That Wright saw Randy one last time, gaunt and bearded, later seemed like something he should have worried about, a mean joke about the smallness of San Francisco, but in his life here he had given up plenty of his old self, denim that didn’t fit right, a habit of apologizing at the slightest discomfort of his own. The thoughts of himself suspended by a noose from an oak tree, twisting over some golden farmland, were all but gone, the imagined weight of a gun pushed back down his right molars, the fantasy of thirty pills dissolving in whole milk and strawberries in a blender. Suicide had been like some billboard he had to drive by every day, he thought, a highly effective advertisement that adorned the horizon on his way to getting anywhere, and somehow, with luck whose longevity he prayed for, he had found a way around it. He had not forgotten how it was to live with that imperative in his mind, a two-word command he had heard from everywhere, and he kept the memory of it as a warning, to remember what kind of town he was living in and what waited on the other side.
The day was forty-two degrees and flirting with rain, and he had taken Braden’s lunch shift as a means of making amends. At a bar two nights before, a place famous for the fact that no two chairs were alike, he had picked up a boy Braden had been eyeing for weeks, a painter who lived on a houseboat in Sausalito and was always faking concern about making the last ferry.
It had begun to feel to Wright like a thrilling game, how to make himself seen. It was automatic now, a certain glance, a jaw pointed in the opposite direction of the gaze, a way of standing, his hands woven behind his head, as though he were at rest even then. He understood that making this his talent had its issues, but it was the first time in his life he wanted to be visible, for people to ask, when he leaned over the shifting light of the jukebox or kissed an arriving acquaintance, who is that? Braden found the painter in the kitchen the next morning, while Wright slept off six well-gin gimlets, and after mopped the whole apartment, the aggressive smell of the citrus wax he used a telltale sign of his anger. “It’s like you need every single person to love you,” he said, when they finally talked about it, “no matter how you feel about them. It’s the same old show, watching you after your third drink.”
On the way home from the restaurant Wright was immune to the street, the florist who lined his windows with unusual cuttings in jars of water, the fire escapes where boys in women’s furs sat smoking. At the corner store where he stopped for cigarettes and to scan the newspapers, a place he generally spent ten forgotten minutes, he heard Randy’s voice. It was unmistakable, a sound that sent up the last decade in smoke.
Next up in the five-person line, shorter than Wright remembered, Randy was thin and ragged as some plant that has grown in a place where it is not supposed to, counting out some change with a rigid pointer finger. He was slipping coins along the top line of his palm, pinky to index. Wright put his paper back and pushed on his sunglasses and made his way toward the door with his eyes on his watch, an absurd impulse he was only half-aware of, as though Randy, if he spotted him, would assume he was late for an appointment and decide not to bother.
The hand on his shoulder came a half a block down. He saw the fingers over the line of his jaw, sallow and attenuated. He dug his scapula forward to remove them, spun around to better see the threat.
“Whoa, man,” Randy said, his arms spread to embrace him. “I thought that was you.”
Wright couldn’t speak, only wait for what came next. He hung on that piece of time waiting for it to drop. Randy began to talk, as he always had, as though he were answering an audience, a single-file line of burning questions about his remarkable life. The flap pockets of his oilskin jacket were overstuffed and revealed their contents, a trade paperback, a misshapen bar of soap. His showy rhetoric identified him immediately, but there was a postural aspect that had changed, a shifting of his weight, a hedging air.
“In town for some big meetings. Not anything I can talk about, yet, but this administration is in for a real shock, let me say, if they think . . .”
The incomplete sentence he punctuated with a hitched-up wiry eyebrow, a smack of either palm to his jaw to crack his neck. He had been underground, Wright calculated, for eleven years. “Where you living, chief,” Randy was asking him, as casual as someone very young to whom an address was a fleeting accessory. Everything about him, this man his mother had loved, ran in opposition to time, called it some old-fashioned joke Randy was above entertaining. This was the chief domain of the unstable, Wright thought, that they saw all minutes and years as having equal importance, not as the pieces of an elaborate construction, foundations and entryways, but some deep bowl of marbles, any of which could shift to become the most visible and relevant. Standing there Wright had a pneumonic feeling. He was sure he could have told Randy that Fay and Annabelle were around the corner editing the latest missive to the press, and Randy would have felt a great relief, followed him without blinking. “Where you living,” Randy had asked, a jocular punch on Wright’s elbow. He heard himself naming the intersection as he had hundreds of times, lightly, Church and Duboce, to cabdrivers, right off the park, to men he wanted to fuck. He had believed himself married to his new life, to the project of his future, but he saw now that at the smallest wave from the past he might consider dismantling it.
“Right on,” Randy said. “Well, yeah, I can definitely stop by and fill you in. And speaking of that, could you loan me a little something?”
Why he agreed he didn’t know. It was a memory that appeared like a taste in his mouth, Randy hunched over him deep in the jungle, covering the tight little-boy fist with his hand and pushing up his shirt to suck out the stinger of a wasp. Randy on his guitar in that hotel room where their three lives had been braided together, no sentence started by one of them left unannotated by another, Paul Simon, mama don’t take my Kodachrome away, a palimpsest of interjections and half-remembered dreams and offers of dried fruit or clean laundry, a world of talking Wright had helped to make, and that had made him. From his front pocket he took his billfold and removed everything in it. He watched Randy walk away with it, the bills tight in his filthy hand. “I’ll call you,” he said, though Wright had not offered his number. At a certain point Randy stopped, and Wright thought he might turn, give off the kind of smile that had once bent a room to him, brief, enormous, but he was only looking at a damp cardboard box someone had put on the curb, picking up tapes and warped tennis shoes, trying to find something he could use.