Two Stories
'Early Shift at the Diaconia' and 'Wild Horses'
Early Shift at the Diaconia
His dick looked like it was trying to retreat into his abdomen as he opened the door. “What do you need?” the old man asked. “I’m not ready yet.” Naked, except for a pair of fuzzy slippers and bifocals. “I’m here to clean your apartment, Sir. Christina is on vacation. I’m covering her shift.” The man ah yes yes yessed and smiled contently. Just the small matter of getting himself dressed but go ahead and get started in the kitchen or better yet the bathroom. “That works,” when really, it didn’t matter.
Stains on the white porcelain, stains resistant to being wiped away — simply, dumbly — with rags, unwilling to let themselves get slowly broken apart bit by brown and yellow and rancid bit with the rough side of a sponge; hideous calcification on the sink. I exhale loudly and I’m on my knees scraping gunk out of the corners. A voice from the living room: “She didn’t come today. What?” Again, louder: “What?” Finally: “This nice young man is working in her stead.” Yeah, yeah, yeah, he knows, he knows. “Very nice young man, though.”
The morning sun has become an aggressive glare on the glistening gray of the hallway floor. I admired my work, hand in front of my face, trying to at least. A nearby door opened and a toothless grin peeked out from behind it, big eyes trying to make sense of my being there. The face puckered its lips and a hand ran through thin white cobwebs. “May I ask you something?” Shoot. “How come you mop these floors every week? It’s not like they’re ever dirty.”
I fell asleep on the bus but woke up when the old man’s penis detached itself from its host and leapt at me. Far away, a clock ticked fourteen times before I realized that I had missed my stop.
Wild Horses
Days had grown into weeks but he still held out hope he would see her again. Rushing to the bus stop to not only catch the 4:47 p.m. bus but to also have enough time to get his book out of his backpack and get himself in position, crosslegged on the uncomfortable bulging bench designed to keep homeless people from sleeping on it, hoping to look up at her nonchalantly when she crossed the street to join him in waiting.
They had met at the stop every day for three weeks, her sometimes hurriedly making her way out of the house on the other side of the road mere moments before the bus arrived, him sometimes arriving to her already sitting there, looking up at him, smiling faintly when they made eye contact before returning her focus to her phone. On the bus, they had a habit of positioning themselves in such a way that allowed for brief glances, a routine occasionally made somewhat ambiguous by the sunglasses the season tended to call for. Four stops, seven to nine minutes later they arrived at the station and went their respective ways. He would walk idly toward the train that took him to his apartment while looking back at her and wondering where it was that the rest of her journey took her.
There was no doubt she was young, too young — she couldn’t have been older than twenty; she was likely closer to eighteen and at thirty-nine, he was more than twice her age. That didn’t stop him from dreaming up elaborate scenarios during late nights and early mornings spent rolling around in bed — rubbing his crotch against the mattress, breathing lustfully into the hot pillow, gazing into the eyes of a phantom — reveries of himself playing the role of a mentor introducing a thirsty-for-knowledge ingénue to the ways of the flesh. What it did stop him from, however, was actually talking to her. The quick glimpses and put-on shy smiles were as far as he was willing to go.
And yet, there remained an inexplicable pull, a deep, immutable desire to cross the threshold — it was so strong that it often rendered him unable to think and sometimes even move. It wasn’t uncommon for him to get off the bus, breathing heavily, feeling physically overwhelmed by the thought of her clothes scattered on his bedroom floor, her bra hanging off the backrest of his brown leather office chair. These images always had a way of taking on an unbearable vividness but they became particularly urgent, especially immediate whenever he had his eyes on her — it was, he felt, a dangerous convergence of reality and fantasy, one that seemed poised to exert a cruel authority over his life.
But now that it had been another three weeks since he had seen her, this grip lessened slightly as his memory of her faded into abstraction.
He sat there, book in hand, his mind once again occupied with this sylph-figured idea he had created — the solipsistic alchemy of an obsessive, reckless sexual appetite. He stared at the pages but the words were meaningless to him as he waited for the white door on the single-family home he sat across from to open. The banality and superficial innocence of this desire stood out to him in that moment: just a boy hoping to see a girl he has a crush on. It was really only when he contemplated the specifics of the situation that his behavior read as aberrant.
