Bobby Tallis possessed the drainpipe physique, knee-length mackintosh, and winsomely dissolute demeanor of a poet, or so he believed, as he pursued a lavishly wayward course across the mangy municipal parks, median strips, and depressed residential quadrangles of his quarter of the city on another blustery October afternoon. One hand broodingly ensconced within a pocket, Bobby smoked as he walked and made rapid, furtive motions with his lips, as if having an intense, collusive conversation with himself, which is exactly what he was doing: Bobby was a poet.
He lived in a dilapidated apartment block on the south-side inner city, a block so populated with retirees and pensioners that visitors—of which Bobby had absolutely none—often mistook it for a state retirement home. Bobby was certain he was the only resident under the age of sixty. The block’s corridors—the sour-cream walls lit by low-wattage sconces downy with dust, the furred, blue, perpetually damp carpeting in which shoe-print impressions dolefully lingered—evoked for Bobby a budget version of the afterlife. It was, at least, a peaceful place, no noise but the late-night dysphagic groans of the elevator’s recurringly jammed doors.
Bobby walked six miles every day. He did so because a lengthy walk helped oxygenate the creative capacities as well as preëmptively dispel the oppressive sense of cabin fever that would consume him if he did not regularly remove himself from the tiny tomb of his one-bedroom apartment. Also, there was a shopping-center parking lot three miles from his apartment block where he bought weed from a schoolgirl on a near-daily basis.
The city was bound on this side by a canal, and Bobby’s peregrinations tended to bring him, as now, into intermittent contact with this body of water. He noted the tarry density of its bilious murk, the tidemark of phosphorescent scum bearding the centuries-old brickwork as the canal subsided toward the stark quays and the notional sea beyond. Bobby traversed the back lane of a housing estate and detoured through a brushy interval that served as one of the numerous pickup sites honeycombing this side of the city—with a grin he registered the dangling lobe of a used condom snagged on the branch of a bush like a dismal festive decoration. He stopped at a McDonald’s drive-through, inhaled three one-euro hamburgers and a fries and a Coke, and took a spumous dump in a toilet cubicle bathed in the purple-blue glow of UV lighting installed to prevent junkies from finding the veins in their arms.
In the bathroom mirror Bobby studied himself.
With his cheeks flocked with old acne scars, the sebum gleam to his macrocephalic forehead, his long, exquisitely dented aquiline nose (his favorite feature), inexpiably seedy smile, and hair an untamable squall of dark curls, Bobby, at twenty-nine, resembled a not unhandsome but grotesquely ancient teen-ager, a physical template he happened to consider the Platonic ideal for a poet. Adolescence was the stage of human development at which nostalgia (that is, the awareness of mortality) first becomes fatally possible, and was the reft, the fracture, out of which poetry grows. The greatest poets, so Bobby believed, lived and died without losing the furious unreason, self-consuming nerviness, and malign naïveté of teen-agerhood.
He washed his hands with pink chemical soap and resumed his walk.
He wanted to be a poet but suffered from a day job, or at least a source of regular income, that was at this stage a discipline almost as interesting: he was a popular house artist on the online-community site AllFreeekArt, confecting pornographic cartoons according to the punctilious specifications of a zealously loyal and steadily expanding client base. He drew Disney princesses, anthropomorphized ponies, superheroes, video-game protagonists, and cartoon versions of celebrities in endless combinations of graphic congress. His clients craved every iteration of the conventionally erotically depictable, but the medium of animation also permitted the realization of dimensions, stylizations, and acts not available to reality, and Bobby enjoyed the challenge of actualizing the more outlandish of the carnal vistas sweated up by his customers. Toward those most recherché of deviants, Bobby felt something close to poignancy. As he absorbed their anguishedly detailed requests, he realized that the purest perverts longed for a species of the poetic, for the incarnation of the impossible.
