirmary, and I felt like I was in some alternate universe, some Twilight Zone, because I hadn't even known.

David asked me, “Haven't you been reading the
Herald
?” And I realized that you and I had never even picked up a paper. We could have gotten one easily, asked one of the nurses to bring it in the morning with our toast. But you and I, when you think about it, really had no due what was going on outside.

I was so confused. “Wait, why haven't any of these people passed through the infirmary?”

David told me that me, him, and that kid who got shot in the throat got the worst of it. The other people were in and out of the hospital in a few hours. Some girl was pushed into bushes, but she only got scratched up, so it wasn't that big of a deal. And there was a sophomore who passed someone wearing a hood, then felt a prick in his arm. He thought the guy had injected lethal poison into him, like that umbrella case in Russia. The doctors found a small hole where the prick was, so he wasn't lying, but they ran every test in the world and he came out clear. And then, as David puts it, “The pussy took the rest of the semester off and went home to Buffuck, Missouri.” David asked me, “Doesn't anyone talk around here?” and I told him that the person I generally talked to was you, and that you wouldn't know anything more than I would, anyway.

Not one of us had gotten a good look at our attackers, so the cops didn't have any suspects.

By the time David was done telling me his whole story—and he takes a really long time telling stories because he's always talking about who he's going to sue—I was tired. So I told him I was going to sleep. You still weren't back.

And then he said, “Wait—”

And I said, “Yeah?”

Out of the blue he said, “You haven't missed me?”

I was surprised by the question. But I told him that I did miss him, which was true. I just hadn't said it out loud.

“You missed me so much you haven't called me once during the past three months?”

I tried to explain to him that absence has never made my heart fonder, and that he shouldn't take it personally. “But now that you're here, I can say to you that I've missed you,” I said. “We had good times. I miss our times.” I thought we were done with that, so I started to roll over and get settled under the covers, figuring that you'd be in soon.

David said, “Hold on.”

“What is it?”

“Don't go to sleep. I have to get woken up every hour anyway, so the sleep isn't even worth having. That's like, crack whore sleep.” He wanted to stay up and talk all night, get refamiliarized with each other's lives. First he was trying to convince me that I did the same thing every night—sleeping—and that I should try to break it up for once. Then he tried to sell me on how exciting it would be not to sleep, saying things like “We'll get that soldier feeling when the morning comes, like we've pummeled through it.”

I told him that I really wanted to talk to him and catch up on everything, but I'd just had physical therapy and needed to recharge.

Again, David said, “Wait.”

I was exasperated with him and completely snapped, asking what his problem was. I said, “Listen, I'm not staying up, so fucking drop it”

I guess it was me acting like that that finally made David get very intense about what he needed to say. Because his facial expression shifted, and I could see that he was done with the “Waits” and was ready to make a declaration.

“I'm going to talk about something that we can both attribute to the drugs later,” he said, and he got out of his bed and squatted down on the floor next to mine (ours). He was rocking back and forth with his hands locked. He reminded me of a coach I used to have in high school, who would pull the same move when he was with us in the locker room. David would only look at his knuckles, not at me.

“What's going on?” I asked.

“I'm on hospital painkillers,” David told me, taking his hands apart so he could write on the floor with his finger. I honestly can't be positive about this, but I thought he was spelling out my name. “Just like you were the last time we saw each other. Maybe I told you I felt all right a half hour ago, that I was clear-headed and in control of my memory, but maybe that was the drugs talking. You don't know. Who knows? Not me.

“If things go well during the next minute,” David said, “it's all right for us to remember them. If they don't, though—” he knocked on wood, the floor—“then we'll attribute everything to the drugs, and both forget that I ever started talking like this tonight”

It was a mistake to say that to me, because as soon as he told me I might need to eventually ignore the information, I began to make sure that I was giving him my whole attention. I told him something along those lines, and he thought I was making fun of him.

“I'm not bullshitting you. Here,” he said. Then it came out.

“I'm going to tell you right now that I've had feelings for you before. When I got to this school, people talked about this air you supposedly had about you, and I was like, ‘I'm going to check out this air.' No one really knew you and they were saying ‘Chess is this,' and ‘Chess is that,' and I encountered all of the hype before I even met you. It was as if people were making this colossal commercial for you, and I didn't even know you, but there was this image and this picture that I was given of you.

