It’s an overcast morning, and a dull filtered sun shines into the studio apartment. There are baked brick walls and soft lamps perched around the furniture. A twin-sized bed is pushed to one side, and a bathroom door is closed on the other. There is a large Afghan rug sprawled in the middle of the room, a record player looming on a crate behind it. The rug stands out as being visibly nicer, more expensive than the items that surround it. It might be an engagement present from a well-off and disconnected relative, it might be a vestige left by wealthier former tenants.
Jack Mendoza is in the bathroom, alone for the moment and hidden from the rest of the apartment.
It’s September, and Jack is crying for the first time in a long time. He’s steaming the mirror, sucking the moisture back in each time he trembles himself into an inhale. Plucked guitar coos gently from the dust-caked speakers at the bottom of his phone. Moist, it’s turned face down and buzzing beneath the music on the bathroom counter over which he’s been leaning.
His image, the sight he sees staring so close back from the other side of the mirror, it warps in and out with the steam of his breath. He’s rippling, his chest quakes with the sputter of the cry that he’s trying to suppress. The phone stops its buzzing, and with that the music loses an aspect of its percussion. No longer is there a shake to underscore the sound of the singer, the shake in Jack’s cry is left alone. The woman’s still singing, though Jack is alone in his crying.
Exhale, he clouds. The silver-moist post-shower bathroom air comes in a cloud and clings to the mirror. It sweats, and hard skin, hard boundaries soften now that the room is saturated. It’s a water-logged world until Jack Mendoza inhales.
There’s a knock, and he turns his phone to pause the music. There’s another knock: it’s meek, a single knock that regrets itself as soon as it’s made its intended noise. It draws back, seconds pass, and it comes again even meeker than before.
For all his shaking, Jack Mendoza is flat when he speaks. “Just a second,” He clears his throat, exhales and wipes the mirror of his exhale.
“I’m not ready,” The voice isn’t meek, not like the knock was. It’s quiet, subdued and flat like Jack’s own. She speaks and it’s slow, she knocks again and it sounds like the weight of her weakened body collapsing in on the other side of the door. “I’m not leaving, I mean—” She waits, uncrying, “I want you to tell me this is a bad idea, I want you to open the door.”
He turns, and her nose is down when he opens the door. It’s down and tilted off to the side like she’s gesturing to something. There’s a toilet brush, but she’s not gesturing because her eyes have gone blank to the room. She starts on a sound when she brings her eyes up, it’s a back-throated ‘Chu’ that she abandons when Jack meets her gaze. He curls his lips in on themselves, places the skin as a stop to the bite of his teeth.
There is no explosion, and they’re silent for the moment that they stare.
There is no explosion, just rough breathing caught and chopped by the phlegm in each of their throats. It’s an admission, to Jack and Katie both, that not only have they been crying, but that they are unable to show that they have been.
Jack tries to smile, “You wanted to see me?”
“It’s magnetic, isn’t it?” Katie Short backs away from the doorframe, allowing room for Jack to join her in the wider room of the apartment. Her hands are holding her elbows, propped in a fold wrapped tight to the skin of her back. “I mean, it wasn’t my brain, was it? That brought me here?”
Jack enters, passes Katie and the table where they’d spoken the night before. She lingers, dropping his path for the view of the table while he continues to the couch on the other side of the studio. He doesn’t sit, just lingers and folds his arms so they look just like Katie’s. “Couldn’t be the brain,” He exhales, whistling hard in a hiss out his nose. Nothing fogs, and silently he curses his own long-admonished visibility.
“I’d like it if you spoke to me.”
Jack is so focused on his breathing, and maintaining the rhythm of his heart, that it seems for a moment that he’s forgotten the presence of his partner. Her words live for a moment in the air, and forever inside of the mortar. In the in-between, it’s as if her sound is laying in wait. It’s gone dormant, fossilized forever within the walls of the apartment. “I’d like it if you spoke to me.”
Jack and Katie mirror each other again when their fingers rise fidgeting to their lips. They toy, they stretch their lips like they’re miming more talk. A slicing rain sparks up outside, and inside they’re playing with the action figure of their respective selves. Everything is mimicry, rehearsed like it’s one of Jack’s plays. Everything in the silence is fraudulent, and reality exists only in the mortar until Jack alone finds a way to turn away.
His hands come more committedly to his lips then, and he whispers something before clearing his throat. “I muh,” He clears the air in his lungs, clears his sigh into audibility, “I’d like to be able to write all this down.” Another cough, another whimpering, lung-clearing sigh, “I feel like I’m better understood given time, and in writing.”
He turns, stops his retreat now that he doesn’t have to speak. Katie waits, she mills like time and silence might do more than a retort ever could. When she starts, she starts slow and low and careful. “I hope you understand,” She says, “That pain is not written. Stay,” He’s drifting slowly away, “It isn’t encapsulated, not like you’d like it to be. Stay,” He gets to the door. Hands shaking, he touches the knob, “No matter how hard you try, it will always come back to the body in which it was born, to the lips that lost their chance.”
White-knuckled, Jack turns the knob. “See,” His shoulders fall, “I can’t do that, I need to think, I need to write this down.” His head then falls too, and he smiles for no one to see, “Their chance.”
“To articulate the things that need to be articulated. You love me, Jack, and there isn’t a letter or a fucking text message that’ll send you away scot-free.”
