Whether he meant ten o’clock or two o’clock, I was hours early. The day had been chilly, but the night was quickly growing frigid. The gates to the cemetery were open. I went in, because I knew the painter Basquiat was buried inside. I walked up a hill and found myself surrounded by headstones. Some were plain, but a great many were elaborate and enormous: obelisks like trees, weeping angels with folded wings, even pyramid mausoleums that seemed likely to end up in the next millennia’s museums.
Night fell early and fast. Soon it was difficult to see where I was walking. I started back the way I’d come, but after several minutes, I still didn’t see the entrance. I started to get worried that I had gotten turned around in the dark. It felt like the beginning of a horror movie.
At last the gothic spires of the gate came into view, faintly silhouetted against the bruise-colored sky. Behind it was Brooklyn, giving way to the harbor, a lone ferry, a weak moon. I shivered. My face was so cold it hurt. I had already decided to give him until ten. If Constant had meant for us to meet at two—well, then that was that and it was better for us never to see each other again. Even ten was pushing it.
But when at last I reached the gates, they were closed and locked. I tried not to panic. It was just past five, but there was no one in sight, and the guard vestibule was empty. By then it was totally dark, and the only lights were behind me, lighting a path through the cemetery. I kept turning my head; it was eerie, like the only way forward was backward, deeper into this dead place. I walked along the perimeter for a while, waving at security cameras, sure that someone would come yell at me but at least they’d let me out.
No one came. I didn’t know what to do. Eventually I ended up back at the gate. Surely a security guard would arrive any minute. I crouched down and pulled my giant mustard coat over my legs and shoved my hands in my pockets. Maybe I wasn’t meant to jump off anything after all; maybe I was meant to freeze here, like the matchstick girl, or become the first victim of zombies. I wasn’t exactly afraid, but it was unsettling to be fenced in with several thousand dead people; it was like my circumstance was conspiring to cast doubt on my existence. What if I was here in the cemetery because I belonged in the cemetery? What if everything was a sign; what if none of this had ever been coincidence?
I was afraid to turn on my phone to see all the notifications from my mother. But I was getting really cold, and the wind was picking up. I needed help. I tried to click it on several times. Nothing happened. The screen remained dark and shattered. My phone had died in my pocket.
I started to panic. My chest ached; I couldn’t breathe. I had to calm down; I was getting hysterical. But I couldn’t stop thinking, I don’t know what to do, I don’t know what to do, in a terrible loop, so there was no room in my head to figure out my options. I couldn’t look at my circumstances objectively, because I started hyperventilating every time I tried. I started crying because I was so fucking cold. My tears fell into my hair and froze.
How did I get myself into these messes? It seemed like no one else fainted up on top of water towers or got locked in cemeteries. Was this what Constant meant when he said strange things happened around me? That everything just went wrong for me? I always lost my head. I was useless under pressure. I was indecisive as a personality trait.
I didn’t know how long I sat there. At some point I lost feeling in my thighs. Every time I tried to calm down and figure out what to do, I thought of my mother and felt the symptoms of a migraine. The fence was too tall to climb, but every few minutes I checked to make sure. I jumped in front of the security cameras again. They didn’t even seem to be on. I needed to get somewhere warm. The street in front of the cemetery was deserted. Occasionally there was a car, but none of them slowed or saw me. I was stuck.
Until, of course, Constant appeared.
A flicker of light shone across the street. The cherry tip of a very small fire, hanging loosely from someone’s mouth. I knew it was him. I knew by the way the tip of the joint moved; I recognized his gait.
“Constantine!” I screamed. “Constantine!”
He stopped dead in his tracks. The joint fell to the ground in a rush of sparks. He was just shy of the gate’s lights. I couldn’t quite see his face, but he was close enough now that I could make out the familiar beanstalk shape of him.
“What the hell,” he murmured, and then, louder, “Ocean?”
He was wearing the scarf. He was holding a huge book, and I must have been close to delirious, because I thought he could break me out with it. For a moment he didn’t move, just stood there, staring at me. He came right up to the gate and squinted down at me.
“Ocean,” he said. He sounded amazed.
“Constantine,” I said. My voice was choked and damp.
“You said you weren’t from Green-Wood,” he said. He sounded delighted.
I hiccupped. “I got locked in.”