And perverts were willing to pay the most. By this point, from the cartoon porn, Bobby was making something perilously close to a living for a man of his rudimentary predilections. The money came into his bank account, and then came in again, like a tide. He withdrew only the minimum necessary. A healthy surplus was building and it unnerved him. He did not want to believe in it yet felt a swell of relief each time he thought of it. Enough money meant you did not have to think about money.
Then there were the poems. Bobby had been writing and rewriting and refining and re-refining the manuscript of his début collection for more than eight years now. The collection was currently entitled “Anhedonia, Here I Come.” He regularly read from this endless work in progress at open-mike nights, had even had a few of the poems published in double-digit-circulation pamphlets and once reputable, now posthumous journals. The poems, he suspected, were not good enough. They exhibited decent technical effects but were in some obscure way insubstantial or evasive. He agonized over the accuracy of his inner ear, was not in fact certain he even possessed one. In terms of theme, he could not get beyond what he was convinced was a fundamentally spurious obsession with suicidal ideation, but simultaneously he felt that every other poetic topic or concern was an obfuscation, an eschewal, or a bald retreat from this theme.
He’d been smitten with the concept of suicidal ideation since he was a teen-ager, but the problem, he figured, was that he had never truly wished to kill himself. Bobby liked being alive. Being alive was, if not the best thing, then at least an O.K. thing, an endlessly O.K. thing. And his life was what many would consider a good life, or at least a serviceable version of what was probably the best available in human history: he was white, male, not rich but not, now, that poor, living in a First World Western city in the early twenty-first century. In addition, Bobby was cursed, it seemed, with an uncapsizable psycho-chemical equilibrium, and no matter how much squalor and degradation he encountered, no matter how many terrible people he initiated relationships with, and no matter how many drugs he crammed into his system, he could not jar himself into a genuine spiral. Not being able to feel crushingly terrible made him feel terrible, but even this second order of terribleness had, to his inquisitive mind, a compelling textural quality that made him wish only to experience more of it: his mind found any sensation or state induced by it fascinating, which was an indirect way of admitting that his mind found itself fascinating, which was to say that he, Bobby Tallis, found every facet of his own disgustingly mundane self and life fascinating. Bobby’s psychic sturdiness was, he feared, a manifestation of a submerged but profound and pullulating narcissism.
Still, duty bound as a poet, Bobby diligently wondered about mortality and the volitional ending of a life: specifically your own. He figured that you did not want to kill yourself because you felt bad, because if you felt bad you perforce retained access to a spectrum of emotional feeling on which was located the possibility of one day again, however provisionally, feeling good. You wanted to kill yourself, Bobby suspected, only when the access to any feeling at all, whether good or bad, was completely eroded, when you found yourself, as many poor souls did, mired upon an undifferentiatedly flat and horizonless plane of Unfeeling, bereft of access to any avenue of actual or potential emotional excitation. It was not Feeling that killed but the final and irremediable withdrawal of it. Bobby had read the literature. This state, he knew, was called anhedonia.
Moving through the molting trees, Bobby saw the beige-colored brutalist slab of the shopping center climb into the skyline. His dealer he knew only by her first name, Becky. She was a convent schoolgirl and camogie player. She often brought her stick and gear bag with her and sold little ten spots of reliably mediocre weed in a corner of the parking lot most afternoons. A small coven of teammates tended to tag along, hanging back and muttering supercilious commentary in the direction of the customers—or Bobby, anyway.
He pounded across the parking lot and instantly discerned Becky in her green uniform, another person with her. Empty plastic bags stirred in the breeze. They lifted and settled, flinched like dying nerves as Bobby tramped on them: the sky itself was the color of a shopping bag. A rat, a sliver of dark muscle, darted across the concrete and vanished into the crumbling base of a low stone wall.
