She sat him down over twelve shots of whisky.

“Each drink,” she said, “is a new subject.” She smiled, and they took the first shot. “What do you want to talk about?” she asked. He shrugged. “How about jobs?” So they talked about what they did all day, how they hated their boss, how they needed raises and all of the normal conversation. It didn’t last long.

“Okay,” she said. “Let’s take another.” They clinked the glasses together and took the second shot down, this one smoother than the first. “That warmed me up,” she said, and told him that summer was her favorite season. He told her his was fall, but summer was nice, too. She spoke about past memories of summer camp. He was a boyscout.

They took the third shot. “You know,” he said, “my parents are divorced.” “You know,” she smiled, “after 35 years, mine are not.” They laughed but she felt terrible, like she made a joke about his life. She touched her hand to his wrist and said she had a very lonely, unhappy childhood. He understood why, though he admitted maybe he did not understand how. She thought hard and told him she always felt alone even if she wasn’t. “This,” he said solemnly, “I understand especially.”

He motioned to the fourth shot, and smiled. They raised the drinks at eachother and tipped their chins back, letting the smooth whisky burn down their throats. “What now?” he asked. “Why are we out here tonight?” she asked him. “Is this a date?” “No,” he said. “But it could be if you want it to be.” She frowned and smiled, then frowned again and looked at her empty drink. “You’ll have to forgive me,” she mumbled. “I didn’t really eat dinner.” “It’s okay,” he said, and this time touched her hand with his: “Do you think this is a date?” She turned to him, squinting. “I’d rather not say.” “Not say,” he asked, “why not say?” “Because I’d rather not know. Not yet anyway.” “Fair enough,” he agreed, “but then we may have completed that subject.”

“Okay,” she agreed and took the next shot and waited as he, surprised, took his a moment later. “Would you mind if I played something on the jukebox?” she asked, andstood up. He sat on his barstool alone and watched as she walked, all hips, to the jukebox across the room. Her ankles seemed to tug at her shoes as she walked, dragging spikey heels across the hardwood planks. She took a few minutes to choose music, and eventually settled on a popular Rolling Stones song. He walked over to her with the last set of glasses, her two hands placed wide-set on the jukebox, her hips swaying softly. “I think that was a subject onto itself.”

They took the last drink down and he brushed hair out of her eyes, his fingers lightly dragging against her cheek like her heels on the floor.

The group and the prayer and the behavior modification stop working eventually and then you will revert, you know this ahead of time, so you do what you always do when you’re lectured about drinking so much: you pour yourself a tall glass with one ice cube and stir it around with your finger before transferring it into a Dixie cup and then you leave, you walk out, into the piss-pour parts of the city late at night because everyone else is drunk like you, tongue-tied like you, frustrated like you, alone or very well could be like you, but before you get to the end of your drink your foot catches in a grate, your knees buckle and your wrists flap again the rough sidewalk and you’ve got yourself a fine set of cuts and a bloodied chin and what’s left of the drink is puddled around your ass like you’ve gone and pissed yourself, so you sit there, licking ribbons of blood off your hands like a wounded cat and wait for the rye to dry and the pain to subside and you imagine how nice, how really goddamn nice it would be for the sun to come out in this black dead of night, just this once while the rest of the big city sleeps, so you could make your way uptown and dig out your keys and get back for one more dose and the dizzy spell of those goodnight dreams.

“Are you kidding?” she asks, but doesn’t expect an answer. She’s leaning against the bar, her long arms draped over it, her fingers dipping in beer spills.

Wagner is silent. He isn’t kidding, clearly.

“She left, and she’s not coming back!” she exclaims.

Wagner nods. “I know. It’s too late.” He moves closer to me, in the middle. I move closer to her. She looks at herself in the mirror. We all look at ourselves in the big mirror behind the bar, continuing conversation through glass.

“What am I supposed to do?” Wagner asks.

“What are you supposed to do?” she repeats. She turns away from the mirror and at the crowd of men gathered to her right. “What is he supposed to do?”

