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In the bathroom, only plain bar soap, shaving cream, and toothpaste.
Nothing that revealed an ounce of personality.
I had looked at Dane and seen sleek, powerful control. Had I misrecognized emptiness?
Manic now, I pulled books off the bookshelves at random, flipping through them in search of some insight into the man I had thrown my tender heart at.
Science fiction, politics, environmentalism, poetry, but none of it told me enough. None of it revealed Dane to me.
I dropped to the floor with a Frank Herbert book in my hand.
Hidden behind the bottom row of books was a stack of notebooks. I pulled one out, heart racing. A journal. Reading someone’s journal was one hundred percent terrible and wrong. An awful intrusion. A breach of trust.
But, fuck me, I was going to read it anyway. Because I was falling in love with Dane. Had fallen in love with him, really. And if he didn’t care about me…if he didn’t love me too, then…I had to know.
I splayed a palm across the cover of the notebook and squeezed my eyes shut, sending up something like a prayer.
“Please, Dane,” I chanted. “Please love me. Please love me, even if it’s just a little. Please care. Please give me a reason to keep trying.”
I opened the journal slowly, as if whatever was inside might snake out and bite me. But no matter how long I stared at the words, they didn’t make sense.
I flipped through the whole journal. Then I flipped through the next one in the stack. The color of ink changed from black to blue to black again. The handwriting was Dane’s. But the words…the words were someone else’s.
In notebook after notebook, Dane had transcribed the books on his shelves. Sometimes the same section went on for twenty pages. Sometimes it was only a paragraph.
But there certainly wasn’t any insight into how Dane felt about me in his journals, because not a single word was his.
* * *
—
Later that afternoon, still wrung out and woozy, I was lying facedown on Sofia’s bed when she texted, asking me to find and forward her insurance information from our computer. I sighed, and went to sort through our jumbled files.
Thanks, bro!
Just seeing her face on my phone and knowing she was right there on the other side of it made me feel better.
Hey do you have a sec to talk? I wrote. I had an awful fight w dane :(
Ten minutes later she wrote back, Oh no! Sorry but I can’t now, I have a meet and greet thing before the show. We still on to FaceTime tomorrow pm tho? Can talk abt it then.
Yeah sure.
I slumped back onto her bed.
* * *
—
I called in sick the next day for only the third time ever. I felt vile. Unfit for human company. The idea of providing customer service made me want to scream. I knew the first person who returned their latte because it had too much milk in it would get an education that would get me fired.
But the idea of sitting in my lonely apartment all day held equal appeal. I tried to watch Secaucus Psychic for comfort, but it just made me furious with Dane and miss him all at once.
The memory of his tight shoulders, expressionless face, and cold voice as I yelled at him made me feel sick. The image of all those pages of compulsive transcription worried me. I hadn’t dealt with the situation well. I knew I hadn’t. But could I stand it? Knowing that the person I wanted desperately might leave me at any moment if someone else called? Knowing that things were wrong with him that he wouldn’t talk about?
Unable to sulk in the tiny apartment any longer, I pulled on jeans and an old sweatshirt of Sofia’s and walked uptown in the cool air. I bought a coffee from the cart on the corner and tried to shake off the poisonous wrongness that had been coursing through me for days…maybe longer.
I ended up in Central Park around midday with the sun bursting through the turning leaves, painting the view in autumn colors that usually made me smile.
Feeling proud of myself for coming to a place I loved, I plunked down five dollars at the counter of the Museum of Natural History and smiled at the elderly man behind the desk.
“The suggested donation is twenty-five dollars,” the man said.
I snapped, “I know that, but this is pay what you can, not what doctors and lawyers can, isn’t it?”
He leaned away from me, chin disappearing into his neck. I felt like a monster, muttering an apology as I slunk away.
I paused beneath the soaring dinosaur skeletons and looked up to the ceiling as I always did. This time, though, instead of contemplating history and other worlds, it just made me miss Dane. How much bigger than me he was. The way I could look up and see the strong cut of his jaw and jut of his chin and know that in his arms, nothing could hurt me.