The other person was a man with a baby strapped like a bomb to his chest in an impressive-looking harness. Becky’s camán-wielding cohort lounged on a nearby wall, observing with studied wrath. Bobby held up between a couple of cars. He watched the transaction. Becky giggled, discreetly palmed the man a baggie as she emphatically patted the baby on the head. The harnessed baby’s loose limbs waggled and its head bobbled disinterestedly around. Bobby thought of a trussed crab unaware that it is about to be boiled alive. He picked his nose, unseated a gratifyingly intact clump of dried matter, palpated it between his fingers, and flicked it away. The man—youngish, with shaved blond hair—walked across the parking lot and placed first the child and then himself into a gleaming hypertrophied Land Rover such as a professional wrestler or a Central American dictator might drive. Bobby now approached.
“All right, Becky.”
Becky grimaced and flexed the wings of her nose. “The usual, Bob?”
“Becky, can I ask—”
“No.”
“Can I ask what your actual name is? I don’t buy Becky, you see.”
“Oh, do one, Bob. Do you want something or what?”
“You seem savvy enough to operate under a nom de guerre, as it were.”
“ ‘Nom-the-fucking-gurr,’ he says.”
“Do you know what that is?”
She sighed.
“Becky’s the name you’re getting, Bob. Stop being predatory.”
“Predatory?”
“You’re initiating predatory behavior. Don’t think I won’t pepper-spray your haggard ass.”
“I’m not—”
She turned to her crew on the wall.
“Guess what, lads!” she shouted. “This fucking sick fuck wants to desecrate my puss!”
“Aaaaay.” The others cheered derisively.
“O.K., O.K., Jesus, Becky. Can I just get my stuff.”
“The usual?”
“The usual.”
“Big spender,” she said as she palmed him the ten spot. “This is it, I think, Bob. This is the last time I’m serving you.”
“Listen, if it’s about asking your real name, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”
She jerked her shoulder, indicated the lumpy appurtenance of her camogie bag. Her helmet, with its white dome and ribbed face guard, rocked against her hip. It looked like the skull of a vanquished opponent she had taken as a war trophy. “Imelda’s, that’s the school, we’ve got to the county quarters for the first time in twelve years or some bullshit. We’re doubling down on training sessions for the foreseeable future. And anyway. I been doing this”—she indicated the parking lot—“like, two years now. It has a built-in life span, Bob. Might be time to get out of the game.”
“Won’t . . . won’t you miss the money?” Bobby asked.
“I don’t do it for the money, Bob. My scumbag parents are rich as fuck. I do it because it’s interesting. But now it’s time to, I dunno, grow up or whatever.”
Now Bobby grimaced. “Don’t do that, Becky.”
She looked at him again. She had a broad frame and dimpled knees, a clearwater complexion, and streaked, tawny-brown hair. Bobby considered her—considered her in a rigorously paternalistic way—very beautiful. For the first time he could recall, something in her expression softened as she looked at him.
“There’s Mike Logan? You know him? Got a tattoo of a stripper with, like, giant titties on his arm?”
“Now, he sounds like a character,” Bobby said.
“That he is,” Becky replied. “He hangs out in the Ladbrokes on Hyde Street, Bob. He can sort you out from now on. I’m happy to vouch as to the quality of his merchandise. And I can vouch on your behalf to him.”
“Don’t take this the wrong way, Becky, but it’s you I’ll miss.”
“You are all the same,” she said with an unexpected weariness. “Goodbye, Bob. If you see me again, cross the fucking street, right.”
“Goodbye, Becky,” he said.
She turned and went to her friends. They unsaddled themselves from the wall and the group headed toward the main street. Feeling woozily, torrentially fifteen himself, Bobby stood there with the ten spot crushed in his hot grip and a corona of flush diffusing across his pocked cheeks as he waited to see if the girl he’d known as Becky would at least look back.
The Land Rover nearly struck him as he wafted toward the shopping-center exit. He stood in place in order to let the monstrosity eke by, but instead it eased to a halt and the passenger window slid down. As Bobby looked in, he caught the man hastily sucking in his gut before leaning across the latte-colored leather of the passenger seat.
“I thought I recognized you.”
“Huh?” Bobby said.
