585

(the facts and the ruling don’t agree)

I. PIRATES For years I have been 585 in his phone

not Austin, not anything with roses, just area code, lake-effect, little upstate weather filed under digits.

Our history had already been smoke / records / Degenerates / almosts.

One year ago: weed and talking and nothing.

Four weeks ago: fifteen hours on my couch, Call Me By Your Name for his first time, his shirt quietly resigning, dawn catching us like a landlord.

Then back to almost no texts.

Fine. Not fine. Weather pattern.

So when he asked me to come to PIRATES I became a bodega with feelings.

White Claws. Oreos. My idiot liturgy.

Do not ask me why Oreos.

I guess I thought a beautiful man in technical distress might need cream filling.

I was too excited. Adult man / area code / PhD / nice sweater / still basically a golden retriever ringing the gate.

Because the invitation had been mine.

Petty little permitting office inside my chest stamping APPROVED on the fact of being asked.

PIRATES:

black foam, aquarium law, every cable in Brooklyn trying to molt.

He was already bent over the laptop, all curls and static, that gorgeous posture people do when the body says I’m fine and the eyes file an appeal.

Red LEDs blinking like tiny ambulance tongues.

Nate arrived first as a voice in the machine.

Then the machine grew legs.

There he was ex / friend / firmware update.

This is not jealousy. This is backend dependency.

And because Nate is my friend too it got worse by staying reasonable.

Nobody screaming. Nobody evil. Nobody giving me the good hard clean drama required for righteous exit.

I stood there holding warm White Claws like junior clergy assigned to bless an outage.

The Oreos. Please retain the Oreos.

I bought another hour as if privacy took quarters. As if enough minutes could turn a city into two men.

Instead the hour grew limbs.

Laptop illness. Cables. Apology. His little spiral. My little hope trying not to look fluorescent.

Then we left for the rave

and history came too, still loading.

II. RAVE The bass was not a metaphor.

It had a lease in my molars.

Fog thick enough to pet back. Purple light not landing anywhere, just hanging in the air like the inside of a bruise, or a lung, or a church left running overnight for nobody.

Wet denim. Mint gum. Vape sugar. Cigarettes. Somebody’s jaw writing a sequel to itself. Somebody kissing like it was cardio. Pupils like nickels. Mesh. Leather. A wrist with powder on it like fresh weather.

Everybody silhouette.

That was the democracy: my PhD evaporated on contact. My day job. My one clean dinner-party self.

Shape only. Beat only. For a little while that felt like salvation.

Nate there too, because a tech emergency, once admitted, always wants a wristband.

Elias about to play. The room going harder less flirt, more factory, more chain-link choir, more radiator, more iron filing in the mouth.

Then Marco. Then Vale.

Brooklyn filing amended paperwork.

I thought Marco was in Miami. Instead he was in the doorway and I was in his sweater,

which is the kind of detail God only writes when He is feeling camp.

The sweater didn’t even smell like him anymore. It smelled like me, laundry detergent, fog machine, Friday.

Still my shoulders knew.

Once he texted like weather. Then we finally did the body thing. Then boyfriend. Then museum.

Fine.

Democratic neglect still lands like a specific bird.

And the room kept hardening. Elias got smaller around the eyes.

Not just nervous about the music nervous about the room becoming meaner than the set, nervous about Marco standing there in his successful little aura, nervous in that very specific way artists get when the problem is suddenly public.

strobe

his shoulders

strobe

Marco in the doorway

strobe

my own body in somebody else’s sweater

strobe

the set list no longer matching the room

strobe

too many inputs / process hanging

strobe

So I said

hey grab your bag. let’s go fix it.

As if I had authority. As if being drunk does not sometimes make me briefly excellent.

So we left the rave to fix the rave.

Out into East Williamsburg, which at that hour is not a neighborhood so much as a surface trying very hard not to admit it’s wet.

Black gum fossils. A puddle doing oil rainbow. Freezer runoff. Chain-link. Loading dock. A dumpster lid vibrating with the bass through the wall like a bad second heart.

We sat in a dark corner that had fully given up on being a sidewalk.

The laptop open on his knees, ghost-light blue, making both of us look slightly interrogated.

And it was funny.

That is what I keep forgetting. It was so funny.

Me, who had been on calls about missing computers for Microsoft Sweden, now drunk on filthy concrete next to a loading dock, helping a beautiful panicking man convince a playlist to grow teeth.

He scrolled. I pointed.

No, keep the ugly one.

Yes, the one that sounds like a radiator giving legal advice.

Meaner than that.

No, meaner.

Perfect.

He swore at a file. I laughed. I rubbed his shoulders. He laughed too.

The whole city shrank to one manageable problem:

make it darker, make it harder, make it fit the room, make him stop spiraling, make the set survive.

A truck went by. The streetlight made a puddle look briefly alive.

Some rat somewhere declined to comment.

Then back in.

He played.

And for a while the room took his side.

Smoke learning arithmetic. Bass in steel-toed boots. His body up there half outline, half command.

