Miriam Gershow

A Step Ahead

Hogan met Lily over the phone. He’d always had a thing for girls with flower names. In high school, he’d mooned silently over a bookish Rose for months and months — close to a year — with her brightly patterned blouses, expertly parted hair, and a scar beside her lip that resembled a tiny sickle, as if it were trying to cleave her mouth in two. He loved the protective way she leaned forward and snaked her arm around her exams, and the slow sashay she took to the teacher’s desk upon finishing (often first, out of everybody), presenting the paper in two outstretched arms, as if it were a gift.

Later, during his single semester of college, he happened upon a Jasmine who worked behind the reference desk in the library and always smelled faintly yet alluringly of sweat and menthol. He liked the way she chewed on the end of her pen. He had seen her, more than once, stick the wrong end in her mouth, then spit it out quickly, looking around to see if anyone had caught her. He enjoyed her look of sheepish embarrassment. Often, he would come up with arcane topics (mourning rituals of pachyderms; trade routes in sixteenth century Timbuktu) so he could steal five, ten minutes of her time; once, she even came out from behind her desk and walked the third-floor stacks with him, searching for a missing issue of the Journal of Military History and its article on unclaimed West Virginian Civil War medals. Jasmine wore sandals, and they made a lazy, sibilant sound against the floor as she walked beside him. Hogan fought the urge to hold her hand, a decision which he had, to this day, regretted.

On warm, sunny, friendless Sundays, or caught behind a slow, exhaust-heavy truck on the 880 into San Jose on mornings when he was already late for work, or in bed at night, as his radiator ticked tunelessly and his toes poked out the bottom of his comforter and he couldn’t sleep, restless from the way minutes piled upon minutes, Hogan reimagined the last decade of his life, from the moment he successfully laced Jasmine’s fingers through his; he had visions of wrought-iron patio furniture, punch bowls filled with bright concoctions of floating fruit, a couch with cushions long molded to the matching imprints of their asses.

He met Lily on a Tuesday, statistically the slowest day at the Call Center. When his phone trilled, he’d been carefully rearranging the postcards along his cubicle wall. He’d amassed them over a number of years from other Call Center employees who’d spent vacations in boozy New Orleans or on the slopes of Colorado. It had become tradition to send Hogan breezy dispatches (Having lots of fun in ________! The weather is ______! Don’t work too hard!), who had traveled no further than two hours north to Sacramento since any of them had known him. One full row was from his best friend, Leon, who’d worked in the cubicle next to Hogan for three years, until one day moving to England with his wife, from where he now sent back pictures of double-decker buses and Buckingham Palace guards with their beehive hats.

The call was coming in through Hogan’s TTY machine, a phone outfitted with a keyboard and LCD screen instead of a receiver. Hogan answered by typing: “CA TRS 9109 M. Number Calling Please?” This was his standard greeting: CA for California; TRS for Telephone Relay Service; 9019, his identification number; M for male. Some mornings, he woke to find himself already reciting the line, lips moving and all, as if he’d mistaken his alarm for the phone.

A quick row of ten numbers appeared on the LCD screen. The number he was to dial. Hogan recognized the area code as Monterey, and when he called, a man answered in a gravelly voice, as if he’d just woken at nearly two in the afternoon. Hogan announced: “California Relay Services. I have a call from a hearing impaired party.”

“From Lily?” the man said, clearing his throat, then coughing.

“From Lily?” Hogan typed into the TTY machine. He was struck, immediately, by the loveliness of the name, though he didn’t comment on it, of course, as it was forbidden for Relay Operators to participate in conversations.

“Who else?” the TTY caller typed back. “Miss my ass, or what?”

Hogan recited the words, verbatim.

The man laughed, then said, “Sure as hell do. What do you think?” and Hogan typed the response into the TTY machine for Lily.

“I think you wish I was next to you right now, naked in your bed,” Lily typed.

Hogan could feel a light flush of embarrassment as he spoke the words, which he knew was silly. He was a professional; he’d been doing this for nearly seven years, earning upwards of $15.75 an hour along with full benefits. He understood how quickly he, as a person with independent thoughts and feelings, became invisible to the callers. It was with remarkable ease that people could become accustomed to an interloper on their conversations. Hogan (or more accurately, 9109 M) was regarded, he knew, as just one more piece of essential hardware, not unlike a closed caption decoder or a smoke alarm that flashed a bright strobe when tripped.

Most callers, however, didn’t speak this frankly. For the most part, conversations were brief, often stilted, stripped bare of all pleasantries and chitchat. (“You need to take me to the dentist at 2 p.m. tomorrow.” “I am cooking chili for dinner. Pick up onion and tomato paste on way home.” “Grandmother died last night. Come back to Maine for the funeral.”) Cumulatively, they left Hogan feeling flat and worn-down at the end of each day, as if he were eavesdropping on some lower form of primate who had not yet discovered emotion or complex sentences.

