anonymous and unnamed

if i were dying and had time to tell you only one story, i would tell this story.

some months ago mostly coincidentally our eyes met across a moderate distance and we smiled shyly, assenting, retreating, and didn't speak, each turning to the left to follow our company and making our respective exits. i regretted this and then forgot, forgot the regret, the gentle question in your face that prompted it, the answer i smothered that necessitated it, and went back to the world and its weight and dense forms and solid surfaces.

love is a thing like science. it insists that to know it we form a theory and then do everything wrong to prove that we were right. my theory has been that our souls shout to us when we are faced with our loves. my experiment has been to tell myself i did not hear any shouting.

on tuesday i dreamt that you were sitting with your back half-turned to me, so close that i could hear the hair rustle against the nape of your neck when you moved your head, could count the freckles on your upper arm, the scent of the warm air eddying in the pocket of space between us like steam-ironed cotton. you didn't look around, but i could feel you knowing that i was there, could feel you understanding that i knew that you knew, understanding what we knew. there was a girl at your side, lovely i thought at first but then closer a nightmare, stone-steel eyes and a sharp claw of a hand that she would sometimes pluck at you with, hook into the back of your jeans where they puckered out at your waist behind your spine. you didn't turn to her either, looked straight ahead or leaned down with your hands between your knees as she fixed her cold concrete eyes on me and i thought, what an empty threat, this one, what a silly hollow hurdle. what does she think she can do? what we know, sitting here, looking at our shoes and the places where the ceiling meets the walls, she knows it, too.

i woke up with my soul so completely still that i could not locate my body to move it in the bed and hung touching nothing, thinking, i may have been right about some things, some things i have done wrong.

wednesday, thursday, friday, flashes of your down-turned face came to me in profile at inopportune moments, uninvited, and i found it hard to work, to see through the crisp angles of your cheek and jaw. is it love or science, i thought, or some other devil that brings a vanished form up from some secret recess and restores it to three dimensions, projects it despite constant objections complete with sound and smell, an envelope of heat surrounding it as if it were its own breathing body and not an apparition inside mine? for three days i could not will you back into our moment's grave; meanwhile, all over the world, great people failed to recognize essential truths, and many lives could not be saved, but other things, as always, were also happening. finally when you again refused to dissipate i thought of them and hushed myself into a sweet green hovering between the world i knew and the world of quietly knowing, stepping softly, letting things be, doing no harm.

saturday i sat in a bar with a friend, not thinking of you, laughing, and was stunned and not at all surprised, in an instant jolted, tremulous, then so completely still when you entered and stood in front of me with your arm around a girl, a lovely girl who twisted a fistful of your shirt into her palm and stared, as you did, straight ahead, silent. i thought, what a perfect, knowing, unknowable world, where love and science could come together in the space between your eye and mine, in the long-ago moment in which there was one space between your eye and mine, and impel the cells and tiny muscles, the nerves and apertures, to form a solid line that you might send me messages across, messages like, i'll be stopping by, like, i'll be bringing a guest, like, there is no reason for you to learn her name.

david and sharon

david's irises were an unassuming shade of mossy green around the outside, spiking into ragged brown-sugar wreaths that encircled his pupils. his left eye bore a wider swath of brown than his right. he didn't think anybody knew this, and he felt o.k. about that most of the time.

david was not thinking about his eyes in the elevator on thursday. he was thinking about all of the things in his refrigerator that he didn't want to eat for dinner, and whether or not he had ever returned that movie he had rented and never watched, and the strange sensation along the outer part of his left leg, between his ankle bone and a point halfway to his knee, exactly between the muscles of his calf and his shin . . . nothing, really, like so many of us do on our way to the exit after work. and then the doors opened, eight floors from the street, and a girl in a straight gray skirt and a blue tweed pea coat stepped through them and wheeled back around toward them. before she did so david looked at her face, which was taut and prim and dominated by a pair of very round, very detached eyes, and after she did so david looked at the back of her head, which was neat and smart except for one strand of dark brown hair that had sprung itself from her upsweep and now pointed brattily toward what appeared to be a smudge of red ink on the back of her neck, just below her right ear. there were four people between david and that ink spot, but he would have stared right through them if he'd had to. he was no longer thinking of anything but that blot, and as he stared at it it bled the intensity out of all of the other objects in the elevator, until it was the only trace of color in the entire enclosure.

as the elevator slowed to a stop at the ground floor, several things happened in an uncertain order.