“How long have you been in there?” he asked. “A couple minutes? Centuries?”
“I’m not dead,” I said, so annoyed I meant it. “Can you help me get out?”
He was squinting at the security cameras. “Hasn’t anyone come to unlock the gate?”
I stared at him. “Obviously not.” Then I felt bad for snapping at him, though he deserved it. “What’s that?” I asked, pointing at his book.
“Just a reread,” he said, considering me in his infuriating mild way. I wanted to snap at him again, but at the same time I reveled in the way he looked at me, the way he always did, a little bit astonished. There was this tenderness in his eyes, a sort of affection I felt all the way down my spine. I shivered.
“You’re cold,” he observed. “Here, hold this for a second?”
He handed the book through the bars. I took it. It was Infinite Jest. “You’ve just been, what, just lugging this around on the subway?”
“Sure,” said Constant, undoing his scarf. “Here,” he said.
I gave him his book back. The scarf was still warm when I wrapped it around my face. It smelled so much like him my eyes stung. I squeezed them shut. It seemed so ridiculous that all that was separating us was this gate, through which we could see each other and touch each other. I know that if I could just open it, my troubles would go away. Suddenly, all barriers seemed irrational and bureaucratic, something from an absurdist’s dream.
“Kafkaesque,” Constant observed.
I was startled. “You can read my mind?”
That made him laugh: his big, reverberant laugh. “If only. We could make this work, then.”
He reached through the bars to tug on the scarf. I was going to cry again. I knew he could feel my breath in his palm. We could make this work. His hands on my bare rib cage, my chest caving in. He grinned. He could read my mind, I thought, and still this wasn’t working.
“So,” he said. “I think you’ll have to climb over.”
“I can’t,” I said. If I could, wouldn’t I have done it already? “I’m not tall enough.”
“I’ll help you,” he said. He looked again at the security cameras, two of which were pointed right at us. “I can’t believe no one has come to let you out. Do you think the power’s gone out again?”
I wouldn’t have been surprised. I thought about what Constant had written about time, and how there were no adequate metaphors for it, but in my mind’s eye I saw a spiraling barber’s pole, infinite, and thought about how we always ended up where we began.
Constant knelt down close to the gate. Suddenly his face was much closer, at an angle I’d never seen him at before, where he was more vulnerable. I almost cupped his cheek before I could stop myself, just because I could reach it. I couldn’t believe how much I liked his face.
“Okay,” he said. “Stand on my leg. I’ll keep you steady.”
It seemed like such a large promise. But I put my boot on his knee. I remembered the pale inside of his thigh, and almost lost my balance. Constant put a steadying hand on my ankle.
It was no use. I still couldn’t reach the top to pull myself over. I wasn’t sure how Constant was envisioning this whole operation. I wondered what kind of upper body strength he imagined I had.
“Here, hop off,” he said. I was already sliding. My cold feet hit the ground, and the jolt went all the way up my spine. He put Infinite Jest on his knee. “Okay, try this.”
With the added three inches, I could reach the top. I still didn’t know what to do next, since I wasn’t capable of a single pull-up, and the spikes at the top of each bar made me nervous. Then Constant adjusted his leg and started lifting me higher. Through the bars, his hands came around my hips, and as he stood, I shot up on a slightly backward trajectory. Then I was clamoring over the top, headlong into Constant’s arms. It was pure luck that we didn’t both end up sprawled on the asphalt. Constant set me on my feet, and I immediately bent over coughing.
When I stood up straight again, I saw the way he was looking at me and was immediately aware that he was going to kiss me. His body leaned toward mine, like he couldn’t help it. I stiffened; he saw. He caught himself. Time stuttered. He fixed his scarf around my neck. “You should keep it,” he said. “It looks good on you.”
I was both crushed and relieved. I knew I couldn’t go on like this, just pining. I had decided, when I left the apartment, that I was only coming to tell him that I couldn’t see him anymore. Every time I saw or heard from him, I wanted to kill myself. I had to stop wanting to kill myself—that’s why I was in the city, not at school.
He pulled the scarf up around my face. As he reached around to fix it so it covered the nape of my neck, he rested his hand on the back of my head, just briefly, in a way that felt as close to an apology as we would ever come. Ocean, he said, though he said it only with his body. Ocean. My whole skull fit in his palm. In the passing moment when he held me like that, it felt as though I had put my head down to rest; it felt like my heart was breaking.