But Lily and the man, whose name turned out to be, plainly, Thomas, talked for a full twenty-seven minutes, meandering through a broad range of topics, from the tequila Thomas had drunk too much of the night before, to Lily wondering if she should get a nose job (to which Thomas yelled no, and Hogan typed capital N, capital O), to the last time Thomas came to see her and left a wet spot the size of a bowling ball in the middle of her bed. “I believe you’re the one who left that,” Thomas said.

“I’m bored,” Lily typed at one point. “My nipples are hard.”

Hogan found her disarming and refreshing and he pictured her as a redhead, maybe with a slight curl to her hair which she ran one finger absently through. He thought she was dimpled, but not round-faced. He imagined a certain sleekness to her features, giving off the confident maturity of having been around the block a time or two, but not in a loose sort of way.

“Bye, babe,” she typed simply, without warning or apology, soon after Thomas finished a long story about his dog throwing up on his carpet.

“Love you, Doll,” Thomas said, and Hogan found a quick, throaty thrill in the typing.

On that first night, Hogan thought of her only briefly. He sat alone in his apartment, listening to his refrigerator make its loud, angry hum, the same noise it’d been making for nearly a week now. He feared it might be revving itself up to an early death, but whenever he opened the door to investigate, he found nothing wrong, except for the air reeking of a mysterious rot. He’d thrown out all the half-eaten takeout containers and the few unidentifiable items wrapped in tinfoil in the back corners. Still, the smell remained. And the noise, too. He dreaded calling the building manager, a gruff man with a heavy Eastern European accent, who made bold, nasty comments about Hogan’s bare walls and the few pieces of furniture arranged spottily through the apartment. “You live like a refugee,” he’d said one time.

So Hogan tried ignoring the refrigerator while he sat at his kitchen counter eating soup; it was then that he wondered if she was eating dinner now too, and if so, alone or with someone else? Was she dressed in work clothes or stripped down to a robe, her bare legs exposed, one crossed over the other and swinging through the air? These were lazy, reflexive sorts of thoughts, a fleeting indulgence; he barely even realized he was thinking them.

When there was a knock on his apartment door, it was Mr. Orachuk from across the hall. His pilot light was out and he needed Hogan to bend down and light it. Mr. Orachuk was old and curled in on himself, a question mark of a man who used walls and doorways to steady his legs instead of the walker that sat in the far corner of the his apartment, pushed between a waterless aquarium and a tall stack of yellowing newspapers.

His kitchen smelled like stale cigarettes and overripe dishwater. Hogan knelt on the linoleum floor and leaned into the mouth of the stove. Flicking his lighter, he could see the craggy stalactites of grease and dirt built up around the walls. Mr. Orachuk stood next to the stove, complaining loudly of his hip problems and his terrible son, who was back in detox after another run of cocaine and barbiturates. His hearing aid was buzzing its usual one-note alarm, signaling a dying battery. The oven had a deep, unforgiving odor of years of burnt dinners. More than once, Hogan had run across the hall to disarm the smoke alarm and rescue a smoldering casserole from its depths.

After Hogan lit the pilot, Mr. Orachuk offered him a glass of tap water. The glass was spotty with fingerprints and Hogan didn’t want it, but took it anyway. He knew Mr. Orachuk had barely any visitors. His wife was dead, his kid a junkie. Mr. Orachuk was on a roll now, talking about the hard time he was having with any sort of grains lately—bread, pastas, cereal—all of it giving him terrible diarrhea.

“Your hearing aid,” Hogan said, pointing to his own ear.

“What?”

“You need a new battery.”

“What?”

“Nothing,” Hogan shouted. It was in moments like these when he most missed his best friend, Leon: their easy camaraderie, the way Leon would sprawl loose-limbed on Hogan’s couch after work with a beer, just as happy to flip through the cable channels as to talk. Hogan missed Leon’s unassuming way of keeping conversations afloat while making surprisingly little demands on the other person. Leon could deliver deft monologues on how terribly the Kings were doing this season, what the real solution was to the problems in the Middle East (parachuting a whole army of laptops into rural villages), if he was ever going to really want kids with the same urgency that his wife did. He made evenings ease by, as he and Hogan maybe ordered pizzas or flipped between an old Western and a football game. Time became languid when Leon was around, not something Hogan had to continually fight against, wishing that the seconds could tick by with a more merciful speed as he stood downwind of old man’s creaky breath or returned to his bowl of soup, cooled now, with a dense, fleshy skin across its surface.

