I

The last to leave my office, I shut the blinds and feel the night slip over me in spite of the light outside. Closing the day and enumerating every set-back and undone accomplishment. Daily resignation.

It’s in the bathroom that I stare myself down again, elbows on my knees and four eyes interlocked in the bottom two inches of the mirror above the sink. I grimace over a black shit made of Pepto Bismol and coffee. I’ve rounded the corner to my mid-twenties and suddenly I look so old—fluorescent light seems to deepen the creases on my forehead, and from this shivering stoop my eyes are dark and heavy beneath the shadow of my brow. Across from me I can only see a shaved ape. A liar. A wastrel. In the office—around my peers—I can put on a different face, but when I’m all alone there’s nothing left to prop me up.

Standing, I rediscover my skeletal thinness as it’s reflected back half-length in the mirror. Bending over the sink I can see my ribs through the hole where my collar hangs limp from my neck, taught skin daubed in a sickly pink-ish paleness. Languid and wavering in place under the drape of my clothes, like a cancer patient stuck between hospital rooms. I wonder whether there was a point to all those comments I got as a kid (and even still) about “filling out.” Whether it’s compulsion or revulsion or just inability that binds me into such a gaunt frame. Now the ape looks like a corpse. Or a ghoul. So I flick out the lights. Leaning back against the door I collect myself, swimming up above the swarm of thoughts that seems to find me after each weekly meeting, after each stint in the office. The smell of my own shit lingers in the air. I give up and I creep out.

Empty halls. Orange sunlight. Slant shadows and mechanical stillness. All the machines sitting idle emitting a subtle collective hum from the de-peopled labs and offices. The little whir of computer fans that seeps through the walls. Buzzing electronics on the powered-down lasers and microscopes and vacuums. The hollow soughing of air ducts. But in spite of the apparent isolation it’s almost guaranteed that somewhere in the building someone else is still puttering away, drafting lines to a thesis or a code or turning dials and making readings—at any hour. Unlike me they’re making progress. They’re still here because they have something worth doing. I’m still here because it takes me time to muster the courage to leave my desk, to say “I’m done” after doing so little. And it gets darker as I reflect on that. I watch the blue of the sky vanish into greyness behind the monolithic walls outside. Again and again I notice just how gigantic and terrible all these buildings are, their sheer walls of brick and stone and concrete that dwarf all the trees, towering and demanding surrender. Here I am, swallowed whole.

Eight o’clock. Still lingering in the office hallway, but now slave to the sick churning in my stomach. Looking forward to a meal waiting pre-packaged and frozen back at home: a bag of dumplings that was stamped and filled and crimped in a factory somewhere, and which I’ll shovel in mounds down my throat. But before that there’s a walk ahead of me, and already I have a vision of what else is waiting for me: the clothes strewn about, the dirty tissues overflowing from the trash, papers scattered, dust collecting—a dirty hovel where I eat and sleep. The only place of reprieve is my bed: two blankets that I launch into face-first, trapping the anguished squirming that I can’t hold back at home, burrowing and gripping like a frustrated child. In that linty pile I can close my eyes and know that no one else can see me. I can shut out the world by force and resign myself to another night of dreams. Vivid dreams. Dreams that run on incomprehensible logic. Dreams that punctuate these otherwise indiscernible days. Dreams that terminate in half-awake hallucinations. In the mornings I so often wake just to close my eyes again and put the night’s scenes on repeat. It’s not waking up that’s hard, it’s getting out of bed.

II

On my back in the lunch room, seven-thirty, Friday night. A light on behind me, I’m on the couch. Beside me—on the coffee table between me and the big window‍—is an empty plastic tub, which half an hour ago had my dinner in it, which I’m picking out of my teeth now, sliding my tongue along the grimy ridges of my mouth. There’s nothing to look forward to. All I’ve got in my head are the ugly continuations of arguments that keep pointlessly spiralling. When I stare at the perforated tiles on the ceiling I see clouds of red and blue scattering between the holes‍—I can focus in and out and watch them appear and disappear. I feel full. I feel awake. I feel empty.

Closer to eight-thirty it dawns on me: at nine the liquor store closes. The rest of the day had been building up to this moment, but I hadn’t realised it. There must have been a silent pocket in my stomach that had hollowed itself out for just this reason. I think about the paltry minutes it’ll take to pack up and bike home—I can get back by quarter-to—but I’ll need to walk from my place to the store—ten minutes if I’m fast. So with an exacting rhythm I pedal home, gliding through intersections with automatic precision, cutting important seconds off of my commute. I keep eating clouds of mosquitoes but I’m fast and my bike ride is like a trip down a river.

It’s muggy out and I don’t know what time it is, so once I’m home I barrel through the front doors fumbling with my keys and searching all my pockets for my wallet and my headphones and my phone making sure I’ve got my ID and wondering, still, if I have enough time. But once I huck my things through the apartment door (and forget to lock it) I see that it’s only 8:42, which gives me plenty of time. In spite of that, I feel the anxiety building as 9:00 approaches, and a few steps away from my door I notice how itchy I am and how hot it is which is making me sweat which probably reeks and how my scalp feels like it’s crawling and I’m scratching everywhere. Open-mouth chewing my gum and somehow there’s confidence under it all, so I double back to hang my jacket by the door, and then leave, again, deciding I don’t care how I smell so long as I make it in time.