“I’m not talking about from back there,” the man said tersely. “I was actually at the reading night in, uh, the Andromeda bar, like a month ago. I saw you read. I liked it.” When Bobby did not respond the guy lowered his eyes and said, with the grave emphasis of a bad actor, “I mean—you wouldn’t have known I was there. Not that it matters if you did.”
Then he looked up and smiled. Bobby stared at his teeth, which were neatly aligned and all the same, toothpaste-ad hue. He appeared to be nothing more than a nondescriptly handsome wodge of heteronormative generica, tidily styleless in a sweater and chinos, but his dopily enthused expression was so innocuous it was unnerving. And Bobby felt, unmistakably, an emanation, the old encoded carnal pang. Was Johnny-fucking-Ikea here actually trying to pick him up? Bobby uptilted his nose to signify skepticism, and also because he believed this angle resolved the geometrics of his face into their most attractive configuration.
“A lot of people come to those things. Actually, that’s not true. Barely anyone comes. But yeah, if you say you were there. Well. Good for you.”
“It’s an interesting scene,” the guy said.
“It’s just a bunch of attention-starved nerds who think they can write, getting up there and shiteing on. Anyone can do it.”
“But it’s impressive.”
“Anyone,” Bobby repeated. The baby in her baby seat in the rear of the Land Rover made a noise. “That your baby?”
The man shifted in his seat. “Oh, uh. Oh no.”
“That’s a disconcerting answer.”
The man’s grin broke. He reached into the back and grasped the baby’s foot. “I look after the kid. It’s my job, sort of. I guess I’m sort of the nanny.”
“A nanny. Manny. Nanny.”
“This is my half sister, actually, Saoirse.”
“Saoirse get high with you or what, then?”
“Well—” The man blushed. “No, but she’s a good accomplice, ha-ha.” He actually said “ha-ha.” “Keeps quiet about me dropping on over here on these little runs.”
“Good one,” Bobby said. Another moment passed. A palsied silence settled between the two men. If one of them did not offer something in the next few seconds, the conversation, such as it was, would die. Bobby stymied an inner disgust, sighed, and said his four least favorite words in the world.
“So, do you write?”
Bobby saw it straight away: the reflexive flinch and bristle.
“Uh, I mean, I’m trying,” the man admitted. “I mean, I’m not any good.”
“You’d fit right in then,” Bobby said. “At the Andromeda.”
“No, man, you’re on another level to what I’m doing.”
Bobby shrugged. “There’s always more levels.” He removed his hand from his pocket, the baggie dangling between his fingers. “Now, if you’ll excuse me. I need to go get lightly spaced.”
The guy lunged at the passenger door, pushed it open. “Look, I detained you enough to offer you a lift at least, if you want.”
The guy’s head came swimming up out of Bobby’s lap after a long minute of sudsy, ungainly fellatio. He blinked like a man who has just been jarred from a deep dream, eyes bloodshot and tear-filmed. He put his forearm up to his humid mouth, seemed to sink his teeth into his flesh, and made an anguished noise.
“It’s O.K.,” Bobby said.
“I’m just too worried about Saoirse.”
“Yeah . . . ” Bobby turned his head and saw a flesh-toned distortion of his own face in the partition of tinted glass segregating the back of the vehicle’s interior from the front. The guy had deployed it reluctantly, but Bobby insisted he would not do anything with a baby watching. Now the guy brought the partition back down. A nursery-pop jingle was burbling gently from the rear speakers. The baby had taken hold of one of her legs and was trying to guide her fat foot into her mouth, an activity she now suspended in order to smile very prettily at her half sibling’s blotchy face.
“It was kind of freaking me out, too,” Bobby admitted.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry. This is all very weird for me,” the guy said. “This wasn’t premeditated at all.”
“You’re all right,” Bobby said, suddenly wary. The key now was to get out before the guy started unloading about his originary trauma or whatever.
“He’ll throw me out on the street again if he finds out I did something like this—in his car—with Saoirse right fucking there! Jesus! Jesus!”
