Seeing 

Riley Bexar Perteet

Was this the right alley? It was still barely light out, but I had the sense that the street I was looking at was meant, somehow, to be viewed in darkness. There were cans with trash filled to some engineered peak without toppling over, and I stuck my Celsius can on top of a recycling bin in a likely symbolic gesture. The door on the brick building to the right of the alley opened, and he peered out. Yes, this was the right alley.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hi,” I replied. I didn’t know his name. I hoped that I didn’t look too different than he expected. He certainly did. His hair was longer, and he looked like he’d gained a few pounds. I wouldn’t have minded the difference, save for it feeling so unflattering that he chose to represent himself inaccurately. Of course, I’m no different—all my photos are cropped so that only the upper half of my body is visible, and always from the front. My photos are recent, but deceptive, unless behind the passionless stares into the camera you’d expect my constant need to mold the shape of my expression, all shown with a slouch far below my stated five foot ten. He smiled, his eyes unfocused—not a generous gaze, but one that felt, thankfully, brief.

        I followed him inside the house. It wasn’t just old, but aged—scrapes on the walls and dents in the stairs marking the betrayal of its residents. Low slurring voices drifted through the staircases. “This place is a maze, sorry about that,” he said below the inebriated hum.

        “Oh, no problem,” I said in a level tone that jittered off the walls. I thought about how I would never find the exit without him guiding me. An image of him holding my hand on the way out flits across my eyes, and I clasp my hands together—as if I could trap the guilt between them.

        “We’re here.” He opened the door to a small, dark room with a window level to the street I’d just stood on. He flicked a switch, and instead of a single light, beads of purple Christmas lights illuminated his ceiling. The purple bathed a legion of disordered figurines across his dresser, desk, and bedstand—they were all some manner of character from a video game or abstractly built animal; none of them resembled anything close to human. Flags hung over his bunk bed in a facsimile of privacy, and below it a couch supported a mound of clothes. “I’m sorry about the laundry… I haven’t done it yet, but I should’ve,” he said quietly, still.

        “Oh, it’s alright. I don’t care,” I replied with a half-formed laugh. He looked at me, this time his eyes focused. I looked away, as if it would prevent him from scrutinizing me to the same degree I scrutinized him. Something turned within me: Wasn’t this what I wanted? He didn’t seem critical—but I was so afraid, afraid that if he looked too closely, he’d see just underneath my skin. He’d see how thin I was inside, that any confidence bubbling to the surface came from a depleted reservoir; I was afraid that in seeing that, he would look no further. I pivoted towards a stout Kirby figurine on his shelf; its smile extended across nearly half its body. “Woah, where’d you get this from?”

        “A friend gave it to me… I don’t really play the games it comes from.” He talked to me without moving, standing in the same place he’d been since entering his room. The room was quiet save for a wild cheer coming from somewhere in the house, echoing off some distant hallway.

        “Oh… that’s too bad, they’re so fun,” I told him, trying to remember the times I’d played a game by myself without a gnawing sensation of loneliness; I looked at a paddle hanging off the wall, a Greek symbol painted onto it. “Hey, what’s that all about?”

        “Oh, yeah, it’s my paddle,” he said, reaching to grab it. He traced his fingers over the symbol, painted over a delicate but amateur portrait of a mountain. “Back in the day, with the freshmen, they used to uh… hit them with it.” He looked down at the paddle, his hair now concealing his expression. “And they wouldn’t stop until it broke… but luckily they don’t do that anymore, my paddle’s still intact.” He smiled faintly, looking over the paddle before hanging it up on the wall. It was the only thing in the room with its symbol. “Hey… do you want to—”

        “Woah, wait, what’s in there?” I pointed to a cage with purple wires in the corner of the room, catching my breath. I hadn’t fully realized what I was pointing to when I said it, but the cage really was a strange addition to the room—hopefully it was strange enough that I could buy a minute, or two. If I just knew more about him, he’d see me differently—not just the pale, oblong mannequin in front of him; one that could only pass as human through excessive imagination. In fact, I was beginning to feel a crawling uncertainty that I’d never walked in the door at all; I imagined myself in the alley still, turning an eye through the window to see someone else wearing his skin.

