Bar 0, or: The Apartment

“You have bangs now,” I say to her. They float above her forehead with all the density of clouds. It’s the first thing I say to her, the first in seven months. 

Katie smiles. “I cut them myself,” she tells me.

Tonight we are going out. 

We wait outside the rusty brick apartment building for her roommates, two girls named Mary who aren’t sisters but look like they could be. Katie lights a joint and takes a drag.

“I got an internship,” I tell her. “For the summer. It’s at a Forbes one-hundred company.” 

She smiles at me. “That’s really, really great,” she says. “I’m really proud of you.” 

I smile back. She passes me the joint and I hit it ‘til my throat burns. Tonight we are going out, and tonight I will tell her I love her, the right way this time.

Bar 1

On the walk to the first bar, the Irish O’Connor’s that has incorporated its C health rating into its signage, one of the Marys passes me a little round pill. “It’s just Ritalin,” she explains, correctly interpreting the look on my face. “It helps you not get so hungover.”

Katie nods. “I can drink and go to work the next day no problem if I take one.”

I nod at her words—I’ve taken Ritalin to study—but slip the pill into my pocket when no one’s looking. We find a high top and one of the Marys buys a round of tequila shots for the table. She takes a flash photo of our hands holding the tiny glasses together, framing the cheers for all eternity or at least the 24 hours it will linger on her Instagram story. The other Mary asks me to tell her more about myself so I comply, filling the space around us with anecdotes about tailgates and Algorithms 201 and my frat brother Michael who got expelled for brewing whiskey in his dorm room. Greek life fascinates her and she presses me for stories. I tell her about the time they gave me and my fellow rushees tabs of LSD and shunted us into a crawl space, had us lay beneath the floorboards of the chapter house while a party seethed above us. Fiddle music canters through the air as I bring the story to a head, narrate to Katie and the indulgently horrified Marys the moment when one of the pledges panicked, began to sob, to say, over and over, “I’m going to die in here, I’m going to die right here.”

Bar 2

I keep my fingers crossed in my pocket while the bouncer, a sloping mountain of a man, examines my ID for too long. 

“Cosmic twins,” he finally says.

“What?” 

“We have the same birthday.” He hands me the ID back and I return it to my wallet, tucking it behind my real one.

In the second bar, everything is black and shiny and costs twenty-three dollars. The Marys find us a table and one of them tells us that she has to go home after this; she’s been asked to pick up a shift in the morning and she needs the money. Katie and I order drinks for each other and wait for them by the bar.

“How are you liking work?” I ask her. I’m a few drinks in by now and feel as though someone has rubbed me down with sandpaper, smoothed my edges, made me aerodynamic; there is a new flow to my words, actions, an easiness. 

Katie shrugs. “Not too different from back home.” She says it like she’s admitting something. “Retail is retail, I guess.”

I nod. In high school, Katie and I worked together at the Walmart on Route 116. The bartender hands us our drinks; Katie takes a sip of her whiskey sour and frowns.

“Don’t you like it?” I ask her.

“I don’t really like dark liquor,” she says apologetically.

“We can trade, if you want,” I offer—she ordered me a Negroni—but she shakes her head. I know the Marys are waiting for us, but I glance around the bar, say to Katie, “This is the kind of place I always imagine you in now. Cosmopolitan, you know?” She rolls her eyes but she’s smiling. “Do you like it here?” I ask her. “In the city?”

Katie nods. “I do. I think it’s been really good for me to get away,” she says. “Really good to get some space from everyone.” 

“Everyone?” I say, pretending to be offended to hide the fact that I’m slightly offended. “Even me?”

“Especially you,” she says. She laughs. She reaches out, squeezes my hand. Her skin is scaly and cool against mine. “I’m really glad to see you. I know I’ve been pretty MIA, but I’ve been thinking about you a lot.” She smiles. The red lights of the bar shoot through her hair, making it appear luminescent, and again I am reminded of clouds, the kind that suffuse the sunset this time.

“I’m glad to see you too,” I say. 

She releases my hand, takes another sip of her whiskey sour. “Was that story true?” she asks me. “About taking LSD at that party.” I shrug and she rolls her eyes again. “Oh my God, you’re such an asshole.” 