Almost two weeks passed before he heard again from Lily. This time, it was an early morning call to a fellow in Berkeley. Not Thomas. Dwayne. They bantered about mutual friends (pregnant Barb, Lou who just lost his job). They told private jokes (one to do with a pet iguana, another with the inexplicable punch line of New Haven).

Hogan felt himself relaxing. It was the sort of relaxation that made him realize how tense he’d been up till then. His shoulders loosened, his jaw unclenched, his spine seemed to sink into the back of his chair. Dwayne and Lily griped about their jobs (Dwayne, a bartender who had to make needlessly complicated drinks like mojitos and chocolate martinis for yuppies in the Easy Bay. Lily, a hospital nursing aid who had to change bedpans and sheets and deliver endless food trays). I swear, she typed, O’Donnellis taking years off my life. Hogan recognized O’Donnell as a San Jose hospital, all the way on the other side of town from the Call Center, but still, the name brought with it the bright flutter of proximity. Might he and Lily swerve to avoid the same potholes on the same city roads? Might they look out their windows at the end of their shifts at the same pallid sunsets?

She told a story about accidentally getting mail at her house for some guy on the next block and reading a letter from his ex-wife where she called him a shitbag cocksucker and threatened to cut his balls off if he didn’t agree to the custody change she wanted. Dwayne told her she was going to hell for snooping. “Among other offenses,” Lily typed. There was something effortless in her glowing green words, and unexpected too; Hogan had no idea what might come next, and he liked that.

“I miss you,” Lily typed. “When am I going to see you? I want to touch you.”

Dwayne told her, “I’m not sure, babe.” He had his sister and two nephews coming to stay with him for about a week.

Lily typed “…” in response, indicating speechlessness.

“She’s speechless,” Hogan said, a little sheepishly. It was awkward for him, those brief moments when he had to interpret what had been typed, rather then simply recite it verbatim. The shift was a subtle one, the way Lily became a she, and Hogan became the mediator. They were the times when he felt most like the eavesdropper.

“Soon,” Dwayne said, without pause. “Tell her, soon.” The man spoke with such conviction, such barely suppressed urgency, Hogan felt a flood of emotions: again, the sheepishness of the interloper, but also a bodily scintillation (he could swear he was tingling), and a deep and unshakeable jealousy. His palms grew moist, his face warm.

He looked now at mundane objects in his cubicle—his black stapler, his scotch tape dispenser, a loose pile of paperclips—to calm himself down, unsettled by the sudden surge of feeling. He was a professional, he told himself. Focusing on his breathing and the way his chest expanded and deflated, the way air whirred down his hot throat, he began to ease back into himself; the tingling lessened, the stuttering in his chest slowed back to normal. Dwayne talked and Lily typed, and Hogan fused the two together simply and automatically, like an electrician to two errant wires.

But later, during the monthly birthday lunch, he found himself involuntarily thinking of her. Hogan hated the monthly birthday lunches: the cheap grocery store cake his boss placed in the middle of the conference room table, the loud and off-key Happy Birthday the Relay Operators were forced to sing to that month’s celebrants, the cramped way everyone arranged themselves around the table to eat their bagged lunches. His coworkers always seemed to revel in the event, filled with adolescent excitement from being briefly freed from the phones—forwarded for this single hour a month to the Call Center outside of L.A.—and able, for once, to speak for themselves. They talked over each other, bartered with their free cans of soda (“Trade someone a 7-Up for a Coke”) and let bits of cake fly from their mouths as they laughed.

Today, Fred, an old-timer who’d been at the Call Center nearly as long as Hogan, shouted a story about his wife charging up his credit card on more panties and bras than she’ll ever wear. “She got one,” he yelled, “that says hot stuff along the behind. Now, I don’t know if you’ve seen her behind lately, but—.” As he shook his head, everyone laughed and yelled about how Fred was a bad man. As usual, Hogan was unable to jump easily into the fray, feeling pressure to be, if not particularly clever, then at least passably loud. He lacked the skills everyone else seemed to so easily possess (even the unlikeliest among them, like pudgy, oily-faced Peggy, or Oliver who wore suits easily two decades out of fashion): coming up with witty anecdotes or pointed questions or sly comebacks or any of the small conversational greases or cogs that seemed to keep a room full of people noisy and entertained.

Instead, he drifted to the earlier conversation. At first, he tried to stop himself, recognizing—momentarily—the sinkhole of time and energy and devotion that could come of this. But across the table, Tabitha, a girl with a face like a mouse, was showing everyone the bad passport photo she’d just taken for her trip this summer to Spain, letting everyone pass it around and make terrible comments (“You look retarded or something,” “What’s wrong with your mouth?”), and Hogan found it so easy—so automatic—to drift away, to dissect instead the earlier conversation: what was her tone when she told Dwayne, Don’t forget about me: playful or desperate? Was her sign-off, Talk to you later, literal? Was she planning to call Dwayne back soon—today, even?

