The Lookback Window by Kyle Dillon Hertz

Author:Kyle Dillon Hertz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2023-08-02T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 20

Two months after the window started, in the weeks after meeting with the lawyers, I lived in small doses. My heart thumped begrudgingly along, and I blamed it for my problems. Too much thinking would make me explode. Wouldn’t it please just stop? I wasn’t present. I felt like a bomb being flown over my own life. I could see the end coming from above. I went to school and the movies and restaurants. Alexander met up with me for drinks. We talked about our childhoods and teenage years and young adulthoods without mentioning the future. I lived my life—as if I had already done what I needed, as if I were long divorced, as if I had accosted the men and Vincent and was at the afters. Even Moans and I got along fine enough. We didn’t have sex. Occasionally, I would jerk him off in the mornings before he left for work. Other than that, Moans was my roommate and nothing more. James kept changing the dates for his trip, but he was coming down around Halloween. I told him that I had plans too, and that I wouldn’t be able to be with him every moment, and he kept asking what I was doing that would prevent him from being around all the time. The truth was Alexander, but I didn’t know how to break that to James, who didn’t love competition.

Moans and I went to movies at the Angelika, where old couples like to talk over the movies, and you were allowed to yell at them. We tensely admired a movie about a woman trapped by a rapist without once mentioning what moved us about the film, other than the performances. We saw a triptych film about growing up Black in Miami at the IFC Center, the city’s second most uncomfortable movie theater. I paid for the third film we saw, from my grad school stipend, at the Metrograph, the city’s best and most uncomfortable movie theater with seats that made you feel grotesque and unloved. The price of entry was mild suffering, like almost everything else about New York. That was also how you were able to tell who would survive the city and who would not—who would take the myriad inconveniences of life here and pretend it was real suffering.

Twice a week I went to grad school for writing in the Village, where I disliked almost every single student. I had two three-hour classes where people talked about things I did not care about while working on things that I did not care about and then went to straight bars to talk about how they were having the time of their lives. Normal people seemed to hate writing programs for the writing they produced, but I learned it was the people they admitted who were casually despicable. It was boring and depressing and sometimes I would find myself so deeply enraged at how people thought that I would show up to class high or drunk and wait for Alexander to meet me outside so that we could go drink at Julius’.

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