The men perk up at the sight of a friendly, intoxicated blonde. “What is he supposed to do?”

The ringleader motions for the group to stand up. They circle us like vultures. I notice wedding bands. I sip my whiskey, neat, and shift away from Wagner, who is fingering his cellphone and staring at me in the mirror.

She sits up straight. “He dated this girl for years. And he’s here from Florida. And she left, she went back home, and he let her go.”

“Where’d she go?” asked one of the married men.

“Home,” she answers.

“The Lower East Side,” adds Wagner.

“Home,” she repeats. “But then she’s moving. This is it. She’s moving back to California.”

“Oh god,” moans Wagner, and I can’t tell if it’s the crowd, or the booze, or the thought of Los Angeles.

“Wagner! You’ve got to call her!”

The crowd of men agrees, sipping their beers and nodding enthusiastically.

“You’ve got to call her or else.”

“Or else what?” asks Wagner.

“Or else she’s gone. She’s practically gone already. This is it!”

The men offer suggestions, like witty text messages and come hither smiley face emoticons that would convince her via SMS to felate him. Wagner just fingers his cellphone, passing it from hand to hand, staring at himself in the mirror.

“You’re going to wait too long and that’s going to be it.”

“And then what?” asks a married man.

“And then your pussy has left New York.” She excuses herself to use the bathroom. The men slink away, back to their beers and conversations and boring, married lives.

Wagner looks at me in the mirror. I take his phone and text her for him. And then I go back to my whiskey, neat.

The bed was perfect, the sheets tucked exactingly into the navy blue bed frame. He sits at the desk with a ziplock bag of grass and a neat folded paper. Why is the door locking? And when we all sit together, draped over the bed in our gray shifts and pale sweaters, blowing wind at the corners of the hotel room, our lungs expand and collapse and when someone uses the bathroom we can all hear them piss into that gorgeous white industrial toilet. We clutch our feet together. We take turns at the bedside table and clean up neat little expensive rows, our fingers tracing over the invisible dust of whoever was in this room last. We won’t be hungry. Tender noise in the window. The traffic lights in Tribeca turn red like a parade or a funeral procession. There is someone in the bathroom. There is someone at the door. Why is the door locking? Our ribcages rise and fall as we inhale, exhale, laying on the bed with our warm hands outstretched. Bring us water when you’re done. Clean up the remains of the desk, of the squat bedside table when you’re through. Jaws clenched, chins up, eyes closed. Don’t mess up the perfect sheets and whatever happens don’t lock the door.

In the summer, the city smells like dead fish, even more so now than before. The trees, especially the hirsute ones uptown, are to blame. It gets colder—just like it always did—in the fall, except now when the trees shed leaves, they develop a fine coating of hair. In the spring, the thin strands molt off the branches and trunks and the street cleaners sweep the streets like a barbershop floor. By June, there are a few stray hairs left in the city. Most of them end up in the Hudson where the scaly fish choke on them and drift under the West Side Highway. The hookers have since vacated Tenth Avenue.

The neighborhood was full of blonde braids and balloon animals on leashes. Little girls sat on stoops throwing pieces of bread at the sidewalks below. One by one and one by one, the little girls tore uneven pieces off loaves of challah and dark seeded rye. They tossed pieces until the rats grew full and scurried away into the gutters, leaving the sidewalks strewn with uneaten bread and pale, yellow leaves. Soon, the little girls were called in for lunch. It began to rain. The bread became bloated and the sidewalks turned spongy. The city smelled like yeast. Later, the rats emerged from the gutters, their eyes shining bright. The little girls were sent to bed without supper.

New York was homogenized, cleaned out by Giuliani and his karma police. We were bequeathed the expensive shreds of what was left. This was all in the last will and testament to Manhattan, articulated in the free pamphlets piled high next to subway ticket machines. The fine print about credit cards and one speed bicycles and bomb-sniffing dogs is in there. It reads like poetry if you are, and you should be, a lawyer. It reads like an admissible villanelle. But no one reads the fine print, and no one notices the delivery boys have all gone missing. The hard boiled detectives are all sleeping in. Old cigarette smoke is bottled and sold on side street bodegas. Skyscrapers buckle in the deadening wind while handymen fix New York from the gutter on up. We take what was left for us and try and remember to leave a suitable tip if the delivery boys ever return.