Bobby glanced at his phone as he arranged his pants. Two texts and two missed calls.
“Listen, I got to go.”
“My fucking father, man,” the guy said. “I’m sorry to drag you into this.”
“You’re not dragging me into anything,” Bobby assured him. They were parked in an alley. Bobby quickly tried the passenger door handle. The vehicle was centrally locked. “I do have to go, though.”
The guy sighed again. “Fuckit.” He reached across Bobby and popped the glove compartment. He took out a small wallet and removed from that a baggie of powder. Nipped it open, licked and dipped a finger, ran the finger round his gums. Then he eyed Bobby again. “Want a bump?” he said in a choked tone.
“I’m absolutely good. Let me out. Please.”
The guy looked confused, even injured, for a moment. Then he pressed the relevant button.
“Wait, wait, wait,” he said as Bobby stepped with relief into the alley. “I know I’ve fucked this up. But I wanted to see if I could show you some of my work. Could you do that? Could you look at it for me?”
He held up his phone. “Can I just get, like, your e-mail or a Twitter handle?”
“I only read hard copy,” Bobby said.
“I’ll print it off and send it to you,” he said, holding Bobby’s eye with a kind of ruthless helplessness.
Bobby felt the warmth of burdenhood settle on him as he spelled out his address.
“Poems?” Bobby asked.
The guy shook his head. “Some. There’s a screenplay, some stories, too. It’s the language, though. I just want to know if it’s doing something interesting or not.”
“I can’t help you, man.”
“You can, you can.”
The guy dipped, ran another dab of whatever was in the baggie around his mouth. He was, Bobby had to admit, an intriguing mess. He had no doubt the guy would send him his stuff, and he had no doubt it would be magisterially self-pitying (and not in the good, Robert Lowell kind of way). The guy insisted on shaking hands before allowing Bobby to walk off.
As he walked out of the mouth of the alley, Bobby checked his messages. Then he realized he was abandoning an infant to a vehicle under the operation of a man kneading tinctures of a patently illicit substance into his face. Bobby turned and looked back and waited to see if there was anything obvious he could do. The vehicle began to move. He watched it complete a spasmodic reverse and trundle toward the far opening of the alley. Then it was gone.
Normally, Bobby would have ignored or evaded Fiachra Calhoun’s midweek-afternoon overtures, but right now he needed a drink. Fiachra Calhoun was in his customary nook at the rear of the Andromeda, which at this hour was near empty. Jess Tombes was with him.
Fiachra’s resting expression was raked-in and solemn, like the heap of cinders left after a fire has gone out. Bobby knew Fiachra took on this appearance of incinerated introversion only when he was absolutely blitzed. Sober, or moderately soused, he was an animate, wryly handsome fifty-two-year-old poet, essayist, and workshop leader, and the senior editor at, in Bobby’s opinion, the country’s sole remotely respectable poetry publishing house. Hammered, he looked two hundred. He raised his ashen lids and grinned wobblingly at Bobby.
“How is the man?” he said.
“Well,” Bobby said.
“Hey,” Jess said.
Jess had a straight fringe and feral blue eyes. She was in college and served as a kind of all-purpose intern-slash-assistant to Fiachra. She was writing poems, of course. She was sitting with one leg tucked under her on a battered leather chair and appeared to be stone sober.
“What’s happening, Fiachra?”
“Ach, we’re celebrating.”
“Just the two of you?”
“Well, there’s three of us now,” Jess said.
“What are we celebrating?”
“It’s a dismal Wednesday afternoon, yet we have warmth, seats, wine, and friends,’’ Fiachra said. “And someone’s wrote a book.”
“Everyone’s wrote a book,” Bobby said, but as he did his heart spasmed fretfully in its chamber.
“Congratulate Miss Tombes,” Fiachra said. “We’re putting her out next spring.”
Jess looked abashedly down into her drink. Bobby had an immediate urge to punch both of them in the face.
