“I saw polar bears tumbling into a cloud-filled crater,” I told him. “As if going into the clouds of heaven–but down, instead of up.
“I had this feeling in my dream that my friends were worried,” I went on. “But me? I don’t know what I felt. Elation, maybe. Excitement. Kinship. The clouds were so dense, white-tailed deer galloped on them. There were rabbits, too. All manner of animals–anything but human–making their pilgrimage to it: a wide, lonely crater.”
“Yea, uh-huh,” he said. “That’s a weird dream, Perry.”
Elijah poured coffee from the French press into a white mug labeled “World’s Best Boyfriend” and turned from the counter, adjusting his black-framed glasses. His black suit fit nicely over his shoulders and he glowered at me from behind spectacles.
“Well, I guess it is, isn’t it?” I said.
“Mhm. Work’s going to be busy today,” he said. “You?”
I had been sitting at the chic, bamboo kitchen table, wedged beside the radiator in our Upper East Side studio. I wasn’t even hungry. More than anything, I had sat to tell him my dream–the very wonders of this life, really.
“Oh, you know,” I shrugged, “it’ll be busy.”
I stood, laid my fingertips on his biceps, kissed him.
Our six-year-old bichon, Benji, wagged his tail, his front paws wrapped around my leg.
“Oh, working from home,” he groaned, “with the dog. Busy, I’m sure.” He brought the mug to his lips and kissed me back, biting my bottom lip. I sucked my gums, tasting iron.
“Have fun,” he said.
He poured the rest of his coffee into a thermos, swung a messenger bag on his shoulder and gave Benji a pet. “Benji, you be good to Perry, you hear?” he said. “He’s going to need it. He’s going to need it for his hard day at home today–oh yes.”
I opened my mouth to speak, but as he was turning to go, he stopped, took one of the snow globes off the counter and slipped it into his messenger bag, and looked at me. I saw how his dark glasses framed his eyes–the greenest eyes. They burrowed into me.
Then he winked and was gone.
Benji looked at me, his tail wagging expectantly–a small, pink tongue hanging on his chin.
I’ve been with Elijah two years now. I don’t know where I found this man–a corporate banker, of all things. I mean I do. I found him at a city bar after a game of intramural league kickball. But I don’t know where he came from–what hole he emerged out of. Like a mushroom erupting from an unknown mycelium network, he was just there.
With Elijah gone for the day, I now held the “World’s Best Boyfriend” mug, pouring the rest of the French press into it. Then I invited Benji to hop onto the back of our red love seat, where together we looked onto the city streets eight stories below.
I was part of a small, boutique consulting firm advising regional businesses how to grow, and I didn’t have much work today. So I brought my laptop, which was closed, and placed it on the ledge beside the coffee. The breeze from the cracked window blew in, and the coffee’s steam bent like a pale, white grass.
“What do you think, Benji, hm?” I said.
His dark, beady eyes looked below. He took a step back.
The first work call was at nine.
I listened, the sound low as I clipped my nails, the television muted on Good Morning America.
“–Hi there, Perry?” my manager said on the call.
“Yes sir?”
“How are the designs for Union Pro? Any word on the new market analysis?”
“Oh,” I said, sighing and clipping my left thumbnail, “we’re not facing any problem that can’t figure itself on its own, no–it’s always been that way. It’ll always be that way.”
Rather, that’s what I wanted to say. Since the world raced and raced, when what was needed was always in arm’s reach.
Instead, I told him I followed up with JMB for the analysis and the designs were sent back–it wasn’t the contractor’s best work.
The call moved on.
Afterwards, I took off my clothes and stood naked in the apartment. I ran my hands up and down my chest, beginning with the muscle lining of my front thigh, swiftly gracing my privates, lifting it up, letting it flop down, then moving my hand up the smooth expanse of my stomach, finishing at my chest–then down again, but on the other side, feeling the long sweep of my lower back, the first bits of hair again on my ass, that brief arch that ended at my outer thigh. What a piece of work is man, I thought.