I take a sip of my Negroni which isn’t bad but probably isn’t something I’d order again. “We aren’t allowed to tell people what really happens.”

Katie’s eyes meet mine. “You can’t even tell me?”

I hold her gaze. “Mostly just a lot of drinking,” I admit after a moment, looking down at my glass, at the orange peel that sits in the amber like a trapped mosquito. “And we did a scavenger hunt. It’s just an academic frat, we don’t get too crazy.” I tilt the cup from side to side so the liquid slides from one edge of the glass to the other, careful not to let it spill. 

“Do you remember when we were little,” Katie asks, “like, sixth grade, maybe, and we swore we’d never drink?” I nod, though I don’t. “We drew up a whole contract and everything,” she continues. “Saying we’d never drink, or smoke, or do drugs or anything like that. I think we might’ve even signed it in blood.”

I nod again. I remember now; pricking our index fingers with a lancet stolen from my diabetic mother’s purse, the shock at how much it hurt, by how much blood one digit could produce, by how hard it was to get out of the carpet afterward. “We were so dramatic,” I say. “Everyone drinks.”

“I guess,” says Katie. “But it made sense why we didn’t want to. With your mom and my dad.”

And then I don’t say anything. 

Bar 3

The third bar is called Bar Four, which the remaining Mary says seems like a bad omen. Bar Four offers free jello shots with entry. Katie talks the bartender into giving us two each, even me. 

Bar Four is busier and louder than the two that preceded it. A DJ plays half-hearted house music for the flooded dance floor. All my joints feel greased and I field the urge to go outside and see how fast I can run. We chat about nothing for a while, and then Mary spots her ex-boyfriend and it’s just Katie and me.

“I have to use the bathroom,” Katie says. I can tell she’s yelling, but I can barely hear her.

“I’ll go with you,” I yell back. 

I follow her to the far corner of the bar where a few women stand against the wall waiting for the toilets. Katie spots a red-haired girl wrapped in a short black dress and greets her with a hug. “We work together,” she informs me, and tells me the girl's name, which I don’t remember long enough to forget. They go into the bathroom together and I wait in the hallway. I am taller by a head or so than the people around me and enjoy the sensation that I am standing in a body of water that reaches my chest. Soon we are at the bar again and I buy Negronis for me and Katie and Katie’s friend because it’s the first drink I think of. When I reach into my pocket for my wallet I find a tiny round object. The pill Mary gave me, I realize, and I place it on the far part of my tongue and swallow. 

A man wearing a beanie comes up to us and asks Katie if he can buy her a drink.

“I have one,” she tells him. She points at me. “He bought it.” And I feel proud. 

The red-haired girl says something to Katie and then leaves, subsumed into the everything around us and paradoxically she is made more present by her latency, the mystery of her vanishing and the threat of her return, and I am struck suddenly by the urgency of the night, of my mission, of my short time with Katie. I move my hand to the small of her back and ask her if she wants to go outside. She nods. The bouncer tells Katie she can’t bring her drink outside so she hands it to me to finish. We stumble onto the sidewalk and Katie bums a cigarette from a girl wearing a spiked choker. She lights the cigarette, takes a drag, and passes it to me. I mimic her but I am drunk and used to smoking weed, not tobacco, and I hold the smoke for too long and then my throat is searing with cold heat and I fold over on myself like a lawn chair as coughs rack my body. Katie places a hand on my shoulder, says, “Jesus, are you okay?”

I nod, still coughing, the scorching sensation curling into my ears. I am aware of Katie’s hand on my body, the pressure of her, the potential of further touch. My coughs cease as Katie’s hand curls around the fabric of my shirt, pulling the back taut against my skin, and I am drawn toward her as if by gravity.

Katie says my name. Her gaze is diffuse and I feel that she is taking in all of me at once. “Do you ever think about the stuff we did as kids?”

“Stuff?”

“You know what I mean.” 

I do. “Of course,” I say. “Like, high school?”

“Before that,” she says. “Really young, I mean.”

“I guess. I don’t think about it very much.”