Not hot exactly. Not only hot.

Beautiful in the stupid old sense: making the air agree to reorganize itself.

Then the set ended. Then he vanished bathroom / darkness / boy republic, who knows.

And there it was again:

Marco Nate Adrian Vale me

Brooklyn, where even the side quests have slept together.

If you were stupid it looked like nightlife.

If you were me it looked like a cursed little committee.

The only way I could keep standing there was under the legal fiction that I was there with Elias.

And maybe I was. That is what made it unbearable.

The fog got thicker or I got thinner. Same visible result.

My body began rehearsing exits with real professionalism.

So I left.

No speech. No blaze. No plot.

Just peeled myself out of the room like a sticker realizing too late it had been placed on the wrong bottle.

Uber.

Lana doing drywall work inside my ribcage.

Home. III. MEADOWS

At home I put the jeans on the floor, left the room dark, opened the glowing machine, and started litigating.

Very elegant sadness. Very good theory. All my little zoning concerns.

I was in bed turning fog into prose for the polite oracle

when the phone lit up with bad grammar and perfect timing:

Did you left??

yes, i said. couldn’t find you to say bye

Aw i was looking for you!

There went my clean little ruling.

Then:

i came to an afters

come hahaha

it’s a sick afters

At eight in the morning I got into another Uber and returned to the weather.

No meadows on Meadow Street.

Only chain-link, loading docks, truck breath, industrial refrigerator light, the city forgetting to rinse the night off.

He was upstairs when my Uber pulled in.

From the balcony

AUSTIN!!

Like my name had done something right.

I have had more elegant romance. I have not had hotter romance.

Inside:

not comedown.

The opposite.

The rave had simply survived the sun.

Harder, actually. Faster. Dumber. More exact.

The sun was just a rumor happening to other people, people with brunch, people with plans, people who did not currently need to watch a woman in a black corset in what I can only describe as beta testing the body.

Old men in pink suits running public works.

Women in their fifties or older on acid making bird calls with such commitment I briefly believed they had invented birds and were now checking on them.

A guy passing out fairy wands like a deranged municipal employee.

Someone dancing on something absolutely not zoned for dancing.

Everything filthy. Everything chemical. Everything weirdly well-administered.

K-holes with bylaws. Cigarettes with institutional memory. A whole queer republic held together by eyeliner, electrical tape, electrolytes, and underground legend.

They looked at me and kind of giggled

not mean, more like:

you absolutely do not belong here, this is adorable, we all freakin love it.

Golden retriever at the dungeon. 585 in a room full of older codes.

And then, horrible news

they loved me.

Everybody telling him I was hilarious. Everybody telling me too. That they loved me. That I was fun. That I was hysterical, which I chose to hear as praise and not diagnosis.

People texting me from ten feet away. My own phone turning into a tiny applause machine.

Someone asked what I did.

Only once.

The only time the old world even tried.

I said

I forgot.

Which was true.

I had forgotten the job. The servers. The nice sweater. The careful boy. The whole well-lit paragraph of myself.

I had a fairy wand in my pocket like a pen.

At 11am I was shaking my ass in front of a room full of strangers and legends and corset women and bird-call aunties and a man in pink who might have been the mayor of whatever country this was.

Everybody silly. Everybody wrecked. Everybody somehow more themselves for it.

The room kept voting yes on me.

Not because I understood it. Because I didn’t. Because I walked in open. Because I showed up with Oreos to a systems failure. Because I was loose enough to let the room mispronounce me into joy.

And through all of it Elias kept finding me.

Not grabby. Not performance. Not nightlife-boy theater.

Just

backpack shoulder face check-in orbit reappearing like weather.

A glance from across the room. A hand near my elbow. A tiny census:

you good / still here / still having a body

no spotlight on it.

That low little register. That private frequency.

Sometimes I found him by backpack.

Sometimes he found me by being exactly where my nervous system wanted him to be.

Around us the republic kept escalating.

Bird calls. Corsets. Fairy-wand bureaucracy. Acid aunties. Pink-suit public works. Someone laughing so hard it sounded like my own chest. Music still chewing metal. Everyone more outline than citizen.

And I somehow could talk to anyone.

Not careful funny. Not dinner-party funny. Not PhD funny.

Funny with my whole body. Loose. Feral at the edges. The kind of funny that makes underground legends pass your number around like contraband.

Turns out I can enter the republic unescorted.

Useful information.

Still whenever his backpack crossed the room my whole little area code relaxed.

At noon he wanted Nowadays.

The phone became a seagull:

whaaaat. come to nowies

comeee

i’m on my way to nowies

I wanted my bed, my face washed off, a small domestic government of blankets.

So I said no in a tone that kept dressing refusal in lip gloss.

He kept leaning on the screen door a little.

Then later

hey sorry i was on the dancefloor and didn’t check my phone! but left already are you still awake? come thru

We do not really text.

I am still 585 in his phone area code, little upstate weather, a number trying to become somebody’s actual name.