When Tabitha’s photo made its way to him, Hogan stared at the picture. It was terrible, her eyes crossed and her mouth twisted as if she were in the middle of shouting something. Everyone waited for him to say something vicious or funny or—best case—both. At least when Leon had still been there, Hogan could fade into the background, existing as something of a sidekick, a colorful character in Leon’s stories (“I took Hogue for $25 on the Sharks game last night. I’m telling you, who’s going to bet $25 on Phoenix?). But now, as everyone waited, his mind went blank; finally, he shrugged and lied, telling her “Not so bad,” ignoring the way people’s faces went slack with disappointment, as if he’d just let the air from the room.

Next came Guy, whom Lily called on a Thursday morning. Guy worked in an animal shelter in Santa Cruz and told earnest stories about three-legged cats, or dogs with scaly bald patches. Lily told him about her recent house-sitting stint, when she managed to simultaneously clog her friend’s toilet (If you could have seen the size of that colossal shit, she typed, and Hogan marveled at her fearlessness) and let the Chihuahua, Giovanna, escape out the back door (Who in their right mind would name a Chihuahua Giovanna? she typed. Is it supposed to be ironic?). Lily ran around the neighborhood frantic, shining her flashlight under every hedge and behind every garbage can, squawking for the dog (That’s how she referred to herself, as squawking), arriving back home sweaty and weepy and exhausted from sprinting for blocks, full of the panic and dread of having deeply fucked up, only to find Giovanna wading along the bathroom floor, up to her belly in the dirty water that had been overflowing for nearly an hour (happy as a clam, dumbly lapping up fecal matter).

Guy laughed and laughed. Lily told good stories. She had a cockeyed smile, Hogan decided, the sort that confused people about whether she was serious or sarcastic. She enjoyed that confusion and wasn’t at all quick to put people at ease. She liked to watch people squirm for a bit. Lily, he guessed, was a step ahead of most people. She made it seem so easy—the banter, the sly, self-deprecating confidence. There were moments when Hogan wasn’t sure if he was growing more enamored of her or of being her.

There were, as it turned out, six men in all. Hogan couldn’t be sure there weren’t more, since there were plenty of other Relay Operators on plenty of other shifts, but over the course of the next few months, he came to know of at least six whom Lily called regularly. Aside from Thomas and Dwayne and Guy, there was Fumio in the East Bay who had a heavy Japanese accent, which made relaying difficult, as Hogan was forced to ask him to repeat words (Rerise, RE-rise, RERISE, Fumio would shout, until Hogan finally understood him to be saying realize). Carl from Salinas was often on the cell phone in his car, the conversation sprinkled with invective hurled toward other drivers, which Hogan was duty-bound to relay, making for several uncomfortable exchanges, when Lily mistakenly thought Carl was calling her a douchebag or a cunthole. And finally, there was Douglas, all the way in San Diego, who spoke in a dazed-sounding monotone, content to spend the majority of conversation in a Zen-like mantra of I love you’s.

Over time, Hogan pieced together the significant details of Lily’s life. Her dad was dead, her mom retired to a humid city in the Florida Keys. She had an older sister named Catherine, who could hear and was a bookkeeper in one of the tiny New England states. Lily described herself as half-Buddhist, half-Jewish, half-atheist. She lived by herself in a studio apartment over an old couple’s garage in Ben Lomand. She worked three days on, three days off at the hospital, and when she complained of San Jose’s choking traffic and dingy, faceless buildings (That town was built by some sick sadist, she typed), Hogan felt he might just burst from feelings of affinity and understanding. She’d been deaf since she was four, the result of a fever. “Brain fever,” she called it, which Hogan took to be a joke but was not entirely sure. She had 15% hearing in one ear if she wore a clunky yellow hearing aid, which she did only at work.

For a time, Hogan was put off by the sheer number of men. For one thing, he felt paltry in comparison as he catalogued through the few women he’d briefly and unsuccessfully dated: Joy-Marie who’d let her little poodle eat out of her hand at the dinner table and started most stories with, “I have a funny story,” when in fact, they were not. Sylvia, who’d moved into the apartment beneath his after her divorce and taken his virginity like a librarian taking an overdue book, with quick, determined efficiency and a startling lack of flourish. Denise, who was allergic to most grains and had a living room furnished with beanbag chairs and mattress-like couches that lolled frameless on the floor, making it nearly impossible to sit up together and giving the whole relationship a lazy, shapeless feel.

