Chance took me to a café with wood-paneled walls and though I’d never set foot on the concrete floor, the hushed vertigo of memory swirled around me. The sunlight died somewhere between the grease covering the windows and cigarette smoke that replaced oxygen. Time had stolen half the letters on the menu board, but I gathered it didn’t really matter anyway. Chance said coffee and extended two fingers. I resisted the urge to wipe the bench before I sat.

He knitted his finger together, like kneeling on a pew, like his sister did, and rested his wrists on the table’s edge. The top was empty but for a bowl of sugar cubes. An ant crawled over them like a tiny mountaineer. I listened to breath roll in and out of my mouth, to blood crashing inside my skull, hoping if I ignored the taste of rust filling my throat that whatever fucked up thing inevitably about to happen might be avoided. I swallowed.

“Cole, I need your help.”

Fuck.

I lit one of his cigarettes, felt my lungs grow heavy as if I’d swallowed all of the air in the café. His lips rose in a smirk. “I don’t have much money, but I might be able to do a side job.”

He pulled his head away from me. “What?”

“To make some money. So you can borrow it.”

“Christ, I don’t need money.” He adjusted the lapels of his jacket, flicking away a piece of sawdust. “Do I look like I need money from you?”

He held up a finger to be quiet. The waiter dropped two chipped porcelain cups on the table, set a pot of coffee next to them and said something to Chance. I couldn’t understand the exchange, though if it because they mumbled or because they were speaking Russian, I didn’t know. Either way, my hand found its way to my hip for the phantom gun I’d never carried, but felt like I should’ve had, and how I ever thought this was a smart idea was beyond me. Chance barked something at the waiter and he stepped away. The interior of the café tilted, as if it was sliding into the abyss. Maybe it was just in my head.​

“Do I really look like I need money?”

“No more than usual.”

The cigarette made everything shimmer along the edges but holding it between my fingers, staring across the table through slits of eye, dictating the terms to which business would be conducted gave me in equal parts the feeling of power and control and nausea. Cigarettes. Cafés. Chance. Old habits died hard, dragging you with them.

“Why would you say that?”

“Well, you said you needed help, and I’m broke, and Amy’s fully-functioning uterus isn’t the reason we’re childless at the moment, though I’ll be fucked in the ear of you think I’ll let her be a surrogate for you.”

“Cole—”

“And the only other reason you’d bring me to a café that’s obviously a cover is to make a proposition regarding the only other thing about which I’ve explicitly told you numerous times to go fuck yourself.” I sipped my coffee. It tasted like ash. “Is that clear enough?”

“We need someone that we can trust.” His expression was static, as if I was a mannequin discarded in his booth. The waiter wiped the main counter, staring at us from the top of his eyes.

“What the fuck did I just say?”

He moved his palms towards the table top, pushed lower your fucking voice through his teeth.

“Well what the fuck, Chance? You and your sister exchange notes on how to piss me off or something? You’re like the Jedi mind-trick of assholes.”

“We needed someone that we could trust and you were the first person we thought of.”

“How many times have—”

“Calm down—”

“Just give me the courtesy of fucking off and leaving—”

Our voices, threats, weaving together like some obscene heirloom tapestry passed from one generation of cannibals to the next. His fists on the table made coffee slosh out of our cups. Wiping the same spot on the counter, the waiter continued to stare at us.

“You—” eyes becoming a web of scarlet threads, veins like ropes in his neck, straining to keep his voice under control, “—You. Fucking. Owe me, Cole.”

“I owe you?”I think I actually snorted. “I owe you.” I bit back a laugh before it touched my lips. Shaking my head, I lifted the bottom of my shirt, showed him the wormhole the knife left when it exited my stomach. “I think we’re square on that.”

He ran his fingers over his moustache and laid his hat on the table, smiling like a dueler who just heard the other gun click. “No, son. That was for using my name. This whole business? This is for the fallout.” He snapped at the waiter, pointed towards one of the windows. The waiter didn’t avert his eyes. Chance placed his thumbs together, raised them to my eyes.

“Get them out of my face before I break them.” My voice came out as little more than a squeak.

“You ever seen these?”

I sipped my coffee, shook my head.

“You know how many stitches it takes to sew an adult male’s asshole shut?”

I stared directly into his pupils, trying not to blink.

“Too fucking many,” he said. “Again, we need someone we can trust.”

Guttural exclamations mixed with the echo of boots as the waiter stomped to our table, waving his index finger at Chance like he was directing traffic. Chance regarded him with little more than a blink, but the waiter kept yelling. It sounded accusatory. Another man in the far corner, who appeared to only have one hand, watched the scene deteriorate, shaking his head. My hand touched my hip again.

The waiter towered over Chance, who uttered a few phrases between sips of coffee. The waiter leaned down to our level, yelling in Chance’s face, smacking his palm on the table. I could see Chance’s jaw moving, teeth grinding. He and Delilah always did that to calm themselves, but it never really worked and this was going to end poorly.

It happened before I saw it happen. The waiter laid his hand on Chance’s shoulder, finger wagging in his face. In one fluid motion, Chance set down his coffee cup, wrapped his fingers around the pot of hot coffee, and shattered it against the waiter’s face. Glass and blood glittered like crystalline confetti. Hot coffee covered the floor like an ink blot and all I could see was horror. The waiter stumbled back, blood streaming from his forehead. Chance looked down at his hand, pulled out a shard of glass, said, “I shouldn’t have done that.”