I’ve got Blonde on Blonde on my portable stereo. It’s a lullaby from a giant golden radio.

Nada Surf – Blonde on Blonde

(From KM.)

The rain was forgiving, in the sense that it eventually dried up and faded into a lukewarm sunset. The fat girl’s t-shirt, however, was not. It buckled under her shoulder blades and the lines that filled out her back. Her hair hung limp to the side in a ponytail, little wisps of brown hedging down her neck. The bartender was a playwright in disguise. The fat girl wouldn’t be able to fit into a disguise. I wondered what he wrote about her. We made eye contact just once in the mirror and went on ignoring each other, eying the fat girl for note taking and the like—her back to my back, to his back, to the mirror.

In college, we would leave campus and drive a few hours north of Boston into the backwoods of Maine and spend the weekend at my friend’s cabin that, while equipped with electricity and running water and most of the creature comforts that had become necessary to our winter of 2005 survival, lacked two major components: television and internet. So, in the backseat of my used Saturn, we wrapped a towel around an oversized plastic container with a matching bottom, a little metal bowl and a big sack of grass. We sat around the kitchen table drinking glasses of aggressive red wine and took hits off the gravity bong, allowing the plumes of smoke to overtake the lofted cabin and lull us all into a quiet, post-adolescent thoughtfulness, the herbal smell dissipating only days later when we packed up our possessions—the plastic-cut jugs, the empty bags of grass, the wine bottles and corkscrews and university sweatshirts, the video camera with philosophical-leaning footage of questionable taste—, loaded them back into the Saturn and drove off with the headlights on bright, our eyes twinkling and our lungs darkening in the dusk.

My bed feels like a garden and my legs feel tethered to it like weeds. Maybe it’s the vicodin, but it wasn’t the wine. I didn’t drink a sip of wine tonight. The week was corkscrewed open and poured close, down my throat, until I curled under the blankets and let myself go. The vicodin, I swear, I had to take because of my back. I slept on it all wrong. And once I fell out of a window. Once I was even in an upside down car. This week, you could say, was an upside down car—except, instead of crashing into rocks, it was served on them with a lemon. You could say that, you know. There are pictures and bottles and rumors to prove it. Too many police officers and not enough heavy breathing. But what happens at the end of the long, autumn nights? Where do we keep the umbrellas when the rain has stopped coming down? I lie slack in bed and ask questions with or without the wine. The vicodin, I promise, won’t answer.

Henry took Wallace to the circus one afternoon to watch the trapeze artists. He told Wallace that they were the closest thing to a god he had ever believed in. The two sat near the front, right up where it reeked like elephant shit. Henry bought a box of cracker jacks and shook out the surprise super-mood ring. It turned fuchsia, which decoded meant wild, which Henry wasn’t sure he was. He tapped it on his knees a few times before putting it in his pocket. The clowns entered in a car, spraying each other with water pistols and turning cartwheels on each other. The audience laughed and cheered, and as they quieted down, Henry turned towards Wallace.

“Wallace, do you ever worry that you’ll never get married?”

“Sometimes.”

“My mother told me once she thought I’d never get married.”

“Are you worrying?”

“My mother’s sister, Auntie Bette, used to always come to visit on holidays. She was old and unmarried, but very elegant looking. Not your typical old maid. But when my father heard she wasn’t dating anyone, he immediately started going through a list of every single friend he knew to see if he could set them up. And Auntie Bette was great about it, always smiling and writing down numbers of men she would never call. But I… I would hate to walk into a room and immediately have people assume that something was lacking in my life.”

“People can be insensitive. I wouldn’t worry it until your forty. Then, you can worry. I think it’s natural, when you’ve made it big, to wonder. So long as you’re not worrying yet.”