And for another, he began to worry that he’d been initially mistaken, and that Lily was simply loose. For a brief time, he felt demoralized by her unapologetic, almost clinical discussions of sex, the way she spoke of her own breasts and vagina and clitoris with the assured remove of a medical student dissecting his first comely cadaver. But over time, he came to see things differently. Lily was irrepressible, uncontainable, far larger than the province of just one man. She had such deep reserves of humor and candor and irreverence, all of which seemed to spill from her in giant lapping waves, flowing into the TTY machine and out of Hogan’s mouth.

Days at the Call Center ordered themselves easily and automatically into Lily days and Non-Lily Days. Not that he heard from her with great frequency. Given the nature of the work, it was not uncommon for him to go days, weeks even, without a word. Every so often, he heard pudgy Peggy, two cubicles away, or loud-voiced Fred across the aisle, relaying a sentence about mouths and penises and the taste of your sweat. And while Hogan’s ears grew warm with the jealous knowledge that they’d gotten her this time, it wasn’t the frequency of her calls that mattered to him so much as their existence. They had become a reference point. Even if there was a span of two, three weeks without contact, the possibility of it still gave him something to tether himself to, the fine point around which everything else could revolve.

And then one night, as he sat in his apartment, his senses dulled by an empty evening, his eyes scratchy from staring at the TV too long, he heard a loud, shattering crash of glass. At first he ignored it, as he’d trained himself to do with the whole host of noises from the tenant parking lot beneath his windows—the squeal of car tires, two women yelling over a parking space, a dog barking incessantly. For a full beat or two, he continued to watch a documentary about an orphaned polar bear pup being raised by humans, until he realized the sound had not come from outside his windows but from in the building. A deeper instinct kicked in then—an instinct that was all at once fretful, morbid, alert—and Hogan moved faster than he had in weeks, maybe months.

He ran across the hall, first knocking on Mr. Orachuk’s door, then banging hard, then calling then old man’s name, then returning to his own apartment for Mr. Orachuk’s spare key (In Case of Emergency, Mr. Orachuk had written on the long tab of masking tape along the key ring, which up until this point had consisted of the handful of times that Mr. Orachuk had locked himself out on the way back from the grocery store). Inside the old man’s apartment, there was the same stale, unwashed smell as usual, but with something layered on top of it now, something tangy and metallic, which Hogan couldn’t identify until he stepped into the living room.

In the far corner lay Mr. Orachuk, crumpled among huge shards of glass and a littering of the tiny pebbles that had lined the bottom of the fishless aquarium. One of the old man’s legs was twisted into an incomprehensible angle; blood (that was the smell—blood) oozed quickly from cuts along his face and arms. Above him on its usual shelf sat what remained of the aquarium - three sides still intact and impotent—more impotent than usual—and the front one gone, nothing left but a few jagged teeth along the bottom, stubbornly hanging on.

“Mr. Orachuk,” Hogan yelled, wishing he could remember the man’s first name. Had he ever even known his first name? Had he ever spoken it? Who had last spoken this man’s first name? For a moment Hogan was stuck in his spot, only moving far enough to stamp out the cigarette still smoldering in its ashtray. Soon, though, he was stepping through the glass and grabbing Mr. Orachuk’s arm, feeling for his pulse, as he had seen so many people in so many movies do, and calling 911.

When the ambulance arrived, Hogan instinctively lied to a paramedic and said yes, he was family, so that he could go along for the ride. He was not ready to separate from the old man, could not fathom returning quietly to his own apartment. During the ride, he kept touching Mr. Orachuk’s shoulder, a nervous gesture he couldn’t stop repeating. “Looks like a stroke,” one of the paramedics told him. “Sure did himself in on that fall, though. Terrible luck.”

As the paramedics jammed tubing deep into Mr. Orachuk’s throat and swabbed his cuts with a burnt orange ointment, Hogan wondered—his thoughts frenetic and slightly unhinged—had it been luck? Had Mr. Orachuk been simply, unfortunately walking past the aquarium when the stroke hit, or had he—as Hogan imagined—been standing over it, maybe peering in, contemplating the fish that had once inhabited it, the leafy green plants that had swayed in the filtered tide, the fake copper scuba divers and abandoned castles, all gone now, lost to him, like so much of Mr. Orachuk’s shitty, sad old life.

It was as he was thinking this that he heard the driver say, “Nine minute ETA to O’Donnell Med Cen.” Or maybe it was the paramedic in the back; he would wonder about that later. Who had first spoken the words? When exactly had he realized, as they whirred through the dark streets, that they were heading to Lily’s hospital? In the days that followed, Hogan would remind himself—more than once—that his initial impulse had been charitable, that those first minutes of panic and chaos were selfless, his motives unmuddled. Because once he heard O’Donnell, everything went askew. Maybe it was the adrenalin already pulsing through him, or the wailing of sirens overhead, or the stomach-churning dips and swerves of the road, but almost instantly, in the span of that one word, Hogan forgot Mr. Orachuk—strapped to a backboard as he was, spotty with orange ointment, mouth agape from plastic tubing—and grew certain, instead, that it would be his own body to fly apart, his own organs to fail, from the force (he could feel it, an actual centrifugal force) of hurtling headlong—surely, he was sure of it—into his fate.

