The Handsome Man by Brad Casey

Author:Brad Casey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: BookThug
Published: 2020-04-04T19:25:22+00:00

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I’m back in Toronto. I’m working in bars, I’m working in cafés. I’m helping to renovate a house. I’m watching movies, I’m drinking a lot. I’m buying a bicycle, a black Nishiki road bike that costs more than I have, more than I make, I’m scared of cars I’m scared of sewer grates I’m so small out here. I’m avoiding certain places, I’m avoiding certain people. I’m distracting myself and I have no money and there’s something missing deep inside of me, something that needs to be filled, something I assume everyone feels, don’t they? I overhear a guy at the bar I work in, a man to another man, say, “It’s like there’s a woman-sized hole in my heart,” and it’s something like that, something, maybe there’s room for a man in there too.

It’s a few months after everything Victoria and I don’t hear from Rienne now. She posts pictures of herself and Alex, pictures in nature, the mountains or the ocean or a sunset in the distance their hands reaching to the sky as if to say see this? It’s glorious, it’s all ours, do you not envy us. We exchange a few messages over a few months and it’s nice to hear from her, what we shared gone, all of the west coast of me gone, all of it opened like a chestnut spread out across the floor. I’m in Toronto now. I’m restless and alone.

It’s a few months later and Alana texts me, says she’s in town. I don’t tell her but I saw Alana in a movie recently and I forgot that it was her, the Alana who sang and who cried by the din of the ocean and as I watched, the woman on screen changed and she contorted and she became something new, something foreign, strange and comforting and terrifying at its core, something I didn’t recognize. Have you ever had an experience like that? Where someone you know acts in a way that doesn’t match up with the person you perceive them to be, they become someone new, unrecognizable? Everyone else can do that, I think, I want people to look at me that way for once. I want to become a projection, to be unreal and grotesque, something new. Can I do that?

Alana asks me to go with her to see her friend Josh play a show and I say yes and I go and she’s there and she’s waiting for me, leaning against the blood-red wall so cool and so small and alone. We’re at the Royal Alexandra Theatre, this movie star and me, people staring at us under a ceiling of light bulbs like looking up at the sun from underneath the water and I don’t know her really at all, she leads me up to the highest balcony high up in the theatre, her walking in front of me, she reaches back and holds my wrist and says, “This is terrifying, please be careful.” There are signs on each side of the stage that read Tragedy and Comedy.

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