anything, anytime

with enough fifth-grade words between us, I thought, we might actually be able to tell each other how we feel

My apartment came with a disjointed collection of refrigerator magnets; the kind I guessed were meant for children or perhaps dementia patients, each of them bearing a different word, all zoo animals and colours and the basic spectrum of human emotion (happy, sad, love, hate). There were so many of them, peeling at the edges and discoloured by cigarette smoke and fry oil and what I could only hope was tomato sauce and chocolate, that removing them seemed more trouble than it was worth. They were all pushed to one side save for the words,

CLEAN ME.

I didn’t clean the refrigerator, nor did I even bother opening it for a week or so. I should have done, because the magnets weren’t the only things left behind.

I was cheating on my boyfriend and he was cheating on me. He was living with me, though he was still renting his hole of an apartment, the one with the Korean landlady that refused to talk to me, so that he had somewhere to hide if he felt like getting stingy with his dope or his condoms or both. I was sleeping with his doctor, which had started out as less of a meat injection and more of me taking advantage of his access to morphine. But there’s no having one without the other.

We hardly saw each other anymore, he and I. We ran in different circles, which was his idea, seeing as he was the intellectual type and his friends considered me a degenerate. It was getting progressively worse, his shunning me, because he was starting to become sort of a big deal. He didn’t want the dead weight.

Often, the only proof I would have that he had been at my apartment at all was his haphazard rearrangements of my refrigerator magnets. Where I had been crafting nonsensical, pseudo-pornographic haikus, he was drafting cryptic, feverish love notes; seemingly, to nobody in particular.

I considered trying to find more magnets at a dollar store or something, so that I could maybe expand the vocabulary. With enough fifth-grade words between us, I thought, we might actually be able to tell each other how we feel. I pictured him, wide-awake at five AM, drinking my coffee and wearing my underwear and smoking his wet cardboard lungs to disintegration in my kitchen, plucking words out at random and leaving them for me to make sense of.

I would scribble some of them down, on my hand or on the back of a receipt, and go over them with his doctor when we were in bed together and had run out of things to talk about. Eventually, the conversation always looped back to him. He was our common ground. I would ask the doctor what he thought the magnets meant and he would shrug, and laugh, and sigh, and tell me that he wasn’t a psychiatrist. Then, he would smirk at me and say that if he was, he would guess that the two of us needed to talk. That’s when I would ask for the morphine.

The first time I shot up was in his bathroom, where the drains smelled so bad I wondered if the building had its own Jeff Dahmer. We weren’t boyfriends yet. Around the time that he was cupping my elbow to hold my arm still, telling me he would keep an eye on me and that really, it was only a little bit, was when I first got the sense that I might be in love with him. I remember being afraid, at the time, of the needle, and of his tongue; that it might suffocate me, or that he might be lying. He tied off my arm with an orange hanky. As a kid I would wet the bed; at some point that night I pissed myself and there was only one set of sheets in that godforsaken place. I started to really miss my mom.

I thought about the kid that must have lived in my apartment before me. I wondered about his parents, whether they talked to him. I imagined a shy boy with tomato sauce all over his hands in a diaper that hasn’t been changed for days, standing on his tiptoes to peel the magnets apart.

CLEAN ME.

I feel like I need a lobotomy, he said to me one afternoon when I’d not seen him for two weeks and he’d been leaving breadcrumbs on the refrigerator (BALLS, MILK, BABY, SUCK, KILL). He was smoking more and more. That or a fucking colonic. You know? He was losing weight.

Yeah, I know.

He made this wet, gravelly sound in the back of his throat after a bump and looked up at himself in the mirror, tugging downward at the circles under his eyes and inspecting their insides, exposing the subway map of desperate, irritable blood vessels. Once, he found a contact lens that had been swimming around in there for perhaps week and said, huh, that’s why I can’t sleep.

So wear your glasses, I said. So stop whoring yourself out, I didn’t say.

I dropped hints with the doctor, sometimes, so that he’d know I’m used to this stuff, that I can handle the abandonment, that I’m no stranger to guilt. My shrink dumped me because he realised we went to the same clubs and he either couldn’t trust me, or couldn’t trust himself. If I hadn’t started a fight at school my mom would still be alive. This arrangement is purely transactional.

The refrigerator taunts me:

DO YOU LIKE ME YES OR NO.

It was hard to remember whether I had placed those words at all; was I asking him, or was he asking me? We’re in fifth grade after all. I spend the better part of an afternoon peeling each and every magnet away, discarding them into a drawer, and leaving nothing but the tiny, nicotine-yellowed ‘YES’. It doesn’t matter who is asking who. I was his trust fall — his reliable fuck, his warm bed, maybe even his home. He knew I’d never speak up. It’s been maybe twelve-hundred days since my last confession. The fridge craps out on me and it smells as bad as it did the day I moved in. The light’s gone out and I stick my hand in, palm-up against the side, like when I check him for a fever.

Nights come and go and I wake up to the rhythmic gushing of someone - him, or a ghost - throwing up. I make a note of the time.

He used to tell me he saw ghosts. I told the doctor about it; that when he had started on another new medication he would complain about having these night terrors in which someone was molesting him in his sleep. He asks me what the ghost, supposedly, looked like.

I guess he never said.

I always did like the cool clinginess and the snap of the tourniquet — rubber, purposeful, clean. Like staying in a five-star hotel.

Maybe he made it up, the doctor says. There’s a cool, crystal clear droplet in the crease of my arm. For attention, you know. What’s your intimacy like with him at the moment?

He’s throwing up, is all I can manage before things get nauseatingly thick in my peripheral vision and I have to close my eyes. I want to call it off.

That same night he’s peeling the alarm clock apart, all its little cogs and screws hitting the floor one by one, the familiar and unfriendly plink of loose metal. I sat and watched him and smoked for a while without saying a word until he went for the phone. I asked what he was doing. With that eerie, dry kind of resignation in his voice he tells me he thinks it’s bugged.

On my birthday we visit my parents. He’s unnervingly sober and it upsets me, to be presented with a glimpse, a reminder, of who he could be, watching him propped up against my dad’s Steinway singing Simon & Garfunkel and adjusting his glasses every seventeen seconds. If I’d had more to drink then maybe I wouldn’t have noticed the offensive purple scab peeking out from beneath the collar of his shirt. Jesus, I thought, the person he could have been. He wears the textbook, maudlin smile reserved for boys in love and boys in the trenches, of which we are both. We’re stuck in a nosedive. In the morning I’ll come clean. In my dreams he’s Death in a black button-down waving an orange hanky like the white flag it is. ‘Anything, anytime’ means nothing to me anymore save for something to put on the headstone.

We stay the night and I’m in the guest room listening to him throw up down the hall. The clock on the nightstand is intact. He pretends to sleep while I cry. Intimacy. Now that’s a concept. There’s nothing more intimate than this. We see his doctor a few days later and I’m trying to find a way to make this all his fault. I can’t look him - either of them - in the eye.

We go out looking for a new fridge. He only comes with me because he got dropped by his director after they slept together and he doesn’t know that I know. I’ve never been to an appliance store in my life and the lights hurt my eyes. He looks so pale. The store has ‘Every Breath You Take’ playing on the fucking sound system. I don’t want to lose you, is my reflexive internal response, activated any time I hear his voice. He laughs and there’s tears in my eyes and he repeats himself.

Should we get some new magnets, too?