Our history prefers other media:

fog couch USB fifteen-hour eclipse fairy wand balcony bird call loading dock his shoulders under my hands my name shouted into morning the exact moment we met remembered years later with disgusting precision

and then, in ordinary daylight, the messages that sound almost too simple to be dangerous:

thanks for your great vibes and for being there during my spirals this weekend

let’s hang soon

when are you usually free

IV. ROOFS Apparently when are you usually free was load-bearing.

Boxers. Ninth Avenue. Six o'clock. Men in tank tops. Sports on mute. The avenue pretending it had never met us in the fog.

I heard his grandmother's name before I finished my first drink.

That's how fast the evening left the building.

We debriefed the hallucination Marco, annoying. Afters, unbelievable. Bird calls, confirmed real. Fairy wand, still in my jacket. The curb, still in my body.

Every sentence a tiny land survey of the same feral country we had not yet left.

He said he wanted to play that party.

I said message the promoter.

He picked up his phone and because his entire operating system runs on beauty and miscalculation he sent it as a disappearing message.

Ambition with a thirty-second half-life.

Gorgeous. Talented. A little shy about asking the world for anything permanent.

The bar got too loud or we got too quiet same acoustic result

and what I need you to understand is that we did not go home.

We went up.

His roof. Cracked concrete. Wires no one claimed. Puddles doing nothing artistic. A satellite dish that stopped receiving signal before either of us had an area code.

The skyline burning overtime in every window, and the sky that purple-almost-black New York does when it is about to let you make a terrible decision with beautiful clarity.

White Claws on the ledge. Always White Claws. The sacrament.

Something on the roof between us making every sentence feel like it mattered because for once for once it did.

We sat close enough for warmth to become a sentence.

We started talking.

We did not stop.

airplane

his dad my dad completely different gravities

airplane

his grandmother's hands I can't remember what he said, only the way his face became a room going tender without warning

airplane

Mexico City described with such heat the altitude changed on a roof in Hell's Kitchen and suddenly I was nowhere I recognized and did not want to come back

airplane airplane

COVID as a room not a year a room they survived and still sometimes check for cracks

sobriety as weather that already passed

airplane airplane airplane

joy and where it hides how it comes back when you stop organizing its arrival peace not the concept the temperature the thing that happens when two people stop performing and just

airplane airplane airplane airplane

our knees one inch apart

Everyone stop.

He has an engineering degree.

All this time.

All curls. All fog. All USB. All panic. All backpack. All playlist. All nervous beautiful black-clothing energy.

And the whole time an entire other citizen of the machine living inside the DJ.

He wants AI. Robotics. Some future with metal in it.

I build cloud infrastructure for a living. I have been circling this man for years and his brain speaks my brain's first language and he told me this on a cracked roof in Hell's Kitchen with a plane crossing behind his head like an exhibit entering the record

and I was expected to remain a functional human being.

I did not.

Our shoulders signed something. Not a treaty. A memo. Internal use only.

Half snuggling under the flight path. Half pretending the English language had a better word for this than *this.*

Then someone checked a phone and it was 2:30 AM

which was fraud, actual administrative fraud

I was certain it had been forty minutes, maybe an hour if the skyline was lying

instead: eight hours eaten by a conversation I will not try to reconstruct because the reconstruction would be smaller than the thing

so I will just say:

we talked until the city ran out of lights to turn off and then we kept talking and the planes kept crossing and neither of us said the word *home* and neither of us performed a single act of leaving

until our bodies the ones we had briefly forgotten we were operating

filed a complaint.

Starving.

India Delight. Butter chicken wraps under fluorescent mercy.

Mexican country music from a speaker the size of a fist.

The whole city finally admitting it is one long beautiful clerical error

and we are two more mistranslated entries laughing inside it.

On the sidewalk I said I should go.

He said his room was too messy for me anyway

but not before floating several logistical architectures in which I stayed

door open door not opened the zoning hearing that will not adjourn

We hugged like something in us had been standing for years.

Then

lean

lean

and

pull

PULL

*fuck offfff*

laughing on the concrete at 3 AM the ancient municipal choreography of two people who want to file and are so terrified of the paperwork they turn the yes into slapstick

because the funniest thing you can do with a yes is pretend it was an accident.

Both of us in the streetlight knowing and performing not knowing

the oldest form of knowing there is.

Then because this night required one last exhibit

he checked his phone.

*Absolutely.* *January.* *Booked.*

The disappearing message had refused to disappear.

Something had been built on that roof that could not be unsent or formatted as ephemera no matter how hard either of us reached for the option.

Morning.

No fog. No fairy wand. No bass. No republic. No strobe. No airplane.

Just daylight in its plain clothes:

*did you make it home alright?* *was fun hanging out last night!*

Two sentences. No disappearing ink.

The most ordinary census:

still here?

Still here.

Still 585

but the five the eight the five

keep rearranging themselves on the screen

trying to spell something they are not yet authorized to become.