Naps at E48

It takes me a while to find it every time, even the one year when the woman behind the desk looked up at me and hesitated before scribbling the letter and numbers on a little sticky note. I knew I didn’t fit in, but she was the only person around to care: everyone else was long past the point of doing a double-take at my tattooed legs and arms, my shorts, the little gold ring through my septum glinting in the late May sun.

The paths are overgrown, if paths ever existed here at all. Every time, I think I’ve taken the right turn, but no, it always starts to feel wrong after a minute: I’ve never seen this family before, never noticed this little baby, time to turn back and try again.

The sticky note doesn’t help, the ink from the cautious old woman’s pen smudged from where my thumb sweats against it. I try to remember how I walked the first time I came here, with that well-meaning neighbor of his whose words made me grind my teeth and suddenly, sharply, hate him. He had told me all about how they were best friends, growing up next to one another and raised in such different, but such deeply, religious environments. You should be grateful I brought you here for my special visit, he’d seemed to be saying, and something inside of me wilted, sort of like it was blanched and killed by the sun and the heat and all of my grief, the weight of it all crushing down inside me while his stupid minivan waited for us back at the gates, looking somehow cheerful as it sat, cool and hulking.

I look to the left, and I blink when a man on a lawnmower rides by, maybe 200 yards away. Suddenly I’m in a rush, I don’t want to be seen, and I stop thinking about minivans and well-meaning idiots. I walk forward until the lawnmower’s whirr fades to a small hum, and I check the time on my phone, feeling guilty as the screen clicks on. I have about one hour left, which isn’t ideal, but it will have to do.

I slide my phone back into the pocket of my shorts and pick my way over a few more patches of crabgrass, brushing the wilder thickets away from where they scratch against my knees, and after a few more turns and a half-felt instinct, I’m there. I look at the little post at the end of the lane and back down to the piece of paper that’s now thoroughly damp in my hand. E48. Okay. Okay.

I have one hour. I lie down, and I close my eyes.

****

The first time I came here, ferried in a minivan by his neighbor from where I had lain in my bed for the last four days, numb and nearly unblinking, I had not done this. I had held myself upright—a Herculean effort in the first months—and tried to remember that only five days ago, a soft spring sunset and the sound of kids playing in their backyards somewhere nearby would’ve made me nostalgic for summer nights at my grandparents’ house. Theirs was a small but comfortable suburban home, whereas my parents chose to raise me in the middle of nowhere, no neighbors except the woods themselves, not even a mailman who’d come out that far until I was about ten years old. I thought about those woods and how I had been fundamentally lonely until I met him, my dearest Michoel Yosef, Michael to some, but to me, always Michi. That first time I came here, I’d listened to his neighbor drone on about nothing and remembered the story Michi told me about him, back in November, back before I even knew this place existed.

He’d been showering, he told me, not too long after placing a tab of acid under his tongue. His parents were having guests over for dinner, some friends of his father’s from the university and some of the people who were helping his mother renovate the old synagogue down the street. This was a common Friday night occurrence, and he hated it: hated the rituals anymore, those rites he used to look forward to all week; hated his dad nodding off when the prayers at the end went on too long, hated that his mom wouldn’t let him have more than one glass of that cheap kosher wine.

Michi had once loved all of it. The family all performing the negel vasser, taking turns. It was peaceful, and he couldn’t imagine anything more lovely than the smell of his mom’s fresh challah. But that was before he started losing his ability to sleep and slowly losing his mind, so he didn’t want to think about all that, and he took the drug and stepped in the shower and let his mind melt out into the spray of water over him.

Only, he was no longer alone—his neighbor, fuck, not now—his neighbor was standing in the doorway as Michi knotted a towel around his hips, was turned away to give him some privacy, but still, and he was talking loudly and waving his arms all around while looking off down the steps toward the kitchen. Michi heard his father’s university colleague arriving, saw the colors of the neighbor’s kaftan flashing, growing, shrinking, swimming in the steam that lingered from his shower, and remembered how his brain never felt like his own anymore, how he hated everything he used to love, and realized he was left with a single thought that made him happy: I can’t wait to tell her about this.

****

I keep my eyes closed and reach out behind me to feel the smooth stones, placed with care in the freshly turned earth, while I let myself enjoy a rare smile. This has been happening, sometimes, and I find that I don’t hate it, though I’m not sure it’s very good for me. I sink down into a memory, and before I force myself to come back up, I try to feel happy for just a moment and luxuriate in that small miracle: Michi liked thinking about me. His sad brown eyes, those chapped lips I was always staring at, the oily skin where his hair was cut unevenly against his forehead—my favorite person in the whole world liked to think about me.

Turning my cheek into the dirt, I watch a few clouds roll past the rooftops on the other side of the fence. I know I need to be out by 4:00, and the bus-subway-bus route home isn’t exactly short, but I can’t bring myself to leave just yet. Tapping my phone, I see I have about twenty minutes left, so I sit up and lean back, hugging my knees to my chest and rocking backward to where they’ll eventually place a proper stone.

The sky is exactly that color I used to love as a kid. The one you’d associate with time off school, fresh cut grass, maybe the faint picture of the moon high in the sky before the earth turned its back on the sun for the night and it shone bright in the summer sky.

Nighttime had been Michi’s enemy, toward the end. When we’d sat on the wooden deck above the old canal, where we used to meet late at night after I was done work and he could sneak out, he had told me how all of his intelligence, all of his confidence in what was sure to be his brilliant future, had disappeared once he stopped falling asleep at night.

No one knew why. Doctors prescribed different medications, but he’d wake up drugged, sluggish at best, and no better than if he hadn’t slept at all. It lasted for years before he realized he had pretty much given up, was used to feeling stupid and spiteful and more than a little bit lonely, but then someone introduced him to a girl who seemed standoffish and disinterested, only, it turned out she was just shy, and then—

Then he was on the deck above the old canal with her.

He had smiled at me and trailed off. When he looked back at me, I saw tears in those brown eyes I loved so much, and he laughed. No more talk of insomnia, of insanity. “You’re my best friend,” he whispered, and we both stared off into the sky, smiling.

I smile now, even though I can feel the congestion in my nose and the wetness on my cheeks. “My best friend,” I whisper back, months too late.

Brushing the dirt of his fresh grave off my clothes and the backs of my thighs, I stand and think about the other years I’ve come here since that very first night with his awful neighbor. I kiss my palm and bend to press it against the dirt. Every year, the ritual is the same: I come here on the day he left my world, and I try to take a nap, even just a quick one, so if some form of him is out in the ether somewhere, he can finally feel some peace.

It hasn’t worked yet. But I hold my palm into the dry earth, and I don’t think he’d mind. After all, I think about him instead. And I know he likes thinking about me, too.