Page 37 of 72 Hours of You

I’m about to protest (harder) or at least alert him to the stupidity of this desire, but he’s already walking. Actually, kind of half jogging. Backward. And smiling at me. I feel my feet moving, following him without my permission, like he’s got some invisible thread yanking me along after him.

“This really is idiotic,” I say.

Peter puts his hand up to his ear. “Sorry? What was that? Can’t hear you. Let’s talk about it on the stoop.”

Shocking absolutely no one, it turns out that walking backward on a city block is ill-advised. Peter bumps into a scowly man with slicked-back hair, a mustache, and—I swear to god—an actual pocket watch. But Peter just laughs and says he’s sorry and flashes him such a genuine smile that the surly hipster (or time traveler) shrugs and mumbles a “No problem.” It’s weird—how people respond to Peter. It’s like he has this light that surrounds him and if you get close enough, a little bit of your darkness goes out too. For other people, anyway. There’s no light big enough to drive out the darkness inside me. But I guess it’s still nice to see it. To be near it.

Peter stops at a brownstone with stone steps and runs his hands over the black wrought-iron handrail. “Isn’t it great?”

“It is definitely stairs,” I say.

“Yeah, but look at the craftsmanship. They don’t make them like that anymore.” He’s looking at this stoop like it’s actually special. Like this old-ass outdoor staircase is an architectural marvel, and maybe it is, I don’t know a lot about stairs. But what I do know is that he looks at the world in this (delusional) way that no one else does. Like it might actually be an okay place. He sees beauty where I see booby traps. And like, I’m right, obviously, but damn, I wonder what it’s like to live like that.

“Come on, let’s do it.” Peter pats the marvelous step made of elephant tusks or whatever, and I shrug and sit down, the stone cold through my leggings.

“Now what?”

“We talk,” Peter says.

I go to stand up. “Yup, I’m out.”

Peter reaches and grabs my wrist. Lightly. It’s so light that it feels like the heaviest thing in the world. He smiles up at me, squinting into the sun. “Stay.”

Stay. A tiny word. An enormous request.

I look out at the street. There’s a teenage girl who kinda reminds me of Jules wearing too much lipstick and furiously texting, a person with a Columbia shirt shouting on their AirPods about bedbugs and hookups, a businesswoman checking her Fitbit, a guy with a fanny pack pushing a twin stroller with some weird toddler-skateboard attachment thing. And they’re all weaving between each other, finding the gaps, careful not to actually touch another human, like the rest of humanity is just an obstacle in the way of whatever their final destination is. It’s all so … random. All these different lives. The whole street is like a river of bodies that doesn’t know which way it’s supposed to flow.

A little poofy rat-dog thing winds its leash around its owner who almost trips over himself. It is sort of like stepping into an indie movie. There’s actually a little hot-dog cart on the other side of the street, and a bodega with a flower display next to it. I don’t know how Peter managed to find a corner of New York that looks like Hollywood designed it to be New York. I’m half expecting someone to yell Cut!

“What’s it like in there?” Peter says.

“In where?”

He touches his pointer finger to my forehead. “In there. Sometimes it’s like you’re somewhere else.”

“I’m here,” I say, ignoring the fire where his finger was. “Against my will, I might add.”

“But what were you thinking about?”

“Nothing.”

“I don’t think you’ve ever just thought about nothing.”

“You know,” I say, “you don’t really know me.”

Peter runs his hands through his hair. “That’s the point. I want to.”

My toes get all prickly in my sneakers, like they’re just itching to jump into that river of bodies so I can take off in my own direction, let the wind blow through my hair, and keep running until I find a bridge to jump off.

But I stay. “I’m an open book.”

Peter laughs. “No. You’re the unpublished Salinger works they keep telling us they’ll release and never do. But it’s okay. I don’t mind waiting.”

Jesus Christ. This guy reads too much. His words are too … too. They’re making me all messed up. And they’re making me want to … say things. But I don’t say things. Saying things is dangerous.

Oh, whoopsie daisy.

“Sydney,” he starts, looking at me as earnestly as he’s ever looked at me, which is saying a lot. He’s gearing up to talk to me about the big stuff. I can’t. It’s one thing to talk about the clocks as a concept, it’s a whole other thing to talk about how I feel about them.