“Oh, that’s my chinchilla.”

“What!? I’ve gotta see it!” I began to step over before realizing I still had my shoes on, and it felt wrong to disturb the already distressed laundry populating the floor. There was a sense of haphazard perfection about the way everything toppled over each other: a reassuring humanness. I took my shoes off and huddled next to the cage to see a barely awake chinchilla—its eye just opened to a judgmental slit. “What’s its name?”

“Her name is Reyka—she’s pretty low maintenance, and I got her a few months ago,” he said, unfortunately preempting my follow up questions. Reyka’s eye scrunched in disapproval, curling back to sleep.

“Should I sit down?” I asked, almost helplessly—as if him saying no would force me to continue voyeuristically hovering over Reyka’s cage.

“Sure, let me move some things.” He grabbed a handful of the blankets covering his couch and pushed them up against the side, and I sat in the newly blanket-less patch—he sat down next to me, between the folds of the blankets. “So… um, what were you thinking?”

“Me? Oh, well, I’m feeling kinda hungry…” I lied. I was thinking about how wrong it all felt, how I felt like I couldn’t stomach anything for a week without throwing up. I was thinking about how hopeless I was, thinking that I would find something real this Fall—that it was the Summer that broke my heart, and not myself, over and over again. And I was thinking about leaving, about the cloth hearts sewed onto the tables at my favorite Indian restaurant—I didn’t want to eat, I just wanted that feeling, the familiarity, the safety. And maybe we could share it, instead of this.

“Oh.” He looked out the small patch of alley outside the window, finally darkening. “I’m getting dinner with some of my brothers at 7.”

“Oh, I get it, that’s pretty soon.”

He grabbed his laptop from on top of a dresser. “Hey, do you want to watch anything?”

“Oh, sure.” I conceded with myself. We would stay here, make do with this moment already now in 3rd person: He agreed. He lied. He felt.

“I have Netflix, Max, Hulu, everything.” He opened the laptop and opened Netflix—nothing seemed to appear for recently watched shows. He began scrolling through titles. “I should’ve thought of something beforehand… Here, you can look.” He gave me the laptop, the mouse absently hovered over Curb your Enthusiasm—Larry David eyeing the viewer ponderously on the title screen.

“Hey, you know this couch can fold out flat.”

“Really?” I said putting the computer down, feeling my stomach rehearse the motion. I wondered how it must feel to be folded in and out constantly, having your only static function be comforting others. I wondered if I could live with being flattened if it was for someone else’s sake.

“Yeah, it might be more comfortable.”

I got up off the couch as he began moving laundry and blankets into piles to reach a lever presumably on the side of the couch. He finally shoved it flat, revealing a draping tapestry of My Neighbor Totoro taped up to the wall—Totoro’s mouthless gaze meeting mine. He got on the couch and shifted against the wall. For a brief moment I watched him—his lining himself against the wall in an uncomfortably fluid movement. I got onto the couch and lay down facing him, teetering slightly off the edge. I looked above the outline of his face, which was now close enough to feel his unevenly deep breathing, and towards the tapestry above—something of noticeable quality up close.

“Woah, you’re a Ghibli fan?” I wanted to know there was really someone there, in front of me.

“Oh, sort of… Not really, a friend got this for me.”

I could feel his eyes still trained on me.“Woah, those and the figures… you must have some good friends,” I asked, again.

“Yeah… I’m going to put on some music.” He said, his words feeling learned—now evading my constant, begging questions. He grabbed his phone and put on something I didn’t recognize, a slow beat underneath a woman’s voice, soft and unassuming.

“What’s this artist? I’ve never heard of them before.” I tried in vain, almost out of habit, to make conversation.

“Oh, I don’t know.” He looked straight ahead at me. His eyes were the shade of some inescapable amber, the kind that preserves the last breath of ancient mosquitos. I had nowhere else to look besides his face or below it, a grey sweater of amorphous animals stitched into a monochromatic forest. I reached out to trace my hand over one of them—layering my next question, conceding just barely.

        “This is such a soft sweater… where’d you get it?”

“Yeah, it’s really soft.” He put a hand on my shoulder and rubbed it gently—as if I was wearing anything worth feeling.