“That’s. So. Great. That’s. So. Great,” Bobby heard himself incontinently reiterate.
Jess Tombes. Jess Tombes. Who and what, exactly, was Jess Tombes? Bobby logged what he knew of her: a student, a kid, she was an unfailingly polite and pleasant human, conscientious, patient, and kind with anyone she encountered. She formed rapports easily, and—a rarity in the Scene—Bobby had yet to encounter someone willing to say a bad word about her. She was writing, but had been purportedly reluctant to show the poems to others. (Bobby had offered to critique them, more than once.) He’d heard her read a couple of them one night. They’d been pretty good, actually, maybe, he thought now.
Bobby’s head swam, tritely. It wasn’t even a question of whether or not she was objectively better than him, it’s that Fiachra had thought so, and soon others would, too. Fiachra had published a number of individual pieces by Bobby over the years in various journals and anthologies, had put him in every live-reading lineup going. Not that he thought he’d be Fiachra’s next guy, necessarily—he just wished now that it was anyone other than the baby-faced Tombes. (Though he knew that this qualification, too, was a lie. He would envy and despise all who were not he, if he was not the one.)
“We signed off on the contracts in the office at noon. Been here since. Good that we could rely on at least one layabout to answer the call to quietly celebrate,” Fiachra said.
For the next ten minutes or so, Bobby interacted. He choked out questions, smiled, and nodded meaningfully at replies. He was trying to interpret Fiachra’s tone—whether it contained a buried note of contrition or at least an awareness of his having, from Bobby’s perspective, rejected him for Jess. There was the gruesome possibility that Fiachra simply expected Bobby to take developments at face value, and be happy for Tombes. Bobby excused himself. In the toilet he closed his fist, hyperventilated, and punched the metal hand-dryer. He looked at his hand. He was pretty convinced he had broken something in his middle finger, through which a steady and piercing voltage of pain now vibrantly coursed. Bobby went back out and drank five pints. Fiachra, with a significant head start but still intent on trying to keep up, rapidly became unintelligible, then unconscious. Jess ordered during each round, bought her own, yet seemed to sit before the same glass of wine drained to the same unvarying depth all night long.
“Do you feel good?” Bobby asked for what felt like the hundredth time, though it may have been the first time he had actually said it out loud to her.
Jess took her time before answering, as she took her time before answering any question. She was looking at him. She had the vigilance, the remorseless patience of the endemically ambitious; there she sat, twenty-one or twenty-two and wreathed in all her untradable surplus time, watching not just Bobby and Fiachra but also somehow herself, insinuated within yet in some way already beyond—already extricated from—this scene, this moment. Bobby could see, now, the abiding apartness in her look. It had always been there. And within him rose again the habitual suspicion, the deep intestinal hunch: his work was shit. So, essentially, was Fiachra’s, and everybody else’s. But Tombes’s, whatever it was, was not. Jess Tombes was going to last, and Bobby could feel himself, in her spectral, incipiently canonical gaze, being transubstantiated, molecule by molecule, into obscurity. Whether she knew it or not—and Bobby hazarded she probably did not—she was killing them all so that she could go on, so that she could make it. This was how the machine worked.
“I do,” she said in a voice so low it sounded as if it emanated from inside Bobby’s own skull.
He looked at his phone. It was getting late. The bar had filled up. He wanted to cry. He put his hand on Jess’s knee. She looked at his hand.
“What is that?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” Bobby said. He withdrew the still aching hand, yawned, closed his eyes, and pinched tears from his lashes. He was very, very drunk. “I am very, very drunk,” he announced.
Fiachra was snoring, head back against his seat. The insensate son of a bitch was always right, which meant that he was right about this, too.
Jess picked up a beer mat, and Bobby watched her place it down in almost but not quite the same spot. The discrepancy, or adjustment, was deliberate. Everything she did was deliberate and precise. She was curating this moment, as if it were already an old, old memory. And Bobby felt like an incidental fixture within that memory, wavering and thinning and becoming increasingly indistinct, mnemonic collateral on the cusp of disintegration.
