Chapter Eighteen
Eighteen
HE GAVE HIM A HOT DOG. He says this like it’s nothing. Like he didn’t just walk right up to a Clocker and interact with him. Talk to him. Make him laugh. Hand him free street meat.
“You can’t just … just … do stuff.”
“Why not?”
“Because!” I say. “Bad things happen when you get involved!”
Peter studies me for a second, glancing down at my hand, which is shaking just slightly. I squeeze my knee to make it stop.
“Look,” I say, pulling his attention away from my traitorous fingers. “It’s not a good idea to try to change things. I told you. It’s bad. It’s … What did you guys even talk about, anyway?”
Peter leans back on the steps and then launches into a retelling of his hot-dog delivery.
Apparently Probably Thomas is actually Gordon.
And Gordon has been forgetting stuff lately.
Little things, like his granddaughter’s drawing—that’s what he was looking for—which may or may not be back at his office, and big things, like his anniversary, and once which street his apartment was on.
He feels older than he is, and it’s getting to him.
At first it was just a few missing words here and there, but now the holes are bigger, blacker.
And he’s afraid to tell his family. He doesn’t want his wife to worry.
She just beat lung cancer (she never smoked a day in her life!), and everyone is still recovering from that.
Especially his daughter. He and his wife are supposed to go on an Antarctic cruise next month to celebrate her clean bill of health.
She wants to breathe the cold blue unpolluted air up north into her raw lungs.
They booked an excursion where you get to eat on top of a glacier.
But now he can’t even remember where that goddamn drawing is.
And Kinzy—that’s his granddaughter—she worked so hard on it.
She’s been practicing her cats—or was it dogs?
—all week. She draws constantly. Their guest room is littered with her drawings, hearts and stars and weird half-monkey things all over the carpet.
But this one was for him. And he promised her he’d keep it safe.
“You got all that from a hot dog?”
“He just needed someone to see him for a minute,” Peter says. “The hot dog did help, though. He said it reminded him of when he first moved here. There’s a place that used to give them away during happy hour and that’s how he survived law school.” He probably really did get mustard on his ties.
I look back to the now empty stoop down the street. This is a lot of information. Like, a shit ton, really. I dig my thumbnail through my thin leggings, pressing a half moon into the knee skin underneath.
What am I supposed to do now? Now that Peter blowtorched Rule #3? Now that I know this rumpled Mark Ruffalo look-alike is never going to make it on that cruise? Now that I know Kinzy and her catdog drawings exist?
“What was the point of all that?” I say. “You can’t change anything.”
“I’m not trying to change things,” Peter says, “for anyone but you.”
“Me?” I look up at him. What the hell is that supposed to mean?
“If the worst part for you is not being able to do something … I thought … well, I thought maybe this would help. He was sad, and then he wasn’t.
Now you don’t have to spend all day thinking about how beaten down he looked.
Now you can think about how he’s going to go home and tell Patricia about his memory stuff. ”
“Who the fuck is Patricia?”
“His wife.”
Right. Of course.
“He’s still going to die,” I say. “You know that, right? It’s not like he’s going to go home and tell her and they’re going to make some emergency doctor’s appointment and save him. You do know that.”
“I know.”
“I mean, shit. He could die of a heart attack or something.”
“I know,” Peter says again. “But this way, he won’t die with a secret.”
He won’t die with a secret. I think about all the secrets I’ve buried inside me—like a paranoid doomsdayer stashing tin cans of money all over the backyard—losing track of where they’re buried and what’s inside each little coffee tin.
Charles. Caroline. Mom’s scratched-up face.
All the clocks I’ve seen. Every single person in my red notebook.
Ninety percent of the thoughts in my head.
“Good for him,” I say. “But it still doesn’t change anything.”
“It doesn’t change his death.” Peter pauses and reaches out to take my trash from me. “But it still changes something.”
There’s something there—shimmering in his words—but I feel like if I look too hard it’ll burn my eyes.
“Listen, Sydney.” Peter takes a breath and rakes his fingers through his hair. “I didn’t know if I should bring it up before or let it go or … But now that we’re kind of …” Kind of what? He inhales again and looks me in the eyes. “I saw you. On your run. Before you … fell.”
“And?” My stomach turns in on itself and I wish I had that vase from the pizza speakeasy to smash against the sidewalk.