        “You know,” I began spilling out, “there’s something about guys in fraternities and having a sort of bulk to them.” I mimicked his movement, lifting my hand past his shoulder. “It’s like, you sign up for a frat and the muscles come with it.” I lied, now caressing his arm.

        “Yeah, we have a really active lifestyle here.” He smiled absently. “There’s a lot of pressure to work out, and get bigger. But it’s fun.” He wasn’t too muscular at the moment, in truth—but I didn’t care.

        “Well you certainly seem to have taken that to heart,” I said, trying to smile earnestly. I was looking at his arm and trying to conjure the image of him after a year, hulking, muscular. I tried to imagine myself in a place like this, buying into what he was saying—summoning an image of myself in a physical state I’ve never been in. What if I’d met him there, in that reality? I looked back up at him, and he was himself again. I was myself. Neither of us had anything to say. He brought his arm past my shoulder around my neck, his hands soft, warm. He slid his hand behind my head, and pulled me into a kiss that felt practiced—more a product of muscle memory than discreet intention. And I kissed him back.

        There was a knock at the door. He broke the kiss and looked up. He squinted at the door, and rolled his eyes. Footsteps receded from the door in a slow, knowing movement.

Suddenly the music stopped—replaced by a louder, vibrating song. The room reverberated with a brassy sound louder than we’d been at any point in our conversation (and somewhere beneath it, a skittering of annoyance from Reyka’s cage.) He picked up the phone and squinted, answering it.

        “Hey Chris, what’s up?”

        The voice on the other line was deep and sarcastic, a murmur only audible through the silence of the room: “Oh, nothing, I was just wondering where you were.”

        “None of your business...” He slid his hand over my shoulder again, idly.

        “You’re not at the house?”

        “No. I’m not at the house…” He took his hand away from me and began inching off the couch. He peered out through the blinds towards the alley, still absent.

        “Really? I swear I just saw you walk in earlier.”

        “You’re seeing things again.” He smirked, voice catching slightly, as he looked across the room to some memory or another.

        “I’m not sure… there was one place I was sure I’d find you, but clearly…” The voice on the line became audible faintly in the hallway, the steps returning. “You aren’t there right now.” The phone beeped as Chris hung up. His face reddened, darting over to the echo of Chris’s voice in the hallway. “That motherfucker…” he said, a smile reaching past a glaze of irritation. He got up off the flattened couch, and opened the door, peering out the hallway. He closed it, and called Chris back. The phone dialed once before the call was declined.

        “Who’s Chris?”

        “Oh, he’s just one of my brothers. He’s such an asshole.” He said it smiling, thinking. “He’s always on me about something… but he’s great, so funny.”

        “I know a few Chrises,” I said, my mouth dry with the lack of truth I’d been allowing it. “I might know him, what’s he look like?”

        “Well, he looks lanky, blonde, oblivious… sort of like a failed service dog. I only have stupid pictures of him, but here I can find one.” He came back over to sit on the couch, now scrolling through a sea of photos. There were so many people, so many fleeting silhouettes of the man I was sitting next to, and although he was swiping too fast to see, he looked just as happy in them as he was searching for Chris. “Here, this is him.” A photo of someone our age appeared glaring at the screen gleefully, his face almost up against the camera—threatening to break out with the force of his enthusiasm. “We were texting this girl back and forth, and at some point it devolved into us sending pictures like this.” He swiped to show a picture of himself posed next to Chris, both of them up against the camera laughing about something; his arm looped around Chris’s waist.

        “Who was the girl?”

        “Oh, some sorority girl.” He rolled his eyes in a way that gave me a pang of phantom empathy for this nameless woman. “Chris was more interested in her than I was… Anyways…” he put his phone down on the couch, and looked back over at me. I didn’t know him—and after this, I never would. But there was certainly desire—not for me, barely for the skin I wore—and by now I felt like quite the actor. I could convince myself I saw him, as I sat there in the audience—I could let the scene move me, sawing off the parts of me onstage for as long as I didn’t feel it. I let myself back to his eyes; that nameless want within them meeting mine. And there I was, captured again in that gaze in which I could only barely make out my reflection.