He waited for a long time in an unforgiving waiting room chair and watched as a stream of people—a gray-haired woman with a melon-like lump in her left calf, a young boy whose hand bled through the bath towel it was wrapped in, a jaundiced man with what Hogan could only describe as algae (a soft green rash) along one side of his face—were shepherded into the ER.

Hogan sat trapped in a ridiculous outfit, a coat hastily thrown over a t-shirt and shorts, and worst of all, white socks in sandals. He was cold and embarrassed, and felt a particular scorn for his knobby, hairy kneecaps, especially as a tiny blonde passed through the waiting room, wearing the same orange scrubs he’d heard Lily describe derisively more than once (You think it’s any coincidence they make us dress like inmates? she’d typed); or, later a brunette with spotty, flushed cheeks and an ample behind; or still later, a pale-faced, skinny girl busily working her hair into a rubber band. He cursed his knees in those moments with a self-hatred so vehement, it moved through him as a shiver, actually making his hands shake as he shrunk into his chair and asked himself the same hiccupping question:

Her? Her? Her?

After a few hours, he was ushered to the ICU waiting room where the chairs were replaced with low-to-the-ground couches whose cushions smelled of spilled coffee and other people’s sweat. The adrenalin had been steadily seeping out of him, replaced by a deep, achy restlessness. What had he thought in the ambulance, that as he stepped through the hospital’s automatic doors, she would come running, her hands flying around her face in a flurry of sign language that he would suddenly, intuitively understand?

Finally, when the clock on the far wall read 3:12, a doctor told Hogan that Mr. Orachuk (Charles, of course, that was his first name, Charles) was unconscious but stabilized and in serious condition; all signs indeed indicated a stroke, but the fall had done its own host of damages: a crushed windpipe, deeply lacerated trunk (this made Hogan think of damaged luggage), loss of blood. “It’s good you found him when you did,” the pale-faced doctor said. Then: “You can see him now.”

Mr. Orachuk was in a shared room, three beds arranged efficiently across a narrow expanse of floor. All three men were asleep or unconscious, the room filled with the arduous noise of ventilators laboring for breath. Machines hummed and gave off strange light shows next to the beds. Mr. Orachuk lay swaddled in a mummy-like coating of bandages, which seemed to glow in the dark of the room. The bright stench of ammonia hung in the air, but nearer to Mr. Orachuk’s bed, where Hogan crept only briefly, before forcing himself out of there and into a cab and back home and—finally, unavoidably—to bed, there was the faintest remnant of the stale apartment, that familiar, slightly sweet odor of rot.

The next day, he couldn’t concentrate. He’d barely slept. Coffee seemed to be making him more tired, but shaky and vulnerable feeling on top of it. He kept dropping sentences during calls, barely listening as he relayed that Janice needed her diazepam from the pharmacist, and that Ronald needed to come right home after school to watch his brother. He wondered if he was getting sick, but quickly dismissed the thought. He couldn’t be sick. He needed to go back to O’Donnell. Of course he was going back. Having inched into Lily’s world, he was preoccupied by the idea of meeting her now, the thought of it having buzzed through his head for most of the night.

There had been a moment, sometime around dawn, as the gray light first filtered through his blinds, when it occurred to him that only a few months before, his mind had been devoid of her, filled instead with a whole universe of thoughts (About what? He couldn’t remember now). The very idea seemed improbable to him, nearly unfathomable, the sort of sleepless idea that borders on lunacy. He’d dressed in nice khakis and his green button-down when he finally got out of bed.

But when work finally ended and he made it back to the hospital—same as the night before—he was unsure of what to do. He sat in chair next to Mr. Orachuk’s bed and thrummed his fingers on his thigh. Mr. Orachuk’s condition was the same. He looked small in his bed, his legs twig-like beneath the blanket. The bandage taped across his throat reminded Hogan almost quaintly of a neckerchief. Each time anyone entered the room—nurse, orderly, doctor, janitor—Hogan startled slightly in his seat, tasting his pulse in his throat. But they turned out to be men, or far too old, or far too young, or quick to turn their head when he said, “Hi,” very softly from his seat, which he had taken to doing—at least with the women, or at least with the women in orange scrubs—as a sort of test.

It was a terrible plan, he realized, really just the worst, sitting here like this, waiting, no different than sitting in his cubicle waiting for her call. What were his options? Go up to a charge nurse and simply ask for Lily? Walk the hallways, floor by floor, looking for the girl with the clunky yellow hearing aid? And then what? What was he supposed to say? “You don’t know me, but I know you?” “Now I know this might sound crazy. . .?”

