The Lights by Brian McGreevy

Author:Brian McGreevy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rare Bird Books
Published: 2017-04-05T20:03:24+00:00

the click

Exactly one year later I passed Jason in the lobby of the graduate library. He was leaving. We nodded curtly in passing.

I said, “Hey.”

He stopped.

“I need you to be tall,” I said.

He walked with me into the stacks to pick up a book I needed. It was on a high shelf and he reached for it and as he did his shirt rode up revealing the hem of his boxer briefs and the curve of his spine. He handed me the book and we looked at each other.

“Thanks,” I said. There was a thin, hot film over my eyes.

“Are you okay?” he said.

“I’d be more okay with a drink,” I said.

“Okay,” he said.

In a few years, after neither of us live in Texas anymore, there will be a shooting on the same floor of the library. It will be of little consequence, as these things go. Some kid will shoot off a few rounds of an AK-47 in the stacks but won’t hit anyone. His heart won’t be in it. To be fair, I don’t know where exactly it will happen, but when I hear about the shooting, I will decide it is on the same floor. When this story breaks I will be working for a Condé Nast ASPIRATIONAL LIFESTYLE MAGAZINE, profiling a San Francisco–based designer in a hotel bed with floor-to-ceiling windows over the bay and another irrelevant man on the other side of the bed because I will not be able to think of a lonelier situation than spending an expense account alone. I will read the story which will have been sent to me by a couple of former classmates and I will think of the hem of Jason’s boxer shorts and the curve of his spine, and of Hogwarts, and the distinguished tradition of the mother institution of which Hogwarts is part of—sad young men announcing their grief with guns—and all the hurt in the world will seem mysteriously and incontrovertibly fucked, and I will close my laptop and look out the window and start to cry, wondering how many Condé Nast girls there are at that moment looking out the window of a hotel room and crying over a man she can never get back.

Jason and I went to a fratty sports bar just off campus that was close and cheap and sat in a corner booth with whiskeys and ice. I took a big swallow.

“There it is,” I said.

“There what is,” he said.

“The click in my head that makes everything feel more peaceful,” I said.

We drank fast, saying little. I put my hand on the table. He put his hand on mine, once again running his finger on the indenture of my injured thumbnail.

“Let’s go somewhere,” I said.

“Where?” he said.

I didn’t know. We had changed locations once already. But it felt like being on a bicycle, drunk, and the only imperative was to stay in motion.

We took a shuttle up to north campus, stopping at a 7-Eleven and got a very cheap

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