Page 33 of The Invisible Roommate

Through a partially open window, he listened alongside the dead to the beautiful communal vocal music being made inside. “You’re really lucky,” he said quietly to the row of headstones in front of him, “to have personal concerts like these every single day.”

Gerard was no scientist or philosopher. He did not know what happened to a person after they died, nor did he particularly wish to, but he’d always had this theory that music transcended realms. Mr. Bud would always say, “Play like you’re playing for the angels, because you are.” Certainly not every person buried in that graveyard had gone on to become some halo-wearing cherub in Grecian dress, but he liked to think they were still somewhere warm and welcoming, humming along to the hymns that he was surprised he still knew the words to.

“Since Love is lord of heaven and earth, how can I keep from singing?” he repeated after the choir into the leaf-dusted graveyard. He sang it a few more times, relishing the melody, unaware that the music inside had stopped.

Moments later, a voice called out from behind him. “How can you keep from singing with us?”

Gerard almost startled off his bench. His journal landed face down in the dirt. He squinted against the sun that poked over the steeple and saw Regina grinning in the window frame.

“Sorry!” he said, utterly embarrassed. “Sorry.”

“Next rehearsal is on Wednesday, same time! I’ll have a book of hymns waiting with your name on it,” Regina shouted after him as he ran off.

Over dinner that night, with song still on the brain, Gerard asked Emory, “What kind of music do you like?”

Emory had made another stir-fry—the third that week alone—but Gerard couldn’t complain. Vegetables, protein, and rice hit the spot and left him full.

Emory sat across from him in his sleep clothes—a pair of sweatpants and his university hoodie. His glasses floated several inches above the collar. Gerard wondered if Emory’s hair was mussed from sleep or if he had any hair at all. His roommate was a tangible question mark floating about the room.

A charge waggled between them when they sat on opposite sides of the table over a meal. Emory’s hunger took on an almost physical manifestation, sauntering across the length of the table, twirling about like a personified candlestick in a Disney cartoon.

Gerard had told him dozens of times at that point that he would simply turn away so they could both sup in peace, but Emory insisted that he preferred to eat after, that he liked watching Gerard enjoy what he’d made. Who was he to take away the invisible man’s pleasures, even if they felt weirdly intimate?

“I don’t,” Emory said after some time.

“You don’t know what kind of music you like?” By Gerard’s estimations, Emory had to be somewhere in the vicinity of twenty-seven, so that didn’t make much sense. Surely Emory had encountered at least one genre of music that made him want to get up and dance or blow through an entire box of tissues while crying or bash in a car with a baseball bat while shouting the lyrics at the top of his lungs.

Emory audibly cleared his throat. “I don’t like any kind of music.”

Gerard almost did a spit take. “What? Who doesn’t like music?”

“I don’t. At least, I think I don’t. I’ve never really given it much attention,” he said. “When in the lab, if given the choice between music and silence, I’d pick silence every time.”

Gerard’s jaw almost unattached as it gaped. “You really should’ve said that before I graciously offered to let you be my roommate.”

“Don’t take it personally. In college, I stopped making time for entertainment. I dedicate what little time I have on this earth to studying and to experimentation.” His sleeve swung to the table in the middle of the room behind the love seat, where his in-progress experiment sat waiting for him to resume.

“Maybe that’s why you’re spinning your wheels,” Gerard said.

When Gerard had arrived back to the apartment, there was stale defeat thick in the air. As Gerard always did, he’d asked how last night’s work had gone, and Emory’d said there’d been no breakthroughs. Gerard understood that without more human test subjects, Emory didn’t have new data to work with, which meant until he turned back, he was mostly poring over the same calculations and running his own blood tests to see if his miracle oxygen-carrying proteins could outlive red blood cells. It was clear Emory found the recording part of his work tedious.

“Unless someone wrote a song about when my tissue will turn opaque again, I don’t see how music is going to help me,” he said in a noxious way.

Appetite upended, Gerard pushed his half-full plate into the center of the table. “Whenever I get stuck while writing a song, I go for a hike or put on a movie. I do something to redirect my energy and then come back fresh. Maybe I find inspiration or maybe I don’t, but at least I haven’t tortured myself.”

“Somebody is out there with my research and my lab mouse, and at any minute he could swipe my entire life’s work out from under me. I can’t afford to waste time on hikes or movies,” Emory retorted almost breathlessly.

“Isn’t poring over the same materials every night wasting time just in a different way?” Gerard asked. “Didn’t you say you got the idea for the blood replacement while you were working on Joe’s boat? I don’t think a magical flushing compound is going to crash through the ceiling and into this room. You could stand to shake things up a little.”

“I’m already shaking things up a little. You’re here. I’m actually getting a decent amount of sleep. I’m cooking,” he said. His unseen stomach let out a loud rumble.

Gerard stood from the table and crossed the room. “Eat, please.”

“You haven’t finished,” he said, voice allaying.

Gerard sighed with frustration. “I’m not hungry anymore.”

Every time he thought they were getting close to understanding one another, Emory put up a new invisible wall between them. It was moments like these where he wished he had privacy, personal space—somewhere to retreat to, preferably with a door. Instead, he got up from the table and slouched into the rocking chair across the room.