He dug in his pocket, dropped two crumpled bills on the table and grabbed my arm. We left in such a rush that he forgot his hat.

One hundred-twenty dollars for two cups of shitty coffee. ​

#

The three of us, we grew up in good houses. Working-class, comfortable. There wasn’t much we wanted, nothing we needed. Their dad worked for the State, something to do with the roads or highways or something. Their mom was a secretary at a law firm. She wore sequined shirts and hair pieces that looked exotic, but were really bought from knockoff vendors in Jamaica Plains. My parents were the same. Equally average jobs, equally anonymous.

We re-enacted Star Wars in their backyard, built fortresses with couch cushions. When we played baseball, Chance was always Carlton Fisk, Delilah was Yaz and I was Brooks Robinson. The Orioles were our rivals but I liked the name. We poked dead animals with sticks, trying to scare each other, and played hockey on the frozen streets of winter.

And with each step of my walk home to my beautiful wife, every time my foot slapped the concrete, every gust of wind that bit at my ears like metal-toothed mice, I tried to understand why I allowed myself to be swept along by the current of Miller, why I deemed it okay to shatter the promise I made to myself when I met Amy, why Chance was now decorated with Russian prison tattoos and fluent in the language.

Fuck me.

Amy smothered me as soon as I entered. She smelled like sweat and baby powder and it turned my knees to smoke.

“Jesus, you asshole,” she said, the bite of hops riding her breath.

I mumbled something into her neck.

“I thought there was an accident or something. Did you forget how to use a telephone?”

“No, sorry, it’s just—” the world collapsing on top of me, everyone I’ve ever known attacking at once, my boss and supplier of our livelihood becoming rapidly annoyed because I keep flitting away at the constant beck and call of two affluent sociopaths that have reattached themselves to my side like tumors, “—this job has been really involved.” I took a swig from her beer, warm like yeast water. “I’m sorry I missed dinner.”

She batted away my apology as if it was a piece of dust and this was part of the reason I fell in love with her. She said she was just glad I was okay, then pinched my nipple and asked me to remember the phone next time.

In the kitchen, she sung softly to herself while stirring the pot of soup, took delicate puffs from the joint that balanced on a bottle of mineral water. I shared her joint and grabbed a beer from the fridge, then collapsed into a chair and ground my palms into my eyes. She set a bowl of noodles and vegetables in front of me. Slivers of scallions and ginger floated on the surface. She told me about her yoga class, about the woman who farted every time she did downward-facing-dog, but was too old to hear or smell it.

“You get any more of those calls?”

She shook her head, sipped my beer. “Still don’t understand why we got them.”

“You used to belong to one of those CD mailorder clubs, right?”

“When I was seventeen.”

I shrugged, slurped soup and offered her some. “Fascists have long memories.”

“Fascists? Really?” She tucked her legs underneath her thighs, sitting Buddha-style on the chair. For some reason I found it incredibly cute.

“You cannot run one of those companies and not be a fascist. It’s a moral impossibility.”

“Fascism is your answer for everything.’

“Fascism, Communism, Taoism. It’s all the same.”

My soup spilled when she smacked me. As I blotted my lap with a napkin, she took my hand and brought it to her lips.

“Are we okay?”

My skin felt amphibian. Some blade of guilt stabbed between my ribs. But I had no reason to feel that. I hadn’t done anything wrong. A quick snap, a synapse in some remote crevice burning out, a tiny twist of smoke and silverfish scattering, hiding in the shadows Amy would never see.

“Of course. Why?”

“I was just making sure. I mean,” she began to stammer, search for words and blood sloshed through my veins, “with houses and babies and all.” She trailed off, gesturing in the air.

“Amy.” I took her hand in mine.

She stared at me as if looking through me, measuring auras or thoughts.

“Then where have you been?’

The tiny crackle of icicles forming, falling, breaking inside my skull. One winter, when I went to Nebraska with Chance’s family, I stood in the middle of a corn field. Snow and sky like ash, punctuated by the occasional silo, like a dying EKG. I’d never been out of Boston and the space was too open, so empty that it crushed me. Chance’s parents found me an hour later, sky and skin the same color.

That field, compressed to the internal dimensions of my skull.

“At the job.” I told myself that if Chance’s parents were right, and there was in fact a God, that he would’ve struck me down at that moment. Not for lying, but deception. For want.

“‘You’ve felt really distant.” She tapped a finger on my temple. “I know that having a, um, schedule for making love,” she laughed at her own embarrassment and I wanted to punch myself in the face, “isn’t excessively romantic, but—”

I spilled my soup when I leaned across the table to hold her. “I’m here, Amy. I’m here.”

“Thank God,” she breathed and pulled me closer, smashing her face against mine.

She pulled down her yoga pants and brought me into her on the kitchen table. Her leg kicked out and knocked off the beer, and as it shattered on the floor, I wasn’t sure if it was sweat or a Russian waiter’s blood dripping down my forehead.

Where are you, Cole? Where are you?