Benji was back on the chair staring at the streets, the traffic crisscrossing below, the day bright and warm-looking, though it was winter outside and the air would turn you numb.
I put my clothes back on and grabbed a coat, hopping on one foot as I slipped on a pair of Clark’s sneaker dress shoes, and tossed chicken and broth, carrots and celery, and other spices and herbs, into the Crock-Pot. I cranked the dial several hours and put my ear to it, listening to the whispering tick of the timer.
Then I was out the door, too, Benji’s yips drowning out as the building’s elevator doors shut.
Outside was a special type of cold, that’s the only way I can describe it. The brisk feel of it raised a specter of memories all at once, calling to mind all the moments in my life when I was numbed exactly this way: thousands and thousands of occasions of being braced by the cold.
I was beginning to feel sentimental–more sentimental than I usually was–and felt a vague draw from my Upper East Side perch to see Lower Manhattan. I could take the subway or hop in a cab, but I preferred the walk. Millions of lives were between me and the seven narrow miles south to the Battery. My phone was in my back pocket, in case a work call came in. I could just tell them or anyone else I had stepped out to get groceries.
Amid the intersecting lines of people and cars, all those well-planned blocks of living, I thought of Elijah–Elijah Paulish.
He was a black mushroom, yes. The underbelly gills lined with silver, near-invisible spores of gold seeping out at dusk. He was always distant, never wanted to talk. That is why I loved him. His character was always locked up in what he never said or expressed. But I could feel it seep out of him, invisible in the dark, a glittering hope for life that for some reason found cover in only the deepest nights and the dankest conditions. He was tough–even menacing–on the outside, but at night and with me a secret self unfolded.
I called him that once, to his face. “My black mushroom.” Do you know what he said? “My real unicorn.” That’s what he called me. “If you’re an animal–a creature. You’re a unicorn.
“Maybe it’s a special, innocent aloofness to life,” he went on. “The same as that mythical horse. Because it’s like–it’s like you understand the world, but you stand at a distance to it. And you do this somehow without feeling lonely or losing warmth.” He paused a moment, then added, quietly, “I don’t understand it.”
I had a history teacher in the 8th grade. He was definitely a turtle. Another friend was a raven, but with blood-red plumes on their tail feathers. And I? I’m the unicorn. Elijah is the mushroom. Somewhere else, in some other world, our archetypes are playing these things out in a fantasy land.
The traffic of the avenue was beginning to get to me, so I stuck my hands deeper in my coat pockets and veered right into Central Park, walking the trail beside the enormous reservoir.
I could see the city buildings erupt from the west side as if sprung from a mechanized seed. They loomed over the bare elm trees that lined Central Park West. Before them and beside me was the frozen reservoir, and couples and families walked by.
Walking south, the lake on my right, I saw the sun shimmer over frosted ice and watched everyone, hundreds and hundreds of people.
Kids flew past on electric scooters. They wore nothing but black jeans and white T-shirts, and music blared from the phones in their hands.
Past the Great Lawn’s eerie quiet were young and middle-aged couples. They walked side-by-side under the sycamores, hands covered by leather-gloves gripping their coats together; their wool collars up high and guarding their cheeks.
The old men were statuesque on their benches. They dotted the park pathways as if by some metaphysical design, each stationed on their bench, a newspaper out, a leashed Scottish Terrier in front, or another, avuncular, stout fellow beside them. They tossed seed to the geese and ducks, and bread to the bass–at least in parts where the streams moved free of the ice.
The beautiful blonde women on Bow Bridge couldn’t be ignored either. They wore an icy expression, and leather boots with stiletto heels. And oh, gay men were the same: gorgeous and not dressed for this weather, which told me how aware they were of their looks–how defiant and proud, and thus how self-conscious and ashamed.