Then Constant said, “Come on. Let’s go paint a map.”
We walked for what felt like a long time, though the train yard was just below the cemetery. Constant tried rubbing some warmth back into my shoulders, but it only made me shiver worse. We were both dragging our feet. The street was dark, and the streetlights seemed to grow weaker with each passing block. I was glad, because it meant Constant couldn’t see my face. Probably we had only made it this long because we met each other almost exclusively in the dark. Finally Constant led me through a hole in a chain-link fence, into what looked like an unpaved parking lot. For the first time since summer ended, I was worried about rats. My eyes adjusted to the dark. There were three subway trains in front of us.
“I heard they keep some of the G trains here,” said Constant. He led me to the nearest one, a hulking dark shape. “Hmm. These might be just here for storage. I think they pulled this model. Hey, did you know there used to be a V train?”
I shook my head.
“There used to be a 9 train, too,” he said. “Here, set that over there.” He handed me the Geiger counter and directed me to a low rock. Then he opened his coat, grabbed a can, and started painting.
I wondered when they had been dismantled. I wondered when, exactly, the V and the 9 ceased to be trains. On the side of the car before us, one by one, the remaining train lines appeared.
For ages we were quiet in the dark. Stars came out and disappeared again under the cloud cover. Far in the distance, a dog was barking.
Only when he got to the G line did Constant speak again. “That’s why the G train is so short now,” said Constant. “Because of the V train. You see that there are bigger problems than language. Just look at all these gaps the city decided not to fill.”
I pictured workers in different MTA offices sending the wrong messages to the wrong people, while on some platform somewhere people accumulated until they were stacked to the dirty ceilings, waiting for trains that would never arrive.
“My girlfriend isn’t very happy about this,” said Constant in a conversational tone.
I felt my soul leave my body. This is it, I thought. This was my moment to say that I wasn’t very happy about it either, and I didn’t want to see him again. But “Why?” he would say, and I would crumble. Why? Because he treated me badly, and I let him. Because it wasn’t sustainable; I couldn’t bear it anymore. I wished I had never met him. But what was I supposed to do—how could I break up with someone I had never been dating in the first place? How could I tell him to stay away from me, when all I wanted in the whole world was for him to tell me he cared about me, and wanted to spend time with me, and liked me better than anyone else? I don’t want to see you anymore. I don’t want you to write to me. There it was—the language. All I had to do was say the words out loud, and then I could leave him in the dark lot, walk away, and get on a train and go home to eat pizza with Tashya and Georgie, and the nightmare would be over. I could go forth and live the rest of my life.
“She says it’s bad for the environment,” he said. “The aerosol.”
It was difficult to put into words how much I hated her then, the once and current girlfriend. For Constant, I felt something else. I leaned against the side of the train car and closed my eyes. The thing I felt was a lot like pain, at least in magnitude: it consumed me. It was shy of rage but stronger than longing. I felt it with my whole face. My bones felt pulverized from carrying the weight of my body for so many days in a row, feeling this feeling. I was so disappointed. I wanted so much for him to be a slightly different person, who liked me. I wanted it so badly it was astonishing and horrifying that I couldn’t have it, and there was nothing to be done. I couldn’t make Constant feel about me the way I felt about him. Life was full of things like this, things I wanted with an urgency that made my ears feel full of water and nonetheless I couldn’t have. I wanted my mother not to have received whatever traitorous email she had received. I wanted to have more energy, and to sleep easier. I wanted to stop worrying about money.
What a stupid place, I thought. And I can’t even manage to get out of here.
Constant had stopped painting. I couldn’t quite see his face; there wasn’t quite enough light. It didn’t matter. I knew the exact shape of it. I could imagine his exact expression. His eyes were all over me. I could feel them like the light beam from his Geiger counter.
“Tell me what you’re thinking about,” he said. “I can never guess from your expression.”
Why should I tell him? I couldn’t remember when his opinion had come to mean so much to me.
“I was thinking about the way out of hell,” I said eventually.
