“Because it’s a good thing in you! It’s a good feeling!”
“It’s love!” I tell her, and I’ve figured it out for the first time. “It’s just love! It’s all the same thing!” And I get up and start dancing, naked, while she stares at me, her pupils wide as saucers.
Four hours later the tide is going out. I’m pacing the room and starting to 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 the bedside 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 drive to the top of Twin Peaks to hold hands and watch the sunrise.
Giving up, I remove the mask and emerge from the bedroom into my apartment’s vast living room/kitchen/dining area. The light through the casement windows is lurid and exhausting, and when I reach the couch I collapse on it and gaze out at the skyline. When I bought this place the view of downtown seemed a thrilling prospect, but four months later it looks like something off a postcard. I’m wearing the same underwear and T-shirt I had on last night, now sour-smelling and soft, and the couch’s coarse fabric is slightly rough against my bare legs. I’m aware that there’s something I’m trying to forget, and the awareness prompts me to investigate, and then I remember last night’s indiscretion and my brain winces and tries to vomit. I go to the fridge for a Gatorade, and keeping my balance requires more concentration than usual. I drink half the Gatorade standing by the fridge with the door open so the cool air prickles the hair on my legs. Is there a way to ensure that I never see Lauren again? She’s probably just as embarrassed as I am. Obviously she’s nowhere near as embarrassed as I am. She’s probably embarrassed, although not as embarrassed as I am, and wants to forget the whole thing. Or else: over the next few days our five-hour artificially instigated love affair will tug at the back of her mind, and she’ll decide the only way to scratch the itch is for the two of us to meet for coffee and review our feelings about the events in question and start erecting a mandatory friendship. She could get my email address pretty easily. I shut the refrigerator door and flip open my laptop, which is sitting on the granite surface of the kitchen island. Once it wakes up and finds the wireless connection I refresh my email, but of course there’s nothing from her, only an invitation to speak on a couple of panels at the Digital Future Conference in March. She won’t email today — she’ll give me a few days to contact her first. I set the email client to alert me when a new message arrives and wonder if there will be any girls at the Digital Future Conference. Where is Maya right now? It’s 8:12 on Saturday. She’s asleep in Justin’s bed, her head on his shoulder in the morning-after composition familiar from American cinema, a sheet draped over her to hide her nipples from the camera. I can’t remember the specifics of her face, just hair and glasses and an expression of compassionate skepticism. The newspapers are waiting downstairs, and the crossword would occupy me for half an hour. I put on the pants I wore last night and then ride barefoot down to the lobby in the nearly silent elevator. When I bought the apartment I decided I’d take the stairs every time, to build some exercise into my routine, but I’m always in a hurry or tired in a way that justifies taking the elevator, or else I’ve just done something noble and thus deserve to take the elevator as a reward. I am aware that these are excuses that prevent me from gaining the health benefits of taking the stairs, and I’ve started trying to tell myself I should take the stairs anyway, even when I’m feeling rushed or exhausted or virtuous, but this particular unslept serotonin-starved humiliated morning is clearly not the morning to abjure the elevator at last. The newspapers are just outside the building’s frosted-glass front door, the Times in its blue bag, the Chronicle in yellow. As I stoop to pick them up I wonder if Maya is sending me an email asking if I want to hang out sometime. I recognize the absurdity of this thought and try to dismiss it, but I nevertheless return to the elevator at a faster pace and am disappointed when the doors don’t open as soon as I press the call button. I shuffle from foot to foot on the cold painted concrete, waiting.