“Yeah, I feel pretty silly getting all worked up about it, but why put off for tomorrow what you can make yourself crazy about today. Then it made me wonder if I’d wind up marrying somebody that I didn’t like all that much just because I was afraid of winding up alone. And I’m not quite sure which would be worse. But then again,” He paused to eat a handful of cracker jacks, “I suppose it is completely silly to worry about at this point.”

And maybe it was, but Henry was only eight years shy of forty. When was he supposed to start worrying? Everything was going faster, time was slipping though his fingers faster than peanuts. He stared at the trapeze artist, watching her flip gracefully in the air, spin, circle, curl, dive and miraculously grab the swing and the last possible second before plummeting. He felt a wave of pleasure wash over him.

“She’s so close, so close.” He stood up, tossing peanuts over the heads of children sitting in front of him.

“Hey!” hollered a little girl in a deep scarlet sweater.

Henry grabbed her by the shoulders, “There’s no net!” he yelled, smiling maniacally.

“Henry!” Wallace stood up, alarmed, and tried to push his friend back down into his seat.

The girl screamed.

“Don’t you understand? There’s no net– There’s no fucking net!” He was laughing frantically now, still grabbing the child and spitting caramelized popcorn in her face. He was causing a scene. The little girl began to sob violently, and Wallace tackled Henry. The clowns had to help hold him down while the lion tamer called for help. Children were in hysterics and parents were sticky from their tears and cotton candy. Everyone was shouting. The tall man was trying to maintain some amount of order, but even the elephants looked disturbed.

It’s Friday the 13th. Don’t get arrested. Whatever you do, jesus, do not get arrested.

Henry Killbride was supposed to have been posthumously famous. He was fixed on the idea of posterity.

After his literary breakthrough was penned that stormy night in Poughkeepsie, he devised a noose with duct tape and hanged himself from a naked pipe in his bathroom. The tape was the color of soot, or charcoal, or deeply tarnished silver. It snapped only seconds shy, allowing for a bruised skull from the rim of the toilet.

If only he had used a rope.

If only he had left the seat down.

Four days without sleep made Henry paranoid. He duct taped his blinds closed and glued forks to his doorframe. The walls looked disproportionate, so he wrapped himself in a blanket and struggled to hide under the bed. He managed to squeeze his head under the bed frame, where he wept for nine hours before breaking out in a cold sweat.

Five days without sleep released Henry’s dormant anger. He smashed the burned out bulb that had hung, quite innocently, above his head, and threw the chair against the wall when he stepped on the glass.

He raged and roared within his studio apartment, which gradually began to swing and sway the sixth day when Henry’s hallucinations sank into his skull. The thick red bricks of his darkened walls shifted under his gaze. Dazed, he collapsed on the floor and saw the carpeting buckle, forming a soft wave. He breathed in as much air as he could take and let the wave tuck under his body and lift him up like a giant jellyfish. The forks fell from their post and attacked him on the ground, causing him to roll around in the shattered glass.

On the seventh day he slept, cut and corrupt.

Henry relied on sleeping pills mostly because he couldn’t quite stomach the taste of Nyquil. But the pills were no problem. He liked the way the smooth capsules felt against his teeth, and would go as so far as to pop a few and let them dissolve on his tongue. The bitterness dripped down his throat and spread out over his gums, a grainy layer of sleep that would get stuck in the back of his throat if he didn’t force himself to swallow soon enough. He would stay awake as long as possible, watching I Love Lucy reruns, anchored and immobilized in his bed, his eyes stretched taught open. When the pills kicked in, his frozen eyes would inadvertently well up with tears that would melt down the side of his face and catch in his ears. Then Henry would curl into a ball, pressing his knees up to his fat gut, and let navy waves of sleep wash over him. It was not a sound sleep, rather an empty void of nothingness that overtook his body every night. Henry wasn’t sleeping. He wasn’t creating dreams and letting his cells repair while his brain rested. He was lifeless and numb, cutting out hours of his life at a time, shutting his body all but completely off. Essentially, Henry was doing the equivalent of what a drug addict might do to destroy his mind without the fashionable euphoria or weight loss.