“And then when we actually came face to face I could have bought into it, but I don't operate that way, you get it? I saw the parts of you that I liked and wanted not because of your stupid,
je ne sais quoi
image, but because I was aesthetically drawn to you. And I don't mean just the outside. I mean there was something from my gut that drew me toward you. I have a very definite sense of what I like, and it cuts through the rest of everything. And my aesthetics for you were so strong that I've had this, I don't know, crush on you, not because of some loser Brown kids and the stories about what you did at this party or what you said during that history section. Who cares. Or rather, I was somewhat in love with you for a while there, and don't even try to tell me that that didn't come from the gut, because you think I
wanted
to be in love with you? I didn't. Is unrequited love ever fun for anyone? No. Never.”

After the “never,” which I remember distinctly, David's mouth stayed open like there was more that was about to come out. I couldn't even imagine what more there could possibly be, because his speech covered everything, or at least it did for me. But after about thirty seconds I realized that he was at a loss for words.

Maybe I should be embarrassed to admit how I felt about his confession because I'm aware that it was a very self-absorbed reaction. But within me it produced, more than anything else, déjà vu. It wasn't that David had ever told me any of this before, but that a more nostalgic, broad-spectrum feeling of being wanted and loved came over me. Maybe I'm being an asshole to the rest of the world, David and you included, by being the kind of guy who would have this kind of reaction, but I think that I'd be an asshole to myself if I didn't.

Maybe you won't believe this at all, but I'm really doing my best to keep you from hating me. Please understand that before the attack, El, there had always been what I can only describe as an energy that sustained me from one minute to the next. There was this tension in my stratosphere that miraculously kept me assured that I was welcome in every place I showed up. To put it more clearly, it wasn't that this is what I thought, but what I just knew, and so I was never responsible for it even passing across my brain.

Basically, David's confession didn't produce shock in me. There was a positive aspect to my nonshock because it prevented me from doing something terrible like jerking back in surprise or reacting uncomfortably to the news. Because while yes, the bearer of the news was surprising, I have to admit that the content was familiar. Being around David again had taken me back to the point of missing him, but hearing that he'd had a secret crush on me took me even farther back, to a year I couldn't pinpoint if I tried.

The next thought I had was that I loved my friend, and that the last thing in the world I wanted to do was hurt him.

So I asked him something like “You're saying that your feelings for me were based on an aesthetic push?”

He seemed relieved that I was giving him an out. “Yes. Almost like the appreciation of an expert on the subject, like—” But he stopped short there and never gave me an example.

“Then how can I argue with that,” I said.

We were quiet for a while because we each knew where the other stood. After some time David asked me, “Am I an idiot?”

I told him no, I didn't think so, and he wanted me to explain why not.

I said that the truth was that I was involved with you, and that I owed it to myself to see how our relationship would play out because it was an enormous, unbelievable thing. I told him that you were where I was at right then.

I remember saying, “There's this stuff—I feel stuff—that I've never felt before.” And that no matter what he said that night, it wouldn't make a difference. Because there was you.

David, since he's a master at it, decided to argue his way back out of what we'd been talking about, and he made a case for the past half hour being like a quick-moving flu. He told me how when he's sick everything takes place on a different plane that resembles the normal one, except it's way more concentrated. He said, “I get this feeling like I'm operating outside of the human race. I'm on a different clock, seeing parts of the night that I usually don't, babbling about things that I usually don't, acting in ways I usually don't.”

And then we were on the same plane because I knew exactly what he was talking about, having been living in the infirmary with you.

“What should we do, then?” he asked.

I said that we should go to sleep.

“I mean about the drugs I'm on,” David said.

I told him that everything was fine and everything was going to stay fine, and he seemed to believe me fully. He said “okay,” that he'd live with that, and he got up from the floor.

I asked him to turn out the overhead light since I was settled in bed, and while he was over at the switch, I heard Adrian, that guy who had mono and was really cranky, whisper to David, “I heard everything.”

David turned off the light, then whispered back. “I could give less of a fuck what you heard. I'm not in love with you.”

 

When I woke up early the next morning, I saw that I was in bed alone. I sat up, completely alarmed because that had never happened since we started sleeping together. The bed frame hit the wall. That woke David up.

“Elodie's not here,” I said to him. “I don't know if she ever came back to the room last night.”

And he told me, “I saw her last night.”

“Back here?”

“No,” David said. “I saw her after you went to sleep. I couldn't relax, so I went for a walk. Inside.