I don’t think there’s anyone left here to come. It jolted through me. I felt it in my heart. Not sarcastic, like Maggs always was, but changed, like fact. Like she was scared. It was enough, just then, to push me off the air mattress and down the two flights of stairs from my shitty room in the garret to Dahlem’s shitty room on the second floor. PBR cans lined the stairs, not all of them empty—leftover from what had started as an open mic. So many new faces come through the house, gone from it again, voices become a part of the walls. Lives transient, unfixed; no roots, no ties. Only the smell of cigarettes, weed, the impressions of words or dances or songs—it’s all that ever lingers in the mornings, with the promise that soon, again, tonight, tomorrow, always, we will be reborn. I knocked on Dahlem’s door. No answer, so I let myself in. He was sprawled in bed, passed out from whatever he drank, or maybe smoked, or took, before finally he brought the show to its end, close to dawn. He called them magnificent, the poets, the artists, and they were—he made them so. Asked everything from those who went up to perform, and for him, they always found something more with which to say, This—this!—is me. I crawled in next to him—his single bed too small for the both of us, but at least it doesn’t creak with the settling of plastic and air. I pressed myself into his back, my nose against the furrows of his spine. The ceiling so high above us, I whispered, “I need you to come home with me.” Dahlem rolled over, the push away before pressing me close. He touched my face. His voice doubled in the vibrations between us, as he said to me, only to me, “Anything for you.” * We’re halfway to the bar when Dahlem asks, “What’s that?” and Ronan brakes hard in the middle of the road. In the light of the sun setting behind the trees, just empty pastures and deer wandering the side of the pavement. Up ahead, the dead man’s curve, and I think maybe that’s where he’s looking. “What’s up?” Maggs gets as close as she can to standing in the cab and leans against the headrest. Her fingers near Dahlem’s neck, so close she could touch the fringes of his hair, tangle herself up in him. “All I see are trees. You know, like nature. They have that here.” All I see is Maggs, taking up space in the window. He says, half-laughing, “No, it’s in the trees. What is that?” When he points, I see what he sees: a tall building painted blue, back far in
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