Katie closes her eyes, frowns slightly, and releases my shirt, and I am in freefall. I stumble, set off-balance by her absence, but Katie doesn’t seem to notice. 

“I think about it a lot,” she says. She is swaying slightly, like a tall tree in wind, but I do not reach to steady her. “I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately. I can see it from the outside now. I think I’ve been feeling bad about it for a long time.” She shakes her head. “But it wasn’t anyone's fault. It wasn’t either of our faults.” She moves to wipe her nose but misses. One of her eyeliner wings has rubbed off, giving her face a lopsided appearance; one of her eyes is round and open, the other sharp. “We were just kids. We didn’t know any better.”

“It’s okay,” I say, aware that Katie is in need of comfort though not quite why. She opens her eyes and looks up at me and I realize that I have nothing to give her.

Bar 4

The fourth bar is more of a club than anything else but I guess that doesn’t really matter. The bouncer lets us in for free because Katie is a girl which strikes me as a marvelous piece of luck. In the bathroom by the sink I fall into my reflection, but I am there to catch myself. A remarkably profound notion, I think, my fingertips balanced on their images, and I am sure no one else could have produced such a thought, and for a moment I am astounded by the good fortune I have stumbled into by being born myself. 

I make my way to the dance floor where a pretty blonde girl in a shiny dress grinds on me. I place my hands on her waist and revel in the wanton anonymity of the moment until I remember that Katie is here somewhere and I leave. We Ubered here from Bar Four and in the car she was strange and silent. My thoughts were interesting and demanded my attention, so I didn’t mind much, but I think about it now. There are people all around me and I am not the tallest one here anymore and I feel that I am drowning and find it an oddly peaceable notion. I buy two tequila shots and tilt them into my mouth as one.

Katie is outside, talking to a man with a shaved head who I don’t recognize. I sling an arm around her shoulder. 

“Where have you been?” she asks me. 

“Hello,” I say to the man in a way that isn’t friendly at all.

“Hey,” he says. “See you around,” he says to Katie, and then he walks away. Katie ducks out from under my arm.

“I can’t find Mary,” she says. “She isn’t answering my texts.”

I don’t care. “It’s funny how we never officially dated,” I say. 

“What?” 

“Like, in high school.” 

Katie is occupied by her phone and doesn’t answer me. I look around, feeling somewhat removed from myself, enjoying the lucid stupidity brought upon me by the various substances dancing through my bloodstream. Across the street from us, a loose line lolls from the mouth of a late-night pizzeria. A girl in a sparkly dress crouches in a dark doorway; I realize she is urinating and look away. A bouncer shepherds a small crowd of obviously intoxicated young adults out from the club we just left. I am confused for a moment but then come to an illuminating conclusion. 

“The club is closing,” I say aloud. I close my eyes and stand as tall as I can in the cool, damp early morning air. I think of Katie and myself, not yet twelve, promising not to become the people we would. I think of us naked together that same year, securing ourselves to each other the best way we knew how. I think of Katie, seventeen, telling me that she wouldn’t be coming with me to state college, that she would be moving to the city instead. I think of the boy under the floorboards who never existed. I stand at the point where the eternal and temporal touch and bathe in the dazzling grief that rises to meet me.

The Apartment Again

I am sitting at a table while Katie moves around me. “It doesn’t have to be sad,” I tell her. By now I only know what I am going to say after I have said it. “We can do it right this time.” Katie says that she needs to use the bathroom and I tell her okay. There is a glass full of water on the table in front of me and I take slow, careful sips from it, delighting in the cool and clean of it against my tongue. I discover that when I close my eyes I untether myself from my surroundings. Some far-off recess of my mind offers me the thought that perhaps my brain has come loose from its stem and is swirling in the fluid of my skull. That would explain the spinning, anyway.  

“Mary texted me,” says Katie, emerging from the bathroom. I open my eyes and everything crashes back into place. She’s taken off her makeup and I recognize her for the first time all night. “She said she’s fine, she’s at her ex-boyfriend’s. She’s gonna stay there tonight.”

“That’s good,” I say.

Katie nods. “You can sleep in her bed, if you don’t want the couch.”