• david thought to himself, "perfect."


• the girl reached up with one hand to scratch her neck where her hair was tickling it, and david noticed more red ink staining the tips of her first and second fingers.


• everyone in the elevator took two steps forward.


• the elevator doors opened.


• the familiar metallic clanging clink of a keyring hitting a hard floor made its way to david's ears from under the feet of the people separating him from the ink-marred girl, who was suddenly in the lobby and making her way rapidly to the revolving door that led out to the sidewalk.

her keys, david thought; she's dropped her keys. then, thank god, david thought; thank god, thank you, thank you, thank you god, and he snatched them up and bombed after her.

she walked fast. man, did she walk fast. she walked so fast that for the nearly four blocks it took david to catch up with her without out-and-out running, he wondered if she knew he was following her and was deliberately maintaining their distance. she barely even slowed at the crosswalks, just charged out into the intersections, a seamless blue bullet, and to keep from remembering the coffee stain on his right thigh and the number of times he'd worn his unironed shirt since its last washing he kept his sights on that red fingerprint, the impish spurt of humanity that he was sure was the truth of her. and even if it weren't, he still had her keys; she had to stop somewhere. she was far enough ahead of him that, while she was able to march across the roads unimpeded, he, by the time he reached those roads, was very nearly killed trying to keep pace. but he hustled on, fixed on his inky beacon. and finally, as the strange sensation in david's left leg was just beginning to reassert itself, she slowed, fishing for something in her pocket. he did run then, afraid that his window would slam shut, and as he closed on her, waving the mess of keys at arm's length in front of him, the girl's round eyes became even rounder. she kept them on him as she flattened herself against a nearby mailbox, dropping her chapstick. they were just like his, he noticed, brown in the center, green around the edges. he thought maybe one pupil was larger than the other.

he realized that she hadn't thanked him yet. in fact, no one had spoken, and he didn't know how long he had been standing there in front of her, panting quietly, the keys jangling brazenly in the space between them.

"you dropped these," he breathed.

her eyes, and he hadn't thought they could do it, but they did get even rounder as she looked from him to the ring and said firmly, "no."

david was very confused. it must have shown, as the girl said, more gently now, "those aren't mine."

oh, david thought. oh. oh no. ohhhhhhh, no. oh no oh no oh no

she was giggling. he dropped his arm to his side and his eyes to the sidewalk, where her chapstick had rolled to a tentative halt a few inches from the curb. what the hell, he thought, and he knelt down and grabbed it.

"you dropped this?"

as she reached for it she started to say something and then stopped, her prim face crinkling up and then backing down. her red-tipped fingers reached around to brush her rebellious hair from her neck. awash with optimism, david met her gaze and asked, "what?"

"nothing, i just . . . are your eyes two different colors?"

autumn and molly

molly's real name was marlene, but no one who knew her referred to her that way. she didn't have a marlene sort of face; hers was soft and open, pink--mollyish. she resented this and wore an unfortunate amount of dark eyeliner and burgandy lipstick in order to tip the scales, but she was what she was, and really, when you think of all the things a girl might turn out to be, soft and pink are not so terrible.

unless you are having an especially terrible day, which, on this day, molly was. she'd had several weeks worth of them by this time, and, because you probably don't know her, and if you do there's a good chance you've heard this story, i don't think she'd mind me telling you why.

molly was pregnant. the pregnancy was the result of a drunken post-party encounter that molly had not been a truly active participant in. she had, in fact, been asleep when it began, and the boy was someone she knew, a good friend of good friends, and she had stumbled away from it so rattled and confused that she had not spoken a word to anyone for four or five days, and after all that silence she didn't know how to say it out loud. she realized she was pregnant a month later and quietly made an appointment to quietly end things.

when the day came molly couldn't sleep or sit still, and the droning ticks and hums of her small empty apartment were leaching the oxygen from even the coolest and whitest corners. she put on her eyeliner and her coat and headed out to the nearby library, thinking it would be easier to maintain her composure in a public place and that pretending to read was as good a way as any to pass a couple of hours. she still hadn't told anybody.

in an otherwise empty aisle on the second floor a boy came around a corner and bumped into her, knocking three large books out of her arms. she began to cry. when he bent over to pick them up she spun and ran, leaving him mute and goggle-eyed, kneeling with a book in each outstretched hand.