–Precious lives all, amid a backdrop of the city skyline. I felt pity. I felt… confused.
I had popped out forty blocks south at the corner of the park, and felt the ache in my thighs and the soles of my feet. I had enjoyed the hike, my eyes darting from the people, the park, and then back again to the city skyline, my own mind roaming just the same and on every topic: Elijah, and all the people I had ever known–and now all those I’d passed and would never know either. It made me sad, and I was crying by the hot dog stands of the Grand Army plaza.
Maybe it was the cold. Or the winter day. Maybe it was all the bare brown of the London planetrees, or the rough way the thousands were dressed to stay warm, looking so small before the towering buildings.
No.
I knew why.
I took out my cell phone from my back pocket and called Elijah.
The phone rang. And rang. And rang.
No answer.
The sun was high in the sky and starting to fall, but I couldn’t know for sure: the day had dimmed over with a grey cloud, like a big wrinkled blanket, and it was so low that several skyscraper tops were blocked from sight, too.
“Elijah, please,” I said.
The phone went to voicemail and I debased myself, calling him again.
“El–El, please.”
The phone buzzed in my ear.
Never talk to me again.
I paused, rubbed my temple. In a breath, I surveyed those around me, walking. My feet were cold with sweat, my knuckles raw from the wind.
“Elijah,” I said aloud.
I wrote back.
Elijah. What are you talking about. Why are you doing this?
You can’t. You can’t do this. Not like this.
Then again.
Elijah. You are doing SO well.
Please. Plase, don’t stop.
The dots of his text hung in the air, then disappeared.
I wrote a long, long message, then deleted it. I wrote another, rallying my self-respect:
What about all your stuff? What about Benji?
…
Have them, he wrote.
For the next forty-five minutes, I paced the blocks around the plaza, weaving in and out of the green Central Park and the gray Midtown Manhattan, calling and texting him to no avail.
What about what you said under the fireworks? Or the night after Finn Henry’s? I wrote.
But he was silent and, for all my pacing, I found I was where I first came out of the park.
I considered going home, but I couldn’t bear the loneliness of it. To be rejected like this–it was to be rejected by everyone on all earth.
I looked south, toward the Financial District, and then down at my feet, which had brought me here. For a long time, I stood and thought, but then out of a sense of things that are, I raised my hand and called a cab.
In the hard backseat, the cab television droning on, the Bangladeshi driving further south, I couldn’t sit still. My heart beat was irregular. The city streets and the crowds thronged here more than the other parts of the city, and I fought with every effort, the window down for breath, the car stopping at the red lights, to not loathe every last person I saw.
The cab stopped at the enormous skyscraper in the Financial District.
I charmed my way past the building front desk, palms sweaty, and passed through the marble atrium to become ensconced by the closing steel doors of the elevator.
Catapulting upwards, I waited.
He was up high in the building, I knew.
The doors opened to a floor with nothing but glass office walls.
I could see everyone, and everyone could see me.
My armpits were hot under my coat from the walk–yet my feet were ice from my frayed nerves. I was sure I stunk, if someone got close enough.
“Hi there, can I help you?” the front desk attendant said.
“No, no not really–just a moment,” I said.
He wasn’t anywhere on the floor. Most everyone wore the black and white formality of the place; the angular lines, the stiff-ish clothes.
“Are you looking for someone?” the attendant asked again.
“Yes–no. I mean no.”
“Give me just a moment and maybe I can find him or her for you?”
I saw him.
“What can I do for you? Excuse me. Sir?”
This was New York, right? People not only rubbed shoulders, they wore their lives on them. And from time to time, that life was shit–or at least my life was shit. My life was absolute shit. My life was absolute dog shit.
I opened the swinging glass door by the attendant.
“Sir!”
Elijah saw me and moved through.
I couldn’t see, or rather my eyes were too affixed to Elijah, and I bumped into a glass wall.
A square-jawed man stepped up.