Mr. Orachuk made a noise—a low groan—and Hogan peered at the bed. But it was nothing; the old man lay still, unmoving. Hogan placed a hand lightly on his forehead, and then on the crown of his head, petting the hair that would soon turn greasy and gritted with dirt, but for now, was still soft as a child’s.

He returned each night, sometimes standing at the bank of pay phones in the hospital’s hallway, trying to look confident and important, as he searched for Charles Orachuk Jr.. He couldn’t remember (or hadn’t been listening to) exactly where the boy lived, so he tried a scattershot of places to the north: Chico, Redding, Crescent City, Humboldt. The boy was nowhere. Other times, he walked boldly to the vending machines or the bathrooms or—even once—to the cafeteria, swinging his arms at his sides, watchful as a periscope.

But mostly, he sat beside Mr. Orachuk, reading aloud from the pulpy sections of newspaper he’d found littered through the waiting room, or watching the slow, steady red trail of a heartbeat as it slunk across the monitor. And the whole time—whenever he was inside O’Donnell—his nerve-endings thrummed noisily just below the surface, his skin grew painful like a fever, his body was alight and in rebellion, from being so close, so achingly close, yet so dimly, so dumbly unable to act.

Late one night, as he finally made his way back home, he could hear the trilling noise of his phone through his door. As accustomed as he was to this sound at work, he was just as surprised by it here.

When the machine picked up, it was Leon’s voice. “Hey Buddy!” he yelled. “Don’t tell me you’re out on the town? Wooing those fine California ladies without me?” Hogan rushed to answer before Leon hung up, the machine making a high-pitched squealing noise as he struggled to turn it off, pressing button after button. Leon yelled “Hello?” and Hogan yelled, “Hang on, hang on.” They rarely spoke on the phone. Leon called every several months, but between the time difference and the rounds of phone tag, it wasn’t unusual for the attempts to peter out to nothing. Hogan couldn’t even remember the last time. After the machine finally stopped squealing, Leon said, “How are you, man?”

“I’m fine,” Hogan said, though what he wanted to say (which he didn’t realize he wanted to say till he heard his friend’s voice, Leon’s good-natured, familiar congeniality) was I’m worn down, soggy, tired. “How are you?”

“Great,” Leon said, and he talked about their flat (that’s what he called their apartment now, a flat), his wife’s PhD program (something to do with economics that Hogan only tenuously understood), the soccer team he was following, called Manchester something, with some player named Ruud, neither of which Hogan had heard of. Leon talked animatedly about the Houses of Parliament and the bullshit laws they were passing about fox hunting. “You wouldn’t bee-lieve the amount of time they spend on that sort of crap,” he said.

“Does it rain a lot?” Hogan asked, unable to think of anything else. He worried, as soon as he said it, that he’d asked the same question in their last conversation.

“What?” Leon said, the reception spotty between them.

Hogan repeated the question, since he couldn’t think of a better one.

“It’s not so bad. You’d be surprised how quick you get used to it.”

Hogan pictured Leon on the London streets, the sky leaden and heavy overhead, Leon walking without worry, an umbrella at his side like a jaunty cane.

“What you been up to?” Leon said.

“My neighbor had a stroke.” Again, he couldn’t think of anything else.

“The old guy?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s too bad. He’s okay?”

“He’s been unconscious for almost three weeks. It’s a coma. He’s all banged up, too.” Hogan told him about the aquarium.

“Geez,” Leon said, and then was quiet. Hogan felt bad for deflating the conversation. He thought of telling Leon about Lily—he ached to talk about her, in fact—but he couldn’t think of any way to put it.

“How’s your car?” Leon finally said.

“The same,” Hogan said, wishing he could think of something funny or interesting. “Shifting hard from first to second.” He was starting to regret picking up the phone. The smallness of his life pressed against him now, shamelessly.

“Get that checked out,” Leon said. “Don’t want to mess with the transmission.”

“Sure,” Hogan said. He glanced around his apartment, looking at the row of magnets on his refrigerator and the pile of shoes just inside his door, hoping something would jog loose a clever story. The static crackled on the line.

“You seeing anyone?” Leon finally said.

“Uh-uh.”

“You still in touch with Denise?”

“No.” Denise, of the allergies and floppy furniture, was the one girlfriend Hogan had had during his friendship with Leon, which had seemed to elevate her to a place of little-deserved but unshakeable significance in Leon’s mind.

“How’s the Call Center?’ Leon finally asked, winding them safely back to familiar territory. Hogan told the story about Fred’s wife’s underwear.