Like every day for the past six weeks, he contemplated this. He looked down the street — cheap pedestrian theater, he knew the bus wouldn’t arrive for another five minutes — and as he turned his head what he had spent most of his recent waking moments hoping for finally happened. Looking both ways, the girl hopped over the curb and strode across the two-laned street that separated her house — or her parents’ house, rather — from the bus stop where he was sitting, waiting, hoping, until moments ago, with painful desperation.
She took her place next to the bench and he studied her with an artist’s eye and a pervert’s intensity. Dressed in high-waisted blue jeans and a white t-shirt, she tucked her dirty-blonde hair behind her ear and used this as an opportunity to peek at the man she recognized from earlier encounters. Watching this out of the corner of his eye he finally asked her, “Can I help you?”
She had already turned back to face the street by the time the question came over his lips. Turning back around, her strands fell in her face. “Huh?” she replied, brushing it from in front of her eyes.
“English?” he asked, looking straight at her. “Deutsch? Français?”
“Excuse me?” She turned to face him and leaned forward politely.
“Do you speak English?”
“Yeah.”
“Can I help you?” he asked again, feigning mild annoyance.
She smiled, confused. “Why?”
“Every time I see you you’re constantly looking over at me.” His eyes, hidden behind his dark Ray-Bans, traveled the length of her body.
“I’m just looking around. No reason, just looking.” She kept facing him and he made note of the breath of playful defiance in her voice. How often had he imagined this exact conversation? How close had he come to giving up on ever seeing her again? And now…
He nodded and leaned back. “My mistake then. Apologies.”
“I get it. I don’t like it when people stare at me either.”
Leaning forward again he asked, “That happen to you a lot?”
She thought for a moment, tilting her head back to look at the sky. She looked at him again, “I guess so, yeah. It definitely does.”
“What do you do?”
“What do you mean?”
“If I had to guess I’d say you’re in college.”
“No,” she responded, “my, uhm…” trailing off. “I don’t really like school and didn’t have the grades. I work at a movie theater.”
“Bad grades, huh?”
“What do you do?” She gestured at the empty space next to him on the gray bench, a twitch of the head and a jerk of the arm that, together, asked, “May I?” Another nod and she sat down next to him.
“Long story,” he said. “You could say I work in IT.”
“What’s working in IT like?”
“It’s like nothing, really.” He paused for a moment. “It’s a job.”
“Is that all you do?”
“I have a lot of free time. I do a lot of things.”
Her eyes looked past his face now, down the street at the rectangular beast that was barreling toward them. He watched her stand up and look over her shoulder, back at him. “Lots of things like what?”
Thinking about it, he got on his feet. “Lots of things like reading.” He held the book up to his face but hoped she wouldn’t ask him what it was about.
“What else?”
The bus came to a halt in front of them and the doors clumsily jerked open. She got on first and made her way to the back; he followed her. The sudden sense of normalcy, of intimacy, tugged at some part of his mind that had thought this very situation impossible and it was not unlike a lucid dream, the universe bending to the sheer power of his desire and perseverance, the brute force of his will. He had not peered into the future previously but rather altered the course of his destiny and, perhaps more importantly, hers. This refashioned future played out before him in an instant; a series of nodes to be navigated by means of rhetoric and subtle physical communication that would take them off the bus, onto the train, and finally into his apartment. The moquette seat, bordeaux littered with gold scribbles and dots, next to the girl glowed with promise; he sat down.
“So what else do I do?” His hand traveled up to his face and plucked the sunglasses off his nose. “I listen to a lot of music. I read. I watch movies.”
She laughed. “So you do what everyone else does too.”
Caught slightly off-guard he replied: “I suppose so, yes. But I think there’s a difference between being able to do these things as something more than just a distraction from your everyday life. Under the right circumstances, great art can alter your consciousness, make you think about life in a different way.”
“But really what you’re doing is sitting somewhere by yourself and taking in someone else’s work.”
He smiled to himself though he was aware she would inevitably see him. “Yes, but see it’s the taking in part that’s crucial. You’re not just turning your brain off, you’re putting yourself in conversation with someone else’s feelings and ideas, the world they lived in at that time. And you realize things about your own feelings and ideas in the process. You learn something about yourself and the world you live in. If the work is any good at least.”
“Yeah that makes sense.” It appeared to him that she was losing interest in the conversation. Could it be that he had overshot his target? She said herself she wasn’t exactly a great student so this chatter about art and engaging with it probably meant nothing to her, not even in the abstract. The future that had presented itself to him just a few moments earlier now seemed in danger of dissipating just as quickly as it had appeared.
