You nod your chin at the bag. “Whatcha got there?”
I knead the bottom of it with my fingers; it’s stuffed full of someone else’s supplies. “Just some goodies,” I say.
I hold the backpack in front of me until we’re out of sight, to minimize the likelihood that it will look familiar to anyone. We walk north for a while, away from human activity, and then east, mostly not speaking. At one point a line of police cars barrels down the street in the direction we came from; the instinct is to turn and watch them disappear behind us, but we don’t. Eventually the sirens fade into nothing, into the backdrop. As always, we scope out our street for on-lookers, and then, confirming that we’re alone, we duck into the gated area in front to enter through the abandoned basement, pitch-dark, which we navigate like a haunted house, me first and you behind, your hand on my collar. We climb the four flights of stairs to the top floor, not really taking care to quiet our feet. On the landing, I drop the bag like a sack of groceries and unconsciously, mechanically reach into my pocket for a key—this idea of “coming home after a night out” having swept over me—but, of course, there isn’t one. There isn’t even a door. We walk through the open frame.
Two objects resolve themselves in the moonlight filtered through the blindless broken windows, this absence of barriers even further evidence of what this building is not, and has never been in our time: the vase overturned on its side, and a figure wrapped in my sleeping bag.
“Someone is sleeping in my bed.” I don’t know if I say it out loud or not; either way, all of my breath is gone.
We stand frozen in the doorway, totally silent, like we’ve accidentally walked in on an intimate exchange in which we play no part. I feel warmth in my left hand, and realize belatedly it’s because yours is wrapped in it. The sound of our presence—our footsteps still on the stairwell, our bodies shifting—draws back like a curtain, and the sound that replaces it is louder than everything: a deep, slow breathing, as if a lead for us to follow, coming from the figure on the floor, peacefully asleep. A growing tower of dread looms above us. I feel deeply betrayed.
Neither of us speaks or moves. The image is too foreign to register properly, though it shouldn’t be—this building wasn’t ours any more than it was anyone else’s, we’ve never had claim to it beyond the fact of our presence, our dwelling over consecutive nights. But my pulse is still racing from the show, I’m brimming with bloody energy, and as our eyes adjust to the dark I recognize more and more: our backpacks, torn inside-out with their contents scattered across the floor, the wind-up flashlight, our candles, water bottles, their shadows interrupting the room’s barren order. I feel my body drain and refill with something uncontrollable, misguidedly righteous—for some reason, the overturned vase upsets me the most, seems the most intentionally arbitrary.
I grit my teeth, and take a step forward into the room, with you at my side.
Something adjusts behind us. I whirl around, panic flooding my chest.
Against the wall, a figure sits in the dark in a collapsible folding chair I’ve never seen before, something you bring to a kid’s soccer game. They hold a knife in their lap, an unreal gleaming blot on the scene. You let out a gasp, an errant breath. I can’t immediately identify the sound I make.
“What are you doing here?” a male voice says from the dark. The accent sounds transplanted here, like someone who’s been training to talk tough. I can’t tell the age.
“We live here,” I say. I feel like I’m telling a lie: no one lives here.
There’s a newspaper on his lap that falls to the ground as he stands. I imagine it’s dated from the day Reagan was elected. The image of him sitting here pretending to read in the dark, waiting for us to arrive, in his ratty chair and its mesh cupholders, is flatly terrifying. “You’ve gotta have someone keep watch. That’s the first fucking rule of this game.”
In the light from the windows he looks ancient, but the voice clashes with the reading, probably less than forty. A mess of tangled long hair hides most of his face, the beard scruffy and incomplete, strived for. He’s dressed in a bulky gray sweater, camo pants, and boots, ballooning his physical stature; I don’t understand why no one here dresses for the season. He is pointing the knife—military grade, made for actual combat—directly at my chest, as if at any moment it could become a gun. The fact that he has a weapon at all seems absurd, an apparition conjured from the most exaggerated and predictable places, like he’s drawn from the newspaper at his feet, with its messages of panic and urban rebellion. I feel you shaking beside me, a furious vibration through our joined limbs. “Also, you need to hide your shit,” he says. “You can’t just leave it lying around for anyone to take.”
His tone is of begrudgingly teaching dumb children a lesson. I wonder how everything became such a cliché. I open and close my fists (letting go of your hand), snatching uselessly at air, as if I’m owed it, as if something will appear in my fingers. Without the physical attachment you seem separate, hovering at a distance.
“At least let us take what we brought with us.”
Part of me thinks I’m being clever, because everything here—except the chair—everything is something we brought in ourselves. A part of me that believes we’ll get away on this technicality, pictures us walking triumphantly burdened down the stairs while he shakes his head with a knowing smile, pure capitulation. To my right, I notice your body shifting, opening minutely up, arms rising, as if in support of what I’ve said, demonstrating reasonableness, that no one wants to die here, and I’m angry at you for it.
“I don’t think so,” the ageless man says. “Everything stays here.” The knife still tipped at us, he kneels down to the newspaper at his feet. His eyes drop from us for a second. Your fingertips brush mine and startled fear pours adrenaline through my body. I throw myself forward and plow him into the wall. Dust and displaced plaster burst around our shoulders. I shove my forearm against his throat above the ragged collar, where the skin feels like it’s barely intact, has ebbed away around the muscle, and I use my other arm to pin his knife hand. He seems to lean into the blow, to buckle around me as if for support. With my weight pressing into him, beneath the baggy clothes, his frame is wasted and crackable, bends to my will. His heart beats in its rickety cage. I imagine you behind me, floating like a planet.
The victory is short-lived. He wrenches his arm free and shoves the knife up through the gap between our bodies, into my face. The rubber handle jams against my mouth and smears it open, digging into my gums and teeth while the very edge of the blade slowly splits my top lip. A metallic chattering fills my ears; the taste spreads like a disease. “I will shove this piece of metal down your throat and I do not give a shit who hears the screaming. Stand down.”
I stand down. My lips curl into my mouth. I’m amazed by how far I have to draw back until our bodies are no longer touching. I back into you, this time desperate for the contact.
He steps forward from the wall. An angry, body-sized patch of material has shaken free from behind him; the stirred dust lends the impression that he is stepping through a veil. His person clarifies: his eyes are vaguely familiar, dark and acquisitive. In his other hand, he un-crumples the newspaper, smooths it on one dusty thigh, and then raises it to his head—it’s folded into a crown. “This city belongs to the kings now,” he says.
My mouth fills with blood for the second time in hours. It stings wildly. I swallow in one gulp, the taste so strong that I feel dizzy. I take your hand again. For some reason, I’m not considering how many more arms we have than he does, that there are two of us against one of him; the darkness around us seems invisibly filled with others, pressing inward, damping our potential. The man, insane-looking, motions