“Funny,” Leon said, and they were quiet again. Hogan thought he could hear Leon sighing. When Leon finally said something else, his voice was cutting in and out, and Hogan kept asking him to repeat it. He longed suddenly to be off the phone, to be free of this crackly, stilted imitation of their friendship. He made up something about having to make dinner, which he knew Leon knew was a lie, since all Hogan ever did for dinner was stick things in the microwave, but Leon didn’t protest.

“Good talking to you, buddy,” Leon said. “I hope your friend gets better.”

Hogan did not bother to tell him that Mr. Orachuk was not actually his friend; he was just an old man who happened to live across the hall.

And when he died—three days later—Hogan felt nothing but a numb tingling up the base of his spine. Is this shock? he wondered. Or grief? Mr. Orachuk had never regained consciousness—it was cardiac arrest that finally did him in—and by the time Hogan arrived at the hospital from work, the room had been stripped bare of him, sheets pulled tightly around the bed, chair pushed neatly into the corner.

Hogan stood in the doorway, tapping one foot. He was not sure what to do with himself. His head felt weighty on his neck. He could not stop biting his bottom lip. It struck him how little difference it made to the room, the removal of Mr. Orachuk from it. There had been no flowers to clean up. No pictures of the late Mrs. Orachuk on the nightstand. No suitcase or shaving kit.

Hogan felt a low burbling in his chest, not unlike indigestion, and he realized he was angry. Angry that the old man had, after all of Hogan’s hours next to his bed, died alone here. Angry that Charles Jr. had never shown up, oblivious that any of this was even taking place, and would likely come knocking one day—next month or next year—unwashed and bleary-eyed, on Hogan’s door, to find out why his dad wasn’t answering his. Angry at the hospital for not calling Hogan and notifying him, even if he wasn’t really anybody. Angry at the Leons and the Lilys—yes the Lilys, too—of the world, who seemed to come into his life for the express purpose of rooting around in the emptiness of it. And angry at himself, for standing here now, fixed in this doorway, with no place else to go.

“He’s still down in the morgue if you want to see him,” said one of the nurses who had come up behind him, the one with the uneven eyes (one a good half-inch higher than the other). Donna, Hogan thought her name might be. He was embarrassed to be found this way, standing in a doorway, crying. He was aware the he was making a stupid noise, a nasally sort of squeak.

“Sorry,” he said, and she assured him there was no need to apologize. She set a hand on his back and he found it to be such a kind and comforting gesture, the noise only grew louder. He wiped his nose on his sleeve.

“There, there,” Donna the nurse said, and Hogan imagined she had a full stable of children back home, ones she tucked in each night, read picture books to, sang songs to about the moon. She told Hogan how to get to the morgue (an elevator trip six floors down to the basement) and gave a short speech about the importance of saying goodbye. He thought briefly about kissing her.

Alone in the elevator, he watched his reflection in the steel door. The metal was slightly warped and murky with fingerprints, so his face was diffuse and clownish, his forehead improbably high, his red eyes stretched into alien-like orbs, his mouth and chin truncated. He looked pathetic. He even said it out loud as they passed the fifth floor: “Pathetic.” It felt good to say. Between the fourth and third floor, he decided he was done. Done with Lily, done with the fantasizing. He didn’t want to end up like Mr. Orachuk, festering away in his apartment for years, only to end up laid out cold on a slab in some hospital. Hogan would get on track, maybe go back to school. Away. Somewhere away from San Jose. And he would study to be something important, a businessman or a veterinarian. He’d stop listening in on other people’s conversations. He would meet a nice girl, maybe someone who already had some kids and was looking for someone quiet and dependable. He would get real. He liked the sound of that. It sounded like a slogan. He would be someone with a slogan. At floor two, he said “Get real,” out loud, and he could feel his heartbeat, strong as a drum, beating against his sternum.

And then the elevator stopped on the first floor and the doors slid open and in came a woman who looked dully at Hogan before facing the panel of buttons and pressing B even though it was already lit, and Hogan thought he might suddenly choke on his saliva, might accidentally swallow his tongue.

It was her. He knew it. It was something almost indiscernible—the curve of her hip, the pale of her neck, the smooth of the back of her hand. Why she was dressed in plain clothes, not the orange scrubs, seemed strange to him, as was the fact that she carried only a tiny change pouch. Wouldn’t she bring a purse with her to work, maybe a lunch sack? Strange too that she wouldn’t be wearing her hearing aid, but there was little time for such thoughts; there were only seconds between when the doors closed again and when they’d reach the basement.

He would say to her: “It’s me. Hogan. 9109 M.”

He would say: “Sometimes, I have dreams where you are touching my face.”

He would say: “I just want to see what it looks like when you laugh.”

He would say: “I’ve never been to England.”

He would say: “Come away with me.”

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