He laughed. It wasn’t an unkind laugh; he laughed like he was delighted. “There is no way out of hell,” he said. “Every system is outdated, and nearly all of them are unjust. Pleasure is fleeting. Money is plastic. The bees and the ice caps are gone. The worst has already happened. We’re in hell anyway. So why not have some fun?”
I couldn’t believe what he was saying, what he had been saying all along, which was that he didn’t care that everything was shit. When he said hell he meant it purely philosophically—he wasn’t actually suffering. For all he talked about nihilism, he wasn’t prone to despair. I was the lobster in the pot, and he was the one writing the essay. All along, that was all we were. I tried to take a deep breath and couldn’t, like there was a band around my chest. If I had been on any edge, I would have jumped. I would have done it, just to prove him wrong.
“Doesn’t it ever occur to you that you’re making it worse?” I asked. I tried to say it evenly; I really wanted to know the answer. “Doesn’t that worry you? Like, what if you’re having so much fun you knock over the rest of the dominos? What about monarch butterflies or, like, systemic racism? What about the other people in hell?”
“Hell is other people,” he said. He was teasing because I was being magnanimous—but of course I wasn’t talking about other people, I was talking about me. I had spent a lot of time agonizing about whether and when to write back, if I was annoying him, if it bothered him when I took too long to respond. Why wasn’t he worried about making my life more painful and less bearable? How could you ask someone if they cared about you? How could you ask them to care, if they didn’t already?
“Hey,” he said. Whatever expression gripped my face made him soften his voice. “Hey, Ocean, I’m kidding.”
But he wasn’t kidding, not really. Constant thought this was hell because everything tended toward entropy—if you left something alone, anything at all, eventually it fell toward chaos. But I thought of hell as a fixed thing: a carousel in the worst of all possible worlds, where nothing could get better. All this time, we hadn’t even been talking about the same thing. And what was so funny about the whole situation was that Constant had tried to tell me: in everything he had written, he’d pointed at this misunderstanding. I just didn’t believe him, or I thought it was something we could overcome.
“Ocean,” said Constant, in such a way I opened my eyes to look at him. That was how I acted around him—like I couldn’t help myself. I looked up and he was there, beautiful and sharp, the only thing in focus. His cheekbones and his crooked mouth and his sideways nose. I could have drawn him from memory with the wrong hand. How long could you love someone? How did you stop? He was leaning over me, his hands braced against the side of the train car. If I could have reached, I would have kissed him. I would have kissed him and stopped caring about the rest of it, and he would have kissed me back.
“Come on,” said Constant, and handed me a can of spray paint. “Come paint the last line.”
I took it. The can was sticky and nearly empty. I was still shivering so hard the pea chattered against the aluminum like teeth. Constant and I stood before his map, which spanned the whole side of the train car, curved top to dirty bottom, the boroughs like continents, the rivers and roads. I was amazed again by how technically good it was, how clean each of his lines was, how sure his hands. I clutched the paint can tight with my frozen fingers.
“I don’t know the G train route,” I admitted.
I heard him shift his weight. “Here,” he said. “Just follow me.”
Then he leaned around me and began to trace a path on the map, his fingertip along the metal. I felt a stab of anxiety that I was about to ruin everything, and then I had to start painting anyway, because Constant was moving, showing me the way.
I followed Constant up and across Brooklyn, leaving behind us an unsteady green line. When you looked at the map, it was obvious that someone, not the artist, had drawn the G line. But I couldn’t turn back; there was nowhere else to go. On we went, into Queens.
“Here,” said Constant. “Stop here.”
It was so abrupt I covered his finger in lime-green paint. “Hey,” he protested, and flicked me on the nose. I could feel the mark he left at the tip of it: wet, then drying. My heart seemed to swell wildly while the rest of my body seized. I wished I didn’t feel such absurd and disproportionate things, just because he was near me. I wished I had fallen forward on the water tower, and we had never met.
“Constant,” I began, just as he opened his mouth and said, “Listen, Ocean, I know I haven’t been—”
All of a sudden we were hit by a beam of light. “Fuck,” I heard Constant say, and then he shouted something else at me. I felt his hand on my wrist, and then it was gone. A wave of nausea had started in my gut and was spinning upward into my head, rocking me back. A dense gray tide of particles overtook me, even my eyeballs, with a rush and a speed that dislocated me from my body. For a moment I was afloat; then even my awareness was gone, and I was nothing at all.