“Actually, let me ask you: what do you do when you’re not working at the movie theater?”
“Alright fine.” A brief smile as she brushed her hair behind her shoulder, first the left then the right. “I usually just hang out with my friends. Sometimes we go to the mall that’s close by here because you can get a lot of food there. I go out on the weekends.”
“What do you do when you’re out? Where do you go?” He couldn’t believe his interest was genuine.
“I don’t know, clubs? Bars?”
“Are you asking me or telling me?”
“God, you sound like my teacher.” She laughed loudly, in a way he found slightly obnoxious. Moreover, it probably couldn’t be a good sign that she was equating him with her teacher, likely an unattractive and small man. He felt desperate but in his desperation he felt a simultaneous surge of energy, a cold determination to not let this opportunity slip through his fingers.
“Your teacher sounds like a smart guy,” he said, smirking with exaggerated arrogance.
She rolled her eyes. “I hate to admit it but I did actually like him. He was hard on us but I feel like he’s the only one I ever really learned anything from.”
“I had teachers like that,” said with an earnestness that surprised even himself. “You end up thinking about them the most.” Try as he might, he couldn’t actually recall any such teacher from his past but he felt that a moment of more wholesome connection would go a long way in steering him back on course.
He caught himself wondering where it was that he wanted to go exactly. This had been a game he had played many times before albeit with more age-appropriate women. Others would have likely observed he was lying to himself (if he had ever bothered to talk to anybody about these things) but he preferred to think of it as keeping his options open, letting the current take him where it may. It was fun to dance on the edge of the volcano, to pick up on subtle shifts in another’s speech, their body language, wondering whether the blood was rushing through their body with similar heat and ardor. He could always do the right thing later.
It wasn’t gratification or validation, it wasn’t power or chasing some pubescent dream of sexual conquest. What he was addicted to was the pure overwhelming power of possibility; it was intoxicating, just as pleasurable as the consummation itself, if not more so. It was the moments of imminence that he chased, when all the doors stood wide open, waiting for him to walk through. A life lived was a life full of doors that time has slammed shut and though he had three lives’ worth of life behind him, this game he played had lost none of its allure; there were always more doors for him to go through and each new fixation brought with it infinite possibilities and novelty.
“Where do you live?” she asked, snapping him out of the comfortable complacency he had found that sat just at the doorstep of self-awareness.
“Excuse me?”
She looked at him with complete seriousness. “You know where I live, you’ve seen me leave the house countless times. Seems only fair that I know where you live too.”
“So you can sit in front of the subway stop and stalk me?”
She slapped his arm. “Aha! So you live by a subway stop.”
“Does that really narrow it down?”
“I don’t think most homes in the city are right by the subway, at least not close enough for anyone to spy on people coming and going.”
“Fair enough,” he said, there was certainly some truth to her words. “What are you doing right now? Are you going anywhere?”
She hadn’t taken her eyes off him since her question had gently lifted him out of his daze. “No.” He looked back at her and he felt slight pressure on his stomach and an uncomfortable looseness in his rectum.
“I could tell you where I live or I could just show you. I’m not doing anything either.”
“Yeah, I’d like that,” she said. “You got any gum in that bag of yours?”
“End of the line.” He got up and made his way to the door as the bus slowly decelerated before coming to an uncomfortably sudden stop. He expected to hear some kind of commotion but realized they had been the only people on the bus all along. The door flew open in front of him and he turned his head around to make sure she was standing there with him, which she was. He pointed toward the station: “I take the train from here.”
“Alright,” she said cheerfully. As they made their way to the stairs that would take them up to the platform, walking side by side, the conversation had died down and there was a brief moment of realization between them — it was certainly there for him but he believed it to be there for her as well — that something had been significantly reconfigured, that some shift had taken place, that they were no longer strangers chatting at the bus stop and allowing themselves the unorthodox but innocent familiarity of a bus-ride conversation. There was an urge to take her hand, to kiss her, to lick her body, pick the dirt from under her nails and the dandruff from her scalp. She was next to him, heading up the stairs, making them look like student and teacher, niece and uncle, daughter and father.
The secret, the truth, vibrated between them, oscillating with such velocity that it appeared in his mind as a piece of translucent red glass. They finally ascended the stairs and he was relieved to find the platform mostly empty. He looked at the digital display: eight minutes — the previous train had just left, more people were likely to show up before the next one. He found himself getting irritated at the hypothetical interruptions he was playing over in his mind but his thoughts cleared when he saw another young girl leaning against the pillar by the tracks.