8:43 and I’m lurching down the sidewalk like the star in a Patterson–Gimlin film, this tight feeling knotting itself into my brow, apishly picking at my crown, turning my nails black with crud. I’m sure I’m making good time but every minute screams at me and I think of all the things that could slow me down, walking down streets of people I know and hoping to God I don’t see them because sweating eyes-wide in the street and muttering “sorry, the liquor store is gonna close” would make me look like a louse—something much smaller than the ape I feel like. But the air feels good with the menthol on my tongue. Making progress.

The blocks evaporate in front of me until there’s just one left and I check my phone, finally, and it’s 8:54. At that the anxiety sloughs off of me and I feel the little rush of confidence in knowing that I’m going to make it—I can even see the doors now. It’s a calm, thoughtless trip through the front and to the rack with the cheap wine, cash-back at the till ($40), back out the door, gripping the bottle by the neck through my bag, feeling myself calming down and welling up with the confidence that budded earlier. It makes the walk home different: taking the main street, eyeing people and passing through crowds, slowing down a little. I have a loose hold on the plastic bottle in my left hand and I feel my right hand opening and closing as I think. Strangers becomes extremes: women whose bodies I digest with my eyes, and every man a wimpish thug. A glut of confident, hateful anomie. Something tantalising and surreal about it, thoughts ricocheting around my skull in placid silence, a bundled enigma that passes in arm’s length of all these people. Then, finally alone, behind locked doors and closed curtains, stripping nude and gulping between shudders. A rushed shower, re-dressing, and out again.

In a few hours it’s all obliterated. (How much have you had to drink?) Memories that mean nothing—a smear of faces and drinks and scenes. Lips that press outside, negative space. Glasses clinking. Deliberate looks. Handing bills to a prattling junkie, opining about my father. A girl whose name I can’t remember and whose mouth feels like a void. The drunk Quebecer jabbering in French. The strangers who know my face, who know my name. And they all leave me. Nothing left but brief, transient touches, evaporating on dewy skin, evaporating into the fog of declining nights.

The walk home goes on without memory, just tableaux of garbage and concrete, hidden under the oppression of drunkenness. A world that swims, sublimating in the morning to reveal: Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Lying alone, staring up at the same spackle ceiling as yesterday and yesterday’s yesterday and so on, each morning a lossless replica of the last one. A night worth little more than a dream.

III

Rusted minivans. Babies in strollers. Dogs on leads. FAT MAN ON BIKE, spandex bib. “Historic district.” Elderly women with tan-wrinkled fat arms cushioned against their sides. Girls with dyed hair, women I’d fuck, memorising bodies and faces, running home to come into the sink with their afterimages still painted on my eyelids. Half-day shadows dwelling on sidewalks. Coffee getting cold. Books unread. Not. Feeling. Anything. Just friction burn on my cock, ache of my ass in a seat for an hour, the weird swell in my eyes pushing out at my temples. Just these physical things that chase me, run me down to ageing oblivion. Drinks still in my gut, long past the alcoholic burn and rush, cheap liquor in alcoves. Pizza boxes, faces I recognise, grass rushing in the breeze, posters signs flags dresses bodies tails wheels masks lamps locks reflections.

Little bugs on the window I want to squash with my thumb, one by one, make little splotches on the glass, dead little swarms, miniature lives.

Pink purse against a black skirt, designer sweaters in the dollar store, platform shoes, hijab, N95. Tattoos and crosses and rainbow knick-knacks. Tiny dog with no nutsack, sewn shut—furry eunuchs everywhere. The impish dyke, jeering smile, looking in at me from the sidewalk. Stinker, stupid kids, “DO NOT TAP ON GLASS.” A crawling bubbling feeling in my gut, shit clawing its way to my ass. Nothing stands in the way of nature: shitting pissing fucking sleeping eating and cleaning it all up, prettying the mess of living, dressing it like a doll just to dunk it in a festering swamp. Can’t even kill yourself without shitting your pants—I could blow my brains out right here right now in this café and they’d be wiping up turds mixed with gore.

Go to the bathroom, walk in on a bum who shouts me back from the sink. Use the toilet after he leaves and find cum in the bowl. Wipe the seat and remove my shirt (advantage of individual bathroom), door gets tried a half-dozen times while I try to shit, startling me into premature pinches always worried the lock won’t hold. Sign up on the door reads “LOCKED IF HANDLE DOESN’T TURN” but people keep fucking trying and pushing and straining against the door and I’m scared to be caught half-nude mid-shit. I smell my own sweat below the anti-septic soapy reek of the room—I like it but wipe it out with wet paper towel. When I’m done a certain girl is gone—tall, dark hair, different outfit from yesterday—but maybe she’s shitting in the other bathroom next to me. Scared to meet her gaze, I keep seeing her around, makes me forget what I’m saying. Makes me wonder whether she can read “PERVERT” written on my face when she sees me.

Pile of dead bugs below the window. If I focus I can see my reflection in the glass.