she found a bathroom and pressed her soft face to the chalky green tile wall, and she doesn't know how long she stood up against it, sobbing. nobody entered or exited in that time, whatever length it was, and when she came back into herself she noticed two things: the wall, and she could only assume her face, was smeared with inky rivulets of black makeup, and there was a girl about her age sitting across from her on the floor, wedged between a stall and a sink.

they stared at each other for a while, and then the girl reached around behind her and into her book bag. she pulled her hand back out and offered it, palm-up, never taking her eyes off of molly's face. molly kept her eyes on the girl's hand as she stepped forward and bent over and saw that it contained several crumpled and fraying packages of sweet tarts. when she looked up she saw that the girl's eyes were swimmy with unshed tears.

"i'm autumn," the girl said.

molly sat down on the floor in front of her and picked up some candy. "i was raped. i'm having an abortion. today."

autumn didn't blink, didn't move at all, but her tears finally made their way out and onto her cheeks. "i have sour peaches, if you like those better."

juniper and matty

matty moved to juniper's town when they were both in the eighth grade. she was kind of nerdy and on the heavy side, and she had some friends when he got there, but a few months later she didn't have any. things like that will happen to a person in the eighth grade. there's no good reason for it and it's tough to convince anyone that it's all right, but there you are. matty was small and delicate and fascinated by magic and natalie merchant and comic book super heroes. he had become friends with some girls who didn't mind juniper, and sometimes they ate lunch together. when juniper's friends not only refused to reaccept her but also began being openly and publicly cruel to her, she stopped eating lunch, and everything else. this, too, will happen, for equally poor reasons and with as little justification, but you continue to be right there. matty didn't know juniper well enough to say much about it, but he did tell her one day that a girl he had gone to school with before had stopped eating anything but lettuce, and she usually threw that up, and after a while her face had gone sort of blue around her mouth, and he figured if that happened to juniper it probably wouldn't help her social standing.

juniper didn't have any sort of comeback for that. in fact, for about a year she and matty didn't really say anything at all. in that time she reconciled with solid food and made some more reliable friends, and she stopped giving a damn about everybody else, and towards the end of ninth grade she was feeling better about things. matty was not. kids, you know... they're mean. especially to delicate boys who wear ankhs and adore michael stipe. things at home weren't always great for matty, either, and one day he came to school with both of his wrists bandaged. there was a lot of whispering and giggling and eye-rolling in their home room. juniper looked around and thought about it, and then she walked over to matty and asked if she could see. he peeled away the gauze and showed her the twin horizontal slices. she asked him what he had used, and he told her. she examined them silently for a minute or two, and then she leaned back and said,

"you did it wrong."
"i did?"
"yeah. to hit all the really important veins you have to cut up your arm, like this."
"oh. okay."

there was a brief, not uncomfortable pause, after which they agreed it had been stupid one way or the other.

alan and arlene

alan's friends invited him to a party where they would be hosting a private performance by a small group of classical musicians. as alan was quite fond of both classical music and these particular friends, he agreed to attend. arlene played clarinet in the ensemble. alan didn't know that her name was arlene on this night; he didn't know anything about her, because he had never seen her before, but he noticed her immediately, and as the performance progressed alan decided that, while all of the musicians were quite talented, she was really the star of the bunch. at some point in the program the group played a mozart quartet, and by the end of it alan was desperately in love with arlene, or, as he knew her, the girl with the clarinet.

but alan was shy, and he and arlene did not speak to one another that day.

maybe alan asked his friends about arlene, or maybe she asked about him. maybe no one said anything to anyone but a few weeks later alan and arlene were sitting across from each other at a dinner party. the hostess had baked a rum cake and placed it on top of her refrigerator, which was a 1950s model, rounded on top and prone to fits of violent tremors during its cooling cycle. over the course of the evening the refrigerator rattled the rum cake closer and closer down the sloping top towards the edge until, from the other room, the guests heard a thud with a slight ringing undertone. the hostess rolled and then closed her eyes, rose from her chair and went into the other room to confirm what she already knew, which, as she informed the others upon her return, was that dessert was now being served on the kitchen floor, and, as it had broken the plate's fall, it was even glass-free. alan and arlene picked up their forks and headed into the kitchen. they sat down on opposite sides of the cake, looked at each other, realized that nobody else was coming in from the other room, and dug in.