The Unknowns Read Free Page B

narrate.
    “So I’m getting a little cold, so I’m going to put on my T-shirt and my boxers now, if that’s all right with you. Wait, where did they… oh, here’s my T-shirt, it got lost under the comforter. And I’ll bet—yup, here’s the boxers, right next to it. There we go. You know, until I was about twenty I bought all my T-shirts in extra-large because on some unconscious level I think I thought I was going to grow into them.”
    “God,” she says, “my stomach really hurts.”
    “That sucks. Do you have any Pepto-Bismol? I don’t really get stomachaches. There’s stomach people and head people, apparently, and I’m a head person. I feel stuff in my head. Maybe I should put my pants on too. I feel weird walking around your apartment in my underwear.”
    We spend another hour waiting out the symptoms—her stomach, my jaw, my monologue—and then I make well-I-should-get-going noises, patting my pockets for my keys and wallet and phone.We hug goodbye at the door, a quick chest press, a take-care-of-yourself hug. Neither of us mentions seeing each other again.
    It’s just after dawn and everything looks weirdly bleached out, as if the color saturation hasn’t caught up to the brightness. I have chemical energy to burn off, so I start walking home through the unfamiliar neighborhood, past stuccoed seventies houses and Chinese seafood restaurants. I feel like shit but I’m glad to be alone, in a place I have no reason to be, at a time when I shouldn’t even be awake. The cold feels good, and I’ve got my coat. I shouldn’t have told her about the thing.
    I’m in no shape to think about this. I’m just going to walk off the rest of this buzz, go home, get some sleep. Tomorrow I’ll do the math, figure out what happened, what to do next.
    I shouldn’t have told her about the thing.
    I get home circa 6:40 a.m. and crawl into bed and put a mask over my eyes. The mask is made of soft foam lined with sateen, and its eyepieces bulge convexly to prevent eyelid contact, which can disturb REM. The mask usually helps me sleep, but this morning there is no sleeping because of the adrenaline racing up and down my spine. My friend Danny claims to have consumed pure MDMA, uncut with amphetamines, manufactured by a CU-Boulder chemistry Ph.D. If I’d taken that I’d be asleep now, although it wouldn’t have kept me from humiliating myself with a stranger. Responsibility for that error lies with the Ecstasy itself, which suppresses faculties of self-consciousness and shame that, although harsh at times, serve a vital regulatory function and shouldn’t be artificially disabled for the sake of some momentary intimacy with a girl who isn’t even the girl I was pursuing. Is Maya going to hear about what happened? Are Lauren and Maya on the phone together right now? By turning my head hard to the left and peering out through the narrow gap between the mask’s edge and the right side of my nose, I can see thebedside clock, according to which it’s only 7:33. They’re not on the phone. Lauren is lying in bed, trying to lower her heart rate by force of will, thinking about the weird guy she brought home who seemed sort of charming at first and gave her drugs and got her naked and then instead of fucking her took the opportunity to unburden himself of his infantile peccadillo.
    Lying here is bringing me no closer to sleep. I should get up, pass a few hours in vigorous exercise, flush the speed from my bloodstream, return to bed around ten, sleep through the day, wake up in the evening and get some breakfast and then stay on a nocturnal schedule, eating lunch at three in the morning, taking vitamin D supplements to substitute for sunlight, never seeing another human being except the clerks working the night shift at the twenty-four-hour Safeway, until one night I run into Maya in the cereal aisle—I’m holding Honey Bunches of Oats, she’s holding Special K—and the two of us leave the supermarket together and