He stood up. “I’m so glad for you,” he managed, and he walked right out.
First he saw the pale humps, then he saw what they were. Old people, huddled on the pavement and some seated or even lying on the grassy embankment outside the apartment block. Some were in pajamas, some in overcoats, some with their blankets draped over their shoulders. A young man and a young woman were moving alertly from person to person, talking to them, placing a reassuring hand on a shoulder.
As Bobby staggered up to the building entrance, the young man jogged over. He had a denim shirt on with the sleeves rolled capably up.
“What’s up?” Bobby asked mildly.
“Gas leak.’’
“Extremely potentially dangerous!” the young woman, joining him, exclaimed.
Bobby ignored them. He took out his key and went to open the door into the foyer.
“The gas company said to stay out of the building!” the young man said. “No unlocking doors and no naked flames inside or in the vicinity of the building.”
“The Fire Department is on the way,” the young woman said.
Bobby absorbed this information and blinked heavily. It was not information he required.
“Look. Lads. I’m bone tired and substantially cut. I just want to get into my apartment that I pay the rent on and am allowed into whenever I like and go to bed.”
“Sir,” the young man said, his face wholesomely indignant. “You don’t understand. This is an emergency situation. We came over to visit my grand-aunt May and were greeted with an incredibly heady smell of what we are convinced is leaking gas in the second-story hall. We went from door to door to advise people to get out.”
“As instructed by the Fire Department,” the young woman vouched.
“Ah, well,” Bobby said. “I’m on the third floor anyways.”
“The whole building’s potentially unsafe!” the young woman said.
She was also in a denim shirt—pink to the young man’s baby blue—her expression as sincerely vexed as his. They were dressed like an unironic country-and-Western duo.
“Do you fuckers sing?” Bobby asked.
“W-what?” the young man responded.
Bobby seized on their confusion to insert his key in the lock and deftly open the door. He squeezed into the brief gap, then held the door fast behind him as the young man tried to pull it open.
“What the hell!” the girl shouted.
“I’m off to bed and don’t try and stop me,” Bobby said. “If the place goes up, tell everybody I went in willingly.”
There was indeed an incredibly heady smell of what may well have been gas in the building, though to Bobby’s cultivated faculties there was a faint but unmistakably herby back-note to the atmosphere. Bobby suspected grass, a specialized or customized blend. But, then, he was drunk, his faculties impaired. Maybe it was gas, and not some aging stoners clandestinely toking away in their apartment. Bobby went carefully up the stairs. He tried to recall the things you were meant to do and not to do in order to avoid conflagrating yourself. Ventilate space where possible, no naked flames, and be careful touching things lest friction prompt a spark of static electricity. Something along those lines.
He unlocked his door and went into his apartment. He opened a window. He booted up his laptop, began preparing a joint with Becky’s weed. He checked his mail. One of his oldest and most reliable clients, PussySplitter112, was back with a new request.
“Good old PussySplitter,” Bobby muttered.
PussySplitter112 had gone to the effort of typing up the commission as a Word doc, and when Bobby opened it he saw it was almost five thousand words long. He skim-read: elvish princesses, fisting, a dash of coprophagia, an extensive and almost clinically dry segue hypothesizing how best to depict a dragon’s hard-on. The usual. Bobby was considering upping his rates. He would start the job tonight, he figured, if he could just take the edge off his drunkenness with a bit of a smoke. He went over to the window. Out front of the building he could see the apparitions of his elderly neighbors, the blankets swaddling their hunched frames making them look like poorly pitched tents. He put the joint in his mouth and brought the lighter to it. Friction: he looked out across the city sky and flicked the lighter’s wheel, prepared for the night to go up all around him, but the night, as the night was wont to do, rolled impersonally on. After a while, Bobby began to hear the Dopplered gulling of the sirens as the fire trucks made their approach. ♦
Animation by Rebecca Mock