It takes over two hours to get the vase back to our building, and a superhuman effort to haul it from the basement to the third floor, the sounds of our struggle magnified through the stairwell and across the spaces between neighboring buildings, but the whole way no one says anything to us, no one asks about its provenance. That night, when we always pose the most sensitive questions, when we’re wrapped in our individual sleeping bags on the dusty floor like two little cocoons in the big big city, staring up at the crumbling ceiling cast by borrowed light through the empty windows, you ask if I took the vase—out of everything else available and still intact—because it reminded me of something.
It’s the perfect time to mention your brother or, more broadly, willpower itself—the reason we’re lying on this floor, the way we arrived here in the city—to bring up what we’re both denying. Instead, I reach over and brush a swoop of stray hawk from your forehead and say something about our derelict space needing an “aspect of Japan,” but it’s a non-sequitur like my Mia Farrow tattoo is a non-sequitur—thematically distinct from the objects around it. I say pointlessly, reiterating, though I’ve never been there, “It reminds me of Japan.” I say nothing about your hair.
*
Our last year in college, just after we moved together as a couple into the only apartment for which we ever paid rent, back in Richmond, on our first night we sat face-to-face on the second-hand couch and screamed at each other, the taped-up boxes and garbage bags and implements of our moving arrayed around us: no words, just long, sustained howls, repeated at different pitches and escalating volume until we both went hoarse. Your voice gave first—before our new neighbors started banging on the wall—but not by much. Like many of the gestures we made during that time, it recalled an animal claim about ownership, served as a marker of something (a living situation, a pair-bond) that we thought of as potentially permanent, despite the month-to-month lease and translucent white paint on the walls that hid no history, all of seven months between us and rival human life on every side. When I decided where to position the Japanese vase (which ended up being directly in the center of the living room, or what had once been the living room), you eyed it from the doorway to the stairwell like the presence of any furniture at all was an imposition, then took a running start and slammed into it just to prove the vase wouldn’t topple, that it could take the weight we gave it.
In this new space, our aspiration is to the appearance of abandonment. To the police, the urban adventurer, anyone else who ignored the weathered surveillance placards and bolted door and made their way to the third floor of this building, the vase would register as a solitary, unwieldy piece of decoration left behind by the previous occupants when they moved on, a token bit of randomness, like the single pristine stuffed animal unearthed from a demolished office complex, a sign that some-one had once cared. It wouldn’t betray us.
I’d looked forward to the anonymity of the city, its famous capacity for disappearance. The size really was beyond belief, and in the macro sense, true, I could die virtually without impact, but the promise felt unfulfilled—I hadn’t been able to vanish in the way that I wanted. The first time I rode the subway alone I’d felt noted and itemized, broken into parts; whenever I raised my eyes above my lap I’d seen the man across from me staring beneath his cap, and I sat there caught in a confused mess of acknowledgment, reading menace everywhere, wondering what the problem was, if I exhibited some kind of aberrance I didn’t recognize or had unknowingly breached a fundamental social contract between us, between me and this stranger, these strangers. I felt a tingling sensation pass from one extremity to the next, as if awaiting sudden blood flow, for a visible wound to re-open. I grew all at once more uncomfortable than I had with any cop. I crossed and uncrossed my legs. I watched his shoe—more of a workboot—but couldn’t raise myself any higher. He got off the train at the same stop I did, and I dawdled until he moved off ahead. A part of it was obvious and all too familiar—we’d been fashioning ourselves to look like outcasts since long before we knew each other—but this was supposed to be different.
There was something between us and the city that didn’t take. The facade of urban life was crumbling by the time we arrived, certain institutions had broken open for the taking, and as soon as we stepped off the bus, briefed in nothing, your empty car sitting in a lot X states away, we knew there was no way we were going to live according to someone else’s formula. The vase, an ancient object from a past entirely separate to ours, was as good a marker as a door. We entered and exited at will.
I’m someplace downtown, far from home, when I’m turned out again, sent blinking into the sunlight like someone who’s never seen it. I’m still learning to recognize the places that are patrolled versus those that are now left empty, but this one I entered on purpose, because the building positively bled luxury—stone beasts out front, deco columns into infinity, factory-level air conditioning you could feel from the street whenever the motion-activated doors slid open—and I was curious to see how deep I could go. In fact, I hadn’t even crossed to the bone-colored elevator bay when someone was following me, was communicating via earpiece, was putting his hand on my arm and leading me back to the street.
The stifling summer air hits me full-force, and a feverish dizziness rushes through my body at the sudden temperature shift. Behind me, the guard returns invisibly to his post. Before me, the rest of the day uncoils, filled with unspecified activity. We’ve been in the city for just over a month, the apartment for the last two weeks, and I still have no idea where anything is relative to anything else. I consider retreating to our building and waiting for you, but when I linger there for too long by myself the disrepair and lack of functionality starts to eat at me, as does my inability to address it, and our situation dissolves into an unstable mess of contradictory, half-assed morals, something we wrote too large too quickly, a ’90s squatter myth we were doing wrong. Our departure has felt like a given since before we arrived, since I reached into my backpack on the bus and realized I’d never owned a pocketknife.
A sickening wind blows across the city, and with it the unmistakable smell of baking garbage. The sidewalk is swarming. I watch the people dividing into pairs. A wasted kid in baggy tan clothes activates as a handsomely dressed young woman carrying black paper bags nears him. She pauses when he speaks to her and looks confused, tilting her head minutely, politely forward, like she can’t quite make out what he’s saying. I walk past them. After a minute she cuts him off and takes a few steps away in the other direction; he follows. She speeds up a little, quivering on her thick heels, and he matches her pace, continuing to talk while blocking her off, reaching one hand in front of her like, You haven’t decided where you’re going. I will them to separate, for the crowd to funnel in and redistribute them far apart, but they’re quickly lost in the traffic. I imagine how much our circumstances would have to change for us to switch positions, me with this kid, this woman.
Along the sidewalk, a placid stream of milky-colored water stagnates in the gutter—the summer must be the worst season. I pass a high-end lingerie store advertising scandalous underwear. A bare mattress lies discarded on the side of the street. I consider it theoretically, as a fixture in someone’s home somewhere in the past, sustaining their impact daily, now lobbed out among the populace. I’m amazed by how instantaneously everything can turn to funhouse-like squalor. I could close my eyes, open them, and everything would be different.
A spanging couple is camped under an awning with a sleeping dog and a cardboard sign offering hugs. The dog looks like a prop. I raise my hand to my face as I walk past, really my stretched earlobe, our visual match. I can’t tell if they acknowledge me.
When they’re out of sight, I close my eyes, and take eight steps in the dark. The experience is extremely disorienting, but in a pleasantly weightless way, especially when