In fact, all those sleeping pills did to Henry’s metabolism was help him retain water. His two chins quickly collected their third, and his cheeks grew into paunchy paper bags. Henry’s heavy chest sagged like an old woman’s, though his nipples remained shriveled bits of clay. Fat gathered at his sides and weighed him down in bed, allowing for several broken springs that would stab him in his sleep, though he could never quite understand why his gut was covered in black blueberry bruises.

In the morning Henry would wake with his eyes sealed shut with nasty crust. He would methodically lean over and check AM/FM alarm clock for the time. His eyes would fall on the crimson numbers. To Henry, the red and the black looked like hell. If it were before two in the afternoon, he would no doubt reach for the bottle of pills next to the clock and take one more, just for good luck, like an extra candle on a birthday cake. In his grip, the pills were mere grains of sand surrounded by his fleshy palm squeezed so tight should Henry ever venture to lick his hand he would find that it, too, was bitter. And then, splash, Henry would fall headfirst back into the pool of sleep. And if he had had any friends, they would have seen him drowning in it.

Henry’s package was delivered by a mail truck in France by a driver named Marc-Antoine Polaert who whistled as he drove along the dirty wine stained streets. He ran over a rat or two. They felt like chunky rocks, living speed bumps. Marc-Antoine’s friends called him Marco, and he was only working for Les Internationaux Expriment to make some extra francs so he could prove to his girlfriend that he could treat her to fancy dinners and jewelry. She had quit smoking for him, because he told her that she tasted like an ashtray. He whistled when he thought of her, the way her lips used to hug the filter and blow perfect smoke rings. When she stopped smoking, she tasted better, but she was not the same girl. He didn’t know how he felt about her anymore. Marco whistled to clear his head, to distract himself from the rats. When he arrived at his destination, a small office in a building near the Seine, he chucked the small envelopes into the narrow mail slot, and left an unusually large package at the door with a note. He had stopped whistling, and was eager to move on with his deliveries.

A shrunken woman with a heavily lined face gathered up the deliveries about three hours later. She had not noticed the package on the other side of the door, and when she left, exited out the back way. The oversized delivery stayed pressed up against the door all weekend, gathering rat shit on the bottom. Although it failed to rain, the edged of the yellow envelope curled from the dew, and the rat shit crusted underbelly turned damp. A filmy layer of dirt had settled along the rim.

On Monday, the sky was overcast and threatening rain. Marco returned whistling with a new collection of letters and a yellow slicker, fearing the worst. He immediately noticed the package, picked it up like a child and tried to brush to filth off that had gathered over the weekend. Marco felt obligated to knock on the door and hand it to the addressee, but the package was so disheveled that he was ashamed. He held it for a bit, rubbing off the rat shit and squaring off the moistened corners. Taking a deep breath, he knocked on the door. He whistled while he waited, noticing a particularly large rat scuttling up an adjacent alleyway. Marco knocked again. He continued to wait, debating whether or not to write a note. Finally, the door opened.

An older woman stood in the doorway, holding a long, slender cigarette stained with red lipstick. Oddly enough, the woman didn’t seem to be wearing any lipstick. She leaned against the doorway, holding onto its frame like a crutch and waving her cigarette around. Marco noticed that it was unlit. He thought of his girlfriend, and repressed a whistle.

“Madame, est-ce- que ce vôtre est?”

Madame looked at the package and wagged her cigarette in front of Marco’s eyes. Her long bathrobe swayed with her in the doorway, and her head rolled back gently. She began to mumble, and Marco began to whistle. He thrust the package at the woman, who took it clumsily.

“Merci, mon beau garçon,” she muttered, dropped the package at his feet and slammed the door.

