The door to the hall was closed and Patrick was alone, trapped. The whole place was unsettling and still, there was an eerie quietude—like a reading room, in a nunnery, on a mountaintop, on Mars. Patrick’s mind raced. He imagined residents tiptoeing around in paper slippers while adhering to vows of silence. The temperature was cool, but air didn’t seem to be circulating from the vent. He had been offered a cup of coffee by someone with crooked teeth named Kevin, which he regretfully accepted; the coffee was weak, stale, bland—much like the first impression Kevin himself put forth. Patrick clung to the cardboard cup tightly, both as something to do with his hands and because there was nowhere to throw it away. The corner offered a lone plant; he considered dumping the coffee in the wicker basket that housed it, but the plant was fake and the basket contained craft foam, not soil, and he didn’t want the coffee running through the loosely-woven reeds and across the tile floor, pooling like evidence in a grisly crime.
That fucking letter. Rereading his letter to Joe had kept him from sleep for the second night in a row. If he didn’t take this next step quickly, sleep might never come again.
* * *
Sara arrived in a taxi that night. She used the key Patrick hid on top of the light fixture outside his apartment door; he heard her fumble with it in the lock. She came in and sat next to him, pulling him into her chest, kissing the top of his head. There were wooden blinds covering the windows, blocking out most of the light; the thin slats of sun that made it through fell across Patrick’s face like prison bars.
Joe had been dead for less than a week.
“I got here as fast as I could.”
Patrick nodded, his chin hitting the top of her breast. “They wouldn’t let me see him.”
“I know.”
Patrick gulped for air. “He must have been so scared.”
“They’re monsters.”
That’s all it took—acknowledgment—and Patrick broke down in ugly heaving sobs. She held him until he was empty of tears.
“Let’s get drunk.”
Patrick laughed, not a lot but a little, and nuzzled his face in the scoop of her T-shirt. Her chest was soft, welcome. Is this why straight men obsessed over breasts? It seemed wrong to sexualize something this comforting. Grotesque, even. He squeezed her tightly. They would get drunk. Was it possible relief was that easy? What was it Evelyn Waugh had written in Brideshead Revisited? “Ought we to be drunk every night?” It was Sebastian. Yes. Yes, I think so. In college, it was his and Sara’s solution to everything. Difficult test, bad grade, hard day, awful date: get drunk. And off they went to Richard’s, a neighborhood bar with bottomless pitchers and a popcorn machine. And it actually, usually, momentarily helped. Patrick just wasn’t sure what witchcraft alcohol could conjure to settle something this dark. “I don’t . . . know what we have.”
He said we, but he was now an I.
Sara pulled a bottle of tequila out of her bag and set it on the table with a thud. “Shots.”
And it did. Help. After the fourth shot. Temporarily, at least, to ease the grip of the fist that was closed tightly around Patrick’s heart. They started with a souvenir shot glass from the Sands that Patrick had acquired on a trip to Las Vegas with Joe; after the third shot Patrick knocked it over, and it rolled under the couch. The Sands itself was long gone, imploded to make room for a newer casino. There was perhaps some symbolism there, but Patrick couldn’t imagine building anything new on his own ground; he wanted to exist as rubble, a fallen monument whose lights once shone bright. “Fuck it,” Patrick said when Sara tried and failed to retrieve the glass; they each took a swig straight from the bottle.
They shared memories of Joe, but they could only speak a few key words out loud. Wretched, putrid and sub-par conjured a telephone call Joe had made to a hotel in San Diego to complain after a disastrous stay. Clams casino, a weekend with food poisoning that was only funny now. Jim jinlet, the way he would try to pronounce gin gimlet after consuming two or three. Full stories were painful and unnecessary. The memories were fresh, the history recent. They played out like little movies on a screen inside their brains. Fleshed-out memories would come later, when the edges started to soften in the fog of memory, when the details needed to be spoken to be recalled.
“You lied to me,” Patrick said when they were sufficiently drunk. The laughter had subsided and things, once again, looked starless.
“I’ve never lied to you,” Sara protested.
Patrick stared into some middle distance. The lie was a long time ago. “You told me life would be easy.”