Sewanee Review

Charles was getting better—healing I mean, after last year had tortured us both—and it was completely ruining the plan. For the better part of two years, we spent sleepless nights in small single-floor sublets in and around Boston, living among broken ovens and cheap white fridges that shook themselves awake and groaned, always awoken by the sound of traffic outside the window, never staying for longer than a few months. I tried on stupid aliases every now and again to make it seem like this was all a joke. Maybe we did have more options than siphoning funds from whoever fell for our shit. Like any idiots in their late twenties, we flirted with our own exposure: just weeks ago a young delivery man in Jamaica Plain saw me suppress a laugh at the utterance of my own “name”; Richard Balls is one you have to practice saying without cracking up. But I wasn’t looking at this man’s reaction; I was watching Charles stifle a smile. Somewhere during these past months I’d lost the ability to make him laugh, and found myself savoring the feeling, swept back to our first nights together. That bone-cold winter, warmed only by each other’s bodies. [End Page 3]

Now it was almost June, and we were in a new place near the Bay—a green marble kitchen island, among other upgrades—thanks to a man named Daryl who donated several thousand to “unlock” his long-lost sister’s fortune. (“What does that even mean?” Charles had asked me as I read him Daryl’s reply one night. “I don’t know,” I’d said. “But he’s buying it.”) For a while I was getting lucky in my emails with what I called the grandmother sweet-spot: comic sans, size fourteen font, spacing a little off, some purple type in there, asking for just a little help—and then the link. You send that to two hundred John Smiths and wait for someone to bite, some idiot to just give themselves up for chivalry. That’s what you get for having a normal name, I’d think as the first bouncebacks hit. We assumed, of course, that a normal name also meant a normal life, which also meant comfort, stability, the things Charles and I could do without. Like gilled fish that thrive even out of water, we imagined we were unique to a point of freakishness, normal only with each other. I’d forgotten that was what I preferred, and now I was too good at this: six grand on a Tuesday afternoon while I licked the lid of a pudding cup. A résumé of petty thefts and two DUIs, a rescinded college admission: you get something like that early enough, the future just seals up. These hours together were our cheat code to another life, or had been until the past few weeks, when Charles started getting himself together as we packed boxes, ready to ditch the mold and nail-studded floors for good. He was buying collared shirts, taking longer with the encryption, and disappearing at midday while I slept until early evening. I stared at the large ceiling fan, which whirred the rank, low-tide air off the Bay. In the style of anyone who has massively fucked up, I kept telling myself I didn’t want to escape the life I’d assembled. But on the night before Charles went missing from my life, I could sense him in the other room—awake, offline, planning for a life without me. I watched the email responses from [End Page 4] my evening cast come in like they always did: the majority of them Unsubscribe now and Fuck off, the occasional dignified No thank you.

You don’t open these, as a rule. There might be something bad in them.