A muffled voice barely broke through to him: “What are we gonna tell people if they see us together?”
His eyes didn’t leave the other girl. “What’s that?” asked absentmindedly.
“What if we see friends of yours? Your neighbors? Aren’t they gonna think it’s weird you’re taking me to your place?” We, with me… the words had a peculiar sensual edge to them, so much so that he was completely uninterested in the specifics of the situation and the possible problems they could cause.
He opted to play dumb. “Nothing,” he said, “we’ll just say nothing. Who gives a shit?” It took a while for the harshness of his words to register with him but even when it did, he stayed preoccupied with the strange girl leaning against the pillar. Although they were likely around the same age, she was, in many ways, the opposite of his surprise companion: brunette, small, skinny, sickly pale, and unattractively dressed in a flimsy plaid skirt and a quilted jacket that left her bony midriff exposed. The girl’s body appeared to be quaking.
“What are you looking at?” The voice had grown clearer now.
His eyes still trained on the small girl he answered, “Look at that girl over there. Do you see her?”
She craned her neck. “The one in the skirt?”
“What’s wrong with her? It looks like something’s going on.”
“Yes, she looks sick.” Her tone had curdled into disgust very quickly. “Ew!”
“God, I hope she doesn’t fall in front of the train. I should go help her. Look at her, she’s about to fall and fracture her skull.”
“Ew, no just leave her alone.”
“But what if something happens?” He immediately felt foolish for justifying himself to someone who was, for all he knew, still a teenager. What was he doing here? “She’s gonna fall and break something.” He stood up, slowly making his way to the other girl.
“Are you serious?” But the voice didn’t register anymore. He walked up beside the girl, bending down in a manner meant to be non-threatening. The girl yanked her head around, startled.
“I’m sorry,” he said softly, “but are you okay?”
The girl looked at him. “Yes, just go away.”
He persisted. “It’s just that you seem like you could use some water or maybe a bite to eat.”
She was getting frustrated. “Jesus dude, I’m okay. Leave me alone.”
He had made sure to keep his distance but even so he could smell her foul breath, likely the result of a lack of hydration and a lack of hygiene. Her yellow teeth poked out from between her thin lips. He took a step back, paused, and decided to go back to his seat.
“What was wrong with her?”
“I have no idea. She didn’t want my help.” He looked over again. “Something’s gonna happen.”
“You are acting incredibly strange.” He could feel that he was losing her, see that the window of possibility was shrinking with each passing moment, but he didn’t care anymore. Under his watchful eye, the other girl made her way to a nearby bench, staggering, limping, breathing awkwardly. When she finally made it there, after what felt like minutes, she held on to the armrest, visibly exhausted. He noticed the way the girl was teetering and leapt to his feet, prompting an involuntary exclamation from the girl sitting beside him. He ran over just as she was about to lose her balance; he was about two steps away when she feel onto the bench. He managed to catch her body before it dropped onto the concrete, putting his head on the back of her head as he laid her down.
“Are you okay? Can you hear me?” There was no response. He tried again: “Can you hear me?” Behind him, footsteps.
The voice again: “Oh my god, what the hell?”
“Call someone,” he commanded, “call an ambulance.” At that moment, he could hear the train coming around the bend — his heart was racing.
“Just leave her here and let’s go,” the voice said. “Why are you even touching her? Let’s get on the train and let someone else deal with it.”
He looked up at her for what felt like the first time in a long time, taking in her features once more. “We can’t leave her like this. Look at her, she could die.” The train was crawling into the station and he briefly looked around: the platform hadn’t filled up after all.
“I’m not waiting another eight minutes with her lying here,” the voice that belonged to the beautiful young girl said. When she saw that he wouldn’t budge, she turned around. “Whatever.”
There he was, crouched next to this frail girl, cradling her head, begging her to answer him. He looked at her face and it reminded him of a doll with its head pushed in or a fish that had suffocated after getting washed up on a beach. There was resentment as he turned to watch the other girl walk down the stairs and out of the future he had imagined for so long. “Can anyone help us?” he called out but there was no one there to hear him. He put the girl’s head down with great patience and care and pulled his phone out of his pocket; he dialed 911. The ringback tone came on and for the first time in a long time he spoke with complete sincerity. “Please don’t die. Please don’t die.”