“Hi there buddy, you alright? What’s going on here?”
“Get your hands off me,” I said.
I found my footing, opened the door, went around the glass balcony that looked below and saw him retreating to a white-painted pillar, a neon red “EXIT” sign beside it.
“Elijah!” I yelled.
It was the building’s stairwell, the door to it now swinging open.
“Elijah!” I said. “Elijah Paulish!”
I rushed through; I could hear voices telling me to stop.
I opened the stairwell door.
When I looked below there were only a few inches between the staircase: dozens of stories beneath me in a space no larger than my fist. Soon, we would be high enough to where the building would bend with the winds.
“El!” I shouted, turning my head upwards. “El, Please stop!”
The door snapped shut; his footsteps echoed wildly above.
“El!”
I ran.
One story after another, thighs and lungs burning, my whole body on fire.
In the sharp breaths, oxygen struggling to my brain, the walls shook in my periphery.
“El, please. You don’t want to do this. You don’t want to shut the door on this.” I planted my feet on the a stair platform and bellowed. “I am begging you!”
But all I heard were his footsteps.
Up higher, the stairwell walls were transparent, too, and people could see me running up. Elijah was above, but his thundering footsteps grew faint as the stairwell shuddered and wavered..
“Elijah!” I paused, breathing and stuck in the stairway.
Those on the floors looked.
I thought I saw my first boyfriend. I was seven, he was seven; we had made it up together in play pretend.
I went on, faces turning to me as I lumbered upwards, feeling the glances of old memories.
The man I took out to the Italian restaurant, who was sweet and kind, but not for me. That other, the boy more like, who I slept with after the Brooklyn rave.
And still more on the floors I passed: a group of men and women in black suits, wearing blue and red ties, surrounded by blue and red balloons, champagne flutes in hand, wailing laughter filling their void-like mouths.
“Elijah!” I said.
“Perry Oliver Moore!” he suddenly bellowed, a disembodied voice high above. “Never talk to me again!”
He opened the topmost door to the roof; I followed soon after.
The wind howled. The fast-moving clouds below me flowed past like a river. The sun was up high in the clear, brisk air–but the building swayed in the squalls.
“Elijah,” I said. “Elijah, where are you?”
The roof platform was absent of anything save a few crane pipes. There was no sign of him, just the black-square perimeter of the building ledge a hundred yards beyond me.
Nothing could be seen of the city. I was on a towering island, and on the horizon were the black silhouettes of other, mightier skyscrapers.
I put my hands to my knees and took a moment, then walked to the ledge.
“Elijah?”
Just then I remembered the Crock-Pot was ready.
It didn’t keep warm when it was done. It was going to go cold now.
And I thought of Elijah, who was gone now, too. He wasn’t going to be anywhere near here, I thought.
I shuffled my toes closer to the edge. I took a deep breath.
Under the warm sun–the clear, cool air–my spine cracked as if a divine breath shivered through it.
I know that I chased Elijah. But what if it wasn’t Elijah I chased?
What if he was already gone, and it was something more I was chasing–those near-invisible mushrooms spores, gentle and evocative of another world–that part of people they swore they’d never allow to be hurt?
We can’t risk you exposing us. We can’t face the terror. Of being weak.
Like an Escher painting, the mind has to take a leap of faith from a set of stairs that first went up, to a set of stairs descending, upside down.
The wind was hurtling in my hair. The void of the world was opening below.
The chase continues in another dimension.
Where it’s always been going on.
From whence mushrooms come, and unicorns freely traipse.
To find that hurt and hidden creature.
To drag him out into the light.
J.T. Ruiter is a Florida resident and former metropolitan journalist with bylines in the Chicago Tribune and Sun Sentinel. His fiction has been published in The Metaworker. He loves learning for the sake of learning, being silly with his wife, and listening to the hopeful, melancholic melodies of German-born indie electronic musician, Ulrich Schnauss.
Idle Ink 