Marco’s face fell into a sad grimace. Again he picked up the package and this time took it back to his truck. He found a pen on the floor and crossed off the address and wrote REVENEZ A L’EXPEDITEUR. There was no return address, save the block letters U.S.A. The address said 541 E. 72 Rue, Paris. Marco wrote 541 E. 72 Road, New York. He dropped it in a mailbox on the corner of 541 and Rue D’Église, and walked back to his truck, tripping on an upturned cobblestone. A week later he broke up with his girlfriend and quit his job, deciding he was better of at the university anyway. His girlfriend never appreciated his knowledge of political affairs, and Marco was ready for a change.

After a month touring France, Wooden Circus traveled to New York City, just a short train-ride away from its birthplace of Poughkeepsie. Correctly labeled, a young lady dumped the package in a mail bin outside of an office building in the Upper East Side. Morris, a middle aged black man with a terrible cough, sorted through the mail as he sucked on a cheap cherry cigar. He noticed the stained package, fresh from Paris, and he stuck it on a shelf next to his ashtray, along with other interesting postal addresses he had collected throughout the years. At the end of the day, he gathered up the package and cut off the stamped writing with a sharp exacto knife he carried in his belt loop with a few extra cigars and books of matches. He stuck some of the sticky tobacco on the corners of the neat slice of envelope and stuck it to the wall above the shelf just to the right of the ashtray. Using tape and some left over pages of an old New York Post, he fastened a patch to go over the gaping square that had been cut from the package. The next day, he filed the tobacco-stained package away to the mailroom.

Jazzy found the weird, disheveled package on the floor of the mail room early one morning before the bulk of the day’s mail would arrive in great bins. He picked it up and held it under his nose, smelling a fine blend of cherries, smoke, newsprint and rat shit. Deciding it smelled delightful, Jazzy felt fairly apprehensive about its contents.

The Paris Review’s mail desk sent Wooden Circus to an editor with a post-it on the huge package. The post-it warned that the submission was oversized, and therefore might possibly contain explosive material. It was signed xoxo Jazzy. When Stuart Diamond opened the package, he likes to tell people that an explosion was just what he found.

It’s different up here, I admit. It smells sweet. We stop in front of a house that is in need of a paint job. The three-story is ready to give—scratched up, mauled over by decades or centuries of wind burns and rain. Two brick tire tracks head up the driveway to an equally beaten garage. We stand side by side. A house and a garage. I want him to hold my hand, but he doesn’t. I want him to kiss me, but he doesn’t know. Trees hover, spilling giant, brassy, fairytale leaves. The house is leaning into the garage. A light goes on upstairs, and we look away from the house and into each others’ eyes. The rock wall has stone bulbs, pressed together like our knuckles.

“Remember Graham’s party?” I ask.

“Yes,” he says, and sips his beer.

“Was that the one after prom?”

“No. It wasn’t after prom because my parents wouldn’t let me sleep over.”

“Oh,” I say.

“It must have been that spring. I think you had on a tank top.”

I laugh.

“And you kept asking if I was gay.”

“I don’t remember that,” I say, “but it sounds like something I would have done when I was that age.” I’m not proud, but I’m honest.

“It worked.”

“We were on the stairs.”

“Yes,” I remember. “Graham’s stairs.”

He wipes some of the condensation off the pint glass.

I look at his hands on his beer. “Was it nice? Do you remember?”

“I think so,” he says. “It was ten years ago.”

How much cancer should we postpone today, I ask myself, lying back on the paper that makes obscene crinkle-crinkles when I shift. How many days should we wait, I wonder. I don’t ask them. I don’t speak. I close my eyes and make fists. I stare at the ceiling and hear an occasional snip-snip as bits of my body are cut and laid out like malevolent paper dolls, like malignant origami.

The new one takes me for wine and oysters, and a few hours later, single malts and charcuterie. We talk about the oysters and other important details of the evening, like the herbed gravity bong, the truffled popcorn and the handful of characters behind the bar. When our lips meet our chins do, too. His hands hold my shoulders. My fingers touch is cheeks. We smell like fine grained booze and thinly sliced meats. We taste like smoke and the aftermath of an expensive date with an effusive appetite.