Jack opens the door and lingers for a moment, then he turns, leaves, and Katie is left alone inside. Jack turns down the street and walks, and Katie goes from window to window, tracing his exit to the edge of their apartment. She crouches, the window on the end is lower than the rest, then she comes up against the wall and collapses, sliding against it, into the floor.
There she sits, rolled around so her back is against the wall. Unable, or unwilling, to get up, she stares like a mouse out and up at the emptied apartment. There are only ghosts of the movement that had been a constant, only whispers in the mortar. The sounds have been stifled by the brick, fossilized as fragments of screams both happy and sad.
Listening, Katie shakes. First like a shiver, then dripping in sweat. Her stare, inspecting the ghosts, goes blank when she reaches for her phone. She pulls it from her pocket and starts to play music with the volume turned as high as her weathered speakers would go. Someone scream-sings, and it’s just loud enough to drown the sound from the walls.
She smiles, sets the phone down, and stands. She makes her way to the center of the apartment.
There’s a record player, propped on top of a side-turned crate that she kneels next to. The sound of the phone-song has faded in its place on the other end of the room. It’s faint, and the scream-singing rises until the canned singer’s canned voice comes to the top of his lungs.
Kneeling, Katie flips patiently through her and Jack’s shared record collection. She handles his favorites with care, displacing Art Tatum and Bill Evans on her way to “Southeastern” by Jason Isbell. She almost smiles again at the sight of the record: it’s light blue and speckled with the flakes of a darker solid, it’s translucent, and the edges are cold to her touch. She spins it, brings it over the needle, places the vinyl, and winds the player up to the fullest extent of its volume.
She does the same with the television, the vacuum and the garbage disposal. She turns them all on and manipulates each piece of machinery until it reaches the apex of its sound.
The garbage disposal comes last, and only then is she able to breathe. Bled blank by the input-assault of the sound in the room, she walks to the center of everything and lays gingerly down on her back. Washed within the storm of the sounds, she finds that, for the first time in days, she is able to sleep. It’s light in the room, breakfast to anybody passing. The sun is about to crest outside, and inside she dreams she’s been drinking.
It’s the first she’s had in over a year. They’re at a party together and he’s smiling when he meets her eye across the room. He checks in, always has. He’s tall and he sees over the tops of the heads in the room. It’s slight, it almost occurs against his will. She looks and it occurs nonetheless.
There’s a sweet odor inside of the room, it’s like sweat and the sun and she doesn’t mind. They’re rootsy, folksy; there’s wine in the kitchen and outside they toy, half with guitars and half with fiddles. It’s the kind of a scene she’d be happy to despise, but she doesn’t. She holds herself to a single glass of wine, and that’s how she can tell she is dreaming.
He is gentle, younger now than he’s ever seemed to her. Even across the room, blockaded by the crowd, he is close. She sips and it stings, she feels the wine cling like glue to the back of her throat, and she smiles until eventually he is the one who looks away.
It takes a moment to notice, but when she does it is impossible to miss. It’s him, and he’s looming taller even than he was when he was checking in on her. Something has cast his attention to the side, so she traces his gaze and finds it has landed, almost lovingly, onto the eyes of another.
She’s dancing, swaying, pretending to be distracted and catching his interested eye whenever he comes up for air. She’s sexy, she looks like the dreamer, dancing and smiling and touching her tongue to her teeth. Her hair’s cut short like his, like that of the dreamer. He smiles and she gets to thinking that he likes it, seeing a bit of himself reflected back in each new set of eyes.
There are more, and one by one he finds them all. They’re dancing, each and every one of them, and each appears to the dreamer as an increasingly obscured manifestation of herself. Younger and dumber or older and wiser, they’re better or worse at dancing and lighter or dark in their smiles. They all stare back, and not a single one is exactly as the dreamer is now.
They are versions, each like a passing glance someone’s had at her life. Snapshots taken and animated by the mind of another, not a single one is her. They are not of the world, they dance and they don’t change.
She remembers, she pictures the good in detail, and that’s how she knows it’s a dream. There is no aversion to the pain that comes along in a dream-state, all that strife is saved for the wave that’ll come in the morning. When she wakes up and he is gone, the floor is cold and there’s no one to share in the sheets she’s stripped from the bed.
Night has fallen outside, and moonlight casts a royal blue in through the few windows in the apartment. There is one in the bathroom, but that door is mostly closed and the light only comes in as a crack. The other two stand like eyes to either side of the mouth-shaped rug. Katie sits up, and the sheets ripple reflecting the blue light back to the seeing walls of the studio. She waits like that for a moment, breathing quietly and concentrating on the steady rhythm of her chest.
She gets up, and her breath picks up with the movement of her body off of the ground. Sheets cast still-rippling onto the ground, and she makes her way to one window, the next, and eventually into the bathroom for the third. Something isn’t seen, and when she walks back onto the rug she does so with her head hanging low.
She curls back up then, ignoring the sheets. She is naked, blue like the rest of the room, and she folds so sharp angles form in all of her joints. Elbows wrap her knees, hug them close to her chest. She shows no emotion, but turns to share a puzzled, quiet stare with the door. The door doesn’t move, doesn’t open. It’s unchanging and slower to age than Katie can be. It’s young, considering the lifespan of a door, and it mocks like the girls in her dream.