“I want to stay in your bed,” I say. “If that’s okay.”

Katie stares at me for a second. I think at first that she’s going to refuse, but then she says sure, why not. 

In her bedroom, we undress facing away from each other. Katie takes the side of the bed closest to the wall, the way she always used to, and instructs me to turn off the light. I lay as close to the edge of the mattress as I can, scared of encroaching on her space, hungry to do so. 

“It’s crazy how we used to do this every night,” I say. I close my eyes and the darkness presses up against me, taking up all the space I’m not, and it’s hard to breathe. I know it would choke me if it could.

“It is,” says Katie. We are silent for a moment, alone together, together alone.

“Can I hold you?” I ask her.

And she says yes. So I gather her in my arms, pull her tight against me, tangle us together and pray we will not find our way apart again. She turns her body so she is facing me, so our foreheads touch for a moment, and I feel her move closer and I think she is going to kiss me but instead she rests her head on the point where my arm becomes my shoulder.

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Katie says. “Joan Didion said that.”

“That mean lady with the talk show and all the plastic surgery?” I ask.

“No, that’s Joan Rivers. Listen. That quote, here’s what I think it means. The way we live—not just us, everyone—it doesn’t really make sense. Things just happen and a lot of the time they’re very bad for no reason. So we make up narratives. We make ourselves heroes and we try to give those things meaning through that. Like, we always thought we were a Romeo and Juliet kind of thing, you know? Well, maybe not them exactly, but, you know, two kids overcoming their circumstances through each other. Love as rebellion.” She pauses. “But now I’ve been wondering.” Her hand travels down my arm, finds my own, holds it. “Were we victims of circumstance or did we manage to make something despite them?”

“I don’t know why you want to talk about this,” I say. “I don’t like talking about this. We were just kids being stupid. Obviously it’s kind of fucked up looking back, but it isn’t like you got pregnant or traumatized or anything. It doesn’t matter.”

“Sorry,” says Katie. “I know.” 

“I don’t think you should think about it any more,” I say. I tilt my head forward until the tip of my chin touches her skull. “You’re just going to make yourself feel bad.”

“Yeah,” says Katie again. She’s quiet for a moment. 

And then Katie says words I will not remember in the morning:

“It’s crazy to think back. I mean, for a really long time, all we had was each other. I feel like I had you when I didn’t have myself. I mean, like, I thought of me, and I thought of us. It felt like I wasn’t even my own person, sometimes, like not a whole person, you know? Like us two together was something, a thing that was whole, and I was just a half of that, maybe less than half. And it was so comfortable. It was so easy and I was so comfortable like that. And part of me wonders what would have happened if we just stayed that way. Honestly, I think I’m always going to wonder. I don’t think it would have been bad. Sometimes I think it would have been really, really good. I’m always going to wonder.” The universe has shrunk to the size of us. 

“But there’s a lot of stuff we never talked about. It was weird. It was like, this thing we had, this thing that was so solid but so delicate too. If we kept going the way we had I don’t think we ever would have broke. But we were so easy to break in the end.” Her words disintegrate into the air like smoke upon their speaking, leaving no trace of themselves in the dark, quiet room. I shift, bring her closer to me. 

“I don’t think we’re broken,” I say. 

Katie sighs. “You know I didn’t mean it like that,” she says, wrapping her arms around me. 

I close my eyes, surrender to the darkness, to the spinning, to her. I orbit her, I think. She is my sun, my center, the marrow that lines my bones, and even through the fog of alcohol and drugs and bone tiredness there is a part of me that knows that this is the last time I will share a bed with her, the last time I will hold her in my arms, the last time I will be allowed to occupy so much of her skin, and for the first time in my life I allow myself to consider a life in which Katie is present only in my memories of her and I know it is a life I can survive. I think of myself, many years in the future, dressed in a suit and tie, sitting at a sleek desk at which I do very important business, counting down the hours until I can go home to a woman I don’t yet know; I think of Katie, older but still beautiful, standing barefoot in a clean, bright room in a house I will never visit. I open my mouth to tell her I love her but instead I say “I think I’m going to throw up,” and then I fall asleep.