Brad dog-eared the page of a book before the one where he'd left off, as was his custom when he knew he'd been too drunk to absorb information for a little while. He was now even beginning to question his ability to pick up much at all on a good day, when he was in a reasonably lucid state of mind, but he tried his best not to give it too much thought. The TV hummed through the wall from the neighbors, he noticed, now that he'd resigned his attention, paid more mind to the world out there than the one inside him.
It was Tuesday, and he'd seen her again, at lunch—the girl with the toboggan, the striped scarf, the green jacket; he'd begun to see her so often lately that he wondered whether she was even real, if he might be making things up.
It had all started on the train a few weeks ago, coming home from a bar, a woman he'd never met before cradled in his arm. The night had gone well until then, but that's when he'd seen the other woman, the one in the toboggan, the scarf, the jacket, and felt immediately that this wayward night had come to an end, that the pathway to bedlam had been roadblocked, and that he may never make love in the same way again—it would seldom seem authentic, too contrived, too forced. The girl had the sort of face which, as far as he could tell, could belong either to someone five years younger than him or five years his senior, and listened to an old, black, off-brand CD player. When she'd suddenly spoken—not to him, but to apologize to the man next to her—her voice was sturdy and resonant, like it had come from the bottom of a bucket.
He said goodbye to the girl from the bar when the train came to his stop—he had class early in the morning, and it was later than he thought, he'd lied—and walked the three blocks home under the early morning stars.
Since then he'd seen her everywhere. The library, two coffee shops back-to-back, when he walked off the campus where he attended graduate classes and through the city. More than the uncharacteristic infatuation, what stuck out to him was how she'd become, in some surreal way, a part of his daily routine, built into his life by circumstance.
Brad lifted the pint of whiskey to his mouth and took a swill, imagined how his tongue, his cheeks, his chapped lips might have reacted to the heat if it were the first time all over again. He walked to the kitchen and removed a to-go box containing half of a turkey sandwich from the day before. "I'll need this for later," he'd told the lunchtime bartender, wearing a grin that didn't mean anything, "when I'm inevitably beyond repair." Brad ate the sandwich and went to bed without brushing his teeth.
Then it was a Wednesday.
This one started the same way they usually did, with Brad teaching an introductory course on American philosophy. Over the past few months, they'd covered Transcendentalism, worked their way up to Pragmatism, would end in a few weeks with American post-structuralism. Brad liked pragmatism because it never entered into much of a relationship with the thought of real life, was droll, dull and tame. The denominators were always common, and usually low, the only way they could be in a school of thought predicated on making decisions. How often did he make decisions? And how often did those seem to be 'momentous'?
When class was over, Brad spent a few hours wandering through the city, which changed every time he looked at it—he remembered the nights, years ago, that he'd walk through it with a friend from college, on the way to some bar on the boulevard, over the paved hills and under the streetlights that set the whole place awash in a dull glow. How he'd see a festival or a protest in the corner parks, how he'd spent an evening racing a girl he'd met at a bar to the train station. The city, staying the same throughout all the years he'd been in it, always kept an element of surprise handy.
Brad stopped into a shack in an alleyway for a cold beer and a taco. He flashed his ID—BRAD MEYERS, born August 17, 1989, hair BR, eyes BLU—and sat at a table. While he scrolled through an article on his phone, he wondered whether he might see her here, sitting in the corner under the decades-old "Cold Beer" sign, scribbling onto a napkin, with her boyfriend, tying her sneakers. He scarfed down the taco, threw the plate in the garbage can, and the table looked the same it had before he'd even walked in—no one would ever know.
The train moved slowly on the way back to his duplex on the edge of town, and he used the time to look out the windows in the way that he never did, as he passed under bridges, alongside parkways. There were new places that he remembered having opened here and there, but in retrospect they seemed to have always been adrift in the world, out there, waiting to have been eaten at, packed with moviegoers for the premiere, the rows of bookshelves inside plundered.
Brad picked up the remote control, turned on a documentary about Carthusian monks in the French Alps. Brad had known that the documentary was silent, steeped from inside out in rigorous technique, but when he listened anyway, he could feel it interrogating him.
On Thursday, Brad poured what was left of his whiskey into his coffee cup—nearly perfect, it filled just under a shot's worth of the mug—and topped it with piping hot coffee. The burning aroma of whiskey spilled into the air and rang through it like a shot. As Brad took measured sips of the drink, he could feel it affect him in the opposite way: slowly, warming the front of his brain, bringing the day to a lull.
He sat on the train in near silence. Three stops from the university, somebody tried to get through the doors as they slid shut, wrenching their arm through, getting caught at the wrist. The hand held tightly to a black briefcase—leather, and cheap by the looks of it—and tried to snake itself in between them.
"Please," a voice pleaded from outside, "I can't be late again. Not today." It seemed to be foreign from the hand dangling there, as though it were coming from a completely different body. Everyone on the train looked first at the red button fixed to the wall, encased inside the clear plastic, then at one other. When the briefcase fell, everybody stared into it, like it had suddenly turned into a strange, tragic animal.
Brad's paper on twentieth-century German aesthetics had won him some favor from the professors in the literature department, so he—alongside three others—stood at the front of the classroom and read, his eyes gliding seamlessly over the pages, more for structure and underlying support than to be snagged or caught on any of the words sticking out past the margin.
When he went home, he strung a tennis ball from the ceiling in the back of his garage so that, in the rare event he used his car, he'd know where to stop, park, turn it off. He peeled back the lid of the canister and felt the musty smell hit his nose, the unmistakable scent of the bright green balls. The closest thing he could compare it to was rope.
He sat at the table and ate half a plate of stir fry he'd put together, then went straight to bed, thought about the next time he might see the girl in the scarf. He'd planned it all out in his head, the different ways it might possibly go. The opportunities were endless—maybe he'd be standing in line at a used bookstore, spending the last few bucks he didn't need for rent on some kitschy novel from the 70s, and she'd be the one who rang him up. Or else she'd be sitting on a beanbag at one of the coffee shops where he'd seen her before, drinking something with foam on top—he wouldn't be able to see what it was through the porcelain mug, but he could imagine she'd have sweetened it with simple syrup, drank it over the span of an hour. Then again, the weather was getting warmer. Maybe it would be iced.
It was balmy on Friday, so Brad left his tweed jacket at home and drove to his two seminars at the school, taught a class on Plato that afternoon, graded some papers. He drove home and took the train halfway into the city, stopped into one of the bars he'd passed in the last few days, decided he would give it a chance. All he had to worry about was paying rent and turning in a draft late the next week, catching the train home tonight, trying to pull himself from bed in the next morning—something which, as he got older, he found harder and harder to do.
He wondered whether he might see the girl in the green scarf here, how long into the year she would wear it, hoped he'd be able to recognize her without it. When he tried to produce an image of her face—toboggan off, jacket tied around her waist—he put together features, but couldn't get a picture that matched, not like he remembered. He would have to wait and see. Brad ordered a beer and a shot of tequila, and wondered what it might be like to set Eden aflame.