“And I saw you close your eyes. You looked …” He slides his hands out of his hair and down to his neck. “You looked like you were really hurting.”
Suddenly it feels like the negative space between me and the sky is alive and bearing down on me, like the hand of god—or fuck, maybe the devil—is crushing me into the stone I’m sitting on.
If I stay here one single second longer I might flatten into nothing.
“I’m supposed to drive home with Jules,” I blurt. “I have to go back. To school.”
I try to feel self-righteous or pissed but I’m just so fucking embarrassed. I want to sink to the bottom of the ocean and implode like some billionaire’s Titanic sub, disintegrating into oblivion.
I can’t believe I thought I could have some montage-style city adventure. Going to Dylan’s Candy Bar for fuck’s sake. It doesn’t get any more delusional than that. Who do I think I am?
I can’t go there and pretend I’m some normal happy person in search of jumbo Sour Patch Kids. I can’t be in this city at all. There are too many people and too many clocks and too many sirens and too much honking and too many fucking hot dogs.
And too many questions from Peter.
I stand up.
I have to go. I have to fucking go. Now.
“Sydney, I didn’t mean to—”
“She’ll be waiting. Jules. She— I have to pick her up. Now.”
I wait for Peter to triple up on his apologies or go on the charm offensive.
I wait for him to show me photos of enormous lollipops and person-sized chocolate bars.
To point out that Jules is arguably one of the most popular people in our school and there would be plenty of people falling all over themselves to drive her home.
But he just crumples up the trash and tosses it into the bin at the bottom of the stoop. “You don’t have to explain yourself. You not wanting to be here is enough.”
I nod, my jaw clenched, afraid to let any words escape.
Peter steps off the stoop and onto the sidewalk. “Let’s go.”
As we push our way through the bloated city blocks back to Grand Central, I keep my eyes on the piss-stained concrete in front of me, afraid to look up.
Afraid to see another Doom Scroll. I don’t know these people and I shouldn’t give a shit if any of them are clocking out.
But all I can think about is how Patricia is going to have to call Carnival Cruises and listen to Bruno Mars music play while she’s on hold for a refund.
By the time we sit down on the orange train seats, I can tell Peter’s simmering. Not in an angry way. This guy doesn’t get angry. But in this way where he’s clearly got a lot of words in his body that he wants to fling at me and it’s taking a lot of self-restraint to keep them rattling inside him.
A jolt of panic, FOMO, whatever, shoots through me and I get the impulse to grab Peter’s arm and tell him I changed my mind.
Maybe I’m making the wrong choice—running away again.
Let’s get off this train. Let’s stay in the city.
Walk around all night and eat ice cream or pretzels or whatever.
See the bridges lit up. Do they light up?
I want to find out. I want to see the sky turn purple and dusty blue and feel small and big at the same time.
I want to see if Peter’s green eyes turn turquoise at dusk.
But then four men in button-downs and matching haircuts stumble onto the train, shouting like they’re inside a frat house and not in a tiny metal tube filled with other people.
They slap each other on the back and congratulate themselves on (I assume) being the winning race and gender in this country.
One of them locks eyes with me as they shove their way to the back of the train. He stops, his hand gripping the top of the seat in front of me. His gold watch glints under the blinking fluorescents. I want to peel his fingers off the chair and bend them backward until they break.
“Hey.” He smiles at me, sloppy and stonelike at the same time. I push my teeth down hard, yearning for something to bite. One of his compatriots pushes him past me, and they continue to the back, where they keep laughing too loudly.
Oh, whoopsie daisy.
My heart thuds against my chest, and I slump back in my seat, wishing I had a hoodie to pull over my face—fabric to lose myself in, to forget where and who I am.
I settle for staring hard at the smudged pole across from our row.
This is why I don’t come here. There is no escape.
And no number of life-changing ten-minute hot-dog conversations is going to change that.
Peter sits there, rubbing the back of his neck and stealing looks at me, before deciding to keep his mouth shut and open the Kindle app on his phone instead.
The Scent Keeper. I peek over his shoulder.
“Maybe that’s how it always is, I thought—we all just go along, catching glimpses of one another, thinking we know everything. ”
That’s not it, I think, leaning my head against the rattling train window as we lurch away from the city. We go along, catching snippets that other people feed us, clinging to the lie of who they say they are. We don’t know shit.