We had picked out a place to sleep and to wake up for the sunrise and I think the idea was to have a kind of religious experience, but we both knew that wasn’t going to happen, not when we were so focused on setting up everything just right. The bridegroom comes like a thief in the night. Always be ready is how I used to read that, now I read it life doesn’t go as planned. If you’re not vigilant you could wake up one day and find yourself with a bridegroom.

Cheever

We looked like idiots, or at least derelict. I was wearing a rented suit I wouldn’t return with a jacket just a little too big. Xina wore a sweatsuit and was carrying her dress. She’d slipped out of it at the graduation and end-of-year awards party sometime between our leaving the second-floor bathroom, separately and discreetly, and leaving Cheever Hall, separately and discreetly, and finding each other in the black glade on the edge of campus by all the frat houses and sorority houses.

Then we walked for two hours nowhere. You can do that sometimes, with the right drugs or with an interesting person, you can do that until you have to stop. We’d decided wherever we stopped would be a good enough to sleep, as long as it was a field or a park on the outskirts of town.

We picked a field’s edge that was dewy already at three a.m., so we had to kick it dry and brush the dew aside. I even blew on the grass blades like I was a hot air blow dryer and Xina whipped me on the head with her dress so I’d stop and we could lie down already.

The mornings were bringing in a late spring fog lately and we could feel it gathering already in the night. We had to press together and share heat to get any real sleep for two hours. But our Molly had peaked only hours ago, so we weren’t going to fall asleep anytime soon.

We spent most of a half hour tying ourselves together in the kind of a knot you might use to cinch a tourniquet. It took a good deal of flexibility and patience and concentration to braid our legs together like we did, in a configuration to keep our four legs toasty. It took planning, trust, and communication, too, to cover ourselves with one side of a suit jacket and then to slide a dress on top of us like a comforter and then in the end come somehow closer together, snug and tight like two spoons butt-welded.

What are you dreaming? was a thing I liked to ask Xina when we couldn’t sleep, instead of asking, you awake? And most of the time she was funny, that’s why I asked her about her dreams and always slept with her. I liked to think she slept with me for the same reason, but I think she only slept with me because I liked her so fucking much. It’s nice to feel liked and I don’t think her boyfriend liked her.

Xina’s dreams often seemed plausible, like real dreams even though they were whole cloth nonsense and not actually dreams at all. But she had an ear for dream music and could stitch together scenes and tableaux the way a liminal mind does. And her voice when she mimicked a sleeper, softly irrefutable. Listening to her voice, I was a child who would believe anything.

Tonight, you don’t want to hear it, she said.

When you say that you know I do, I said.

She squirmed out of her shoes for some reason and started toeing my socks.

What’s this? I said.

Aren’t your feet cold?

Not yet.

My toes are freezing. I want your foot warmth.

Here, I said and I tried to free up my arms to help her.

Don’t! she said. You’ll fuck up the blankies.

So, I let her do it and she burrowed her cold toes into my socks. I didn’t tell you she was short, did I? She was able to wriggle into my socks because her feet came to my shins when we spooned.

Then there was a pause in the squirming, like house lights dimming and a curtain going up and she entered and found her light and she told me:

Display cases

I’m dreaming that you and me are in a kitchen, but the kitchen is also a farmers’ market.

You never dream about us, I said.

We’re making pancake and waffle combo plates but we don’t have a griddle.

You never dream about me, anyway.

Maybe tonight I will. Just listen.

I hope so.

Instead of a griddle we have these, like, machines and magic powers to make all the components of a breakfast. You have this wheel of pancake, like this tubular thing spinning that you cut like you score a pot on a potter’s wheel, and you’re scoring it and off plops a pancake. You put two of them on a plate and pass me the plate and I crank this, like, sausage maker machine that poops out eggs whatever way you want them, scrambled, over-easy, sunny-side up, boiled, they’re all settings on this egg maker. And I put the eggs on the plate you’re making and you have a roll of bacon, perforated kind of like a paper towel roll, and you tear off a couple strips. Then, three ferries or elves or whatever walk up to the plate and one has a firehose of syrup and one has a flamethrower that sprays whipped cream and the last one has a cannon that shoots berries. This plate gets blueberries.

Who’s it for?

That’s the thing. We don’t know at first. There’s a screen in front of us, held up by these C-stands, and it’s just this black curtain and when we’re done with a plate we put it in this display case in front of the screen and there’s an audience now, we see them now. They’d been watching us on CC TV. But they’re with us now, so we close the display case and there’s this little ripple of applause that ripples through the entire market and it’s growing and growing until it seems like it’s parting the clouds above us and putting a magnifying glass over the sun, it’s so warm and the tents beside us are starting to burn and then there’s theme music, title music. It’s like this awful horror score, but also like a seventies public television show. At the end of the title score a great big pimply hairy mitt of a hand reaches through the curtain and everything goes silent except for the sound of some monster that we can’t see chewing and chomping and burping. Two firemen have popped up out of nowhere to put out the fires around the farmers’ market and the sun cools off for minute and apologizes for losing herself in the moment. She was the monster! She was the one stealing our food and eating it! But she returns the plate to us clean and it wobbles in the display case, and it feels like we’re moving because we are, and we’re like clicked two notches, our whole world, like a setting for some tool or machine is clicked, or a kitchen timer, and in front of us is an order ticket for the next breakfast plate and we see that we’re just riding a ticket carousel and we’re in a different market, this one indoors and more of a meat market kind of vibe, and I’m squinting to see what’s on the ticket so I know how to squeeze out my eggs, but I can’t see it. You can somehow see it, but I can’t.

You can’t read in dreams, I said.

I think you can, she said. I just can’t in this one.

What time is it? We should go to breakfast when 4B’s opens.

That’s way across town.

Perkins is twenty-four hours.

All the cops are there. We don’t want to be around cops.

Is it daytime, though? It seems like it’s becoming daytime.

We just laid down.

It’s getting light out.

That’s impossible.

It’s getting light out fast.

And there was light, even Xina could see it, but it wasn’t the light of it’s light out. It was above us and concentrated like a pair of spotlights and shining on the trees at the edge of the field by the ditch, but it wasn’t on us, because of the small hill we were on the other side of, and it was coming from the west not the east as I was pretty sure it should be in the morning.

Another light and another light were added to the first light and I said, shhh, but I didn’t really need to. It was sort of implied.

Nothing good comes from light at night.

There were voices, in general saying nothing at all except that they were all, with the exception of one, agreed on some action they were about to take. You could tell by the rolling waves of agreement.

Nah, I ain’t playing with this fucking fool no more, the dissenting voice said. He send a motherfucker to tell us his shit and this motherfucker ain’t shit at all? Man, fuck him!

I think they got the message.

Nah, fuck that.

Then a door opened and a pleading voice joined in the discussion until someone hit the motherfucker who ain’t shit.

I’m sorry! I’m sorry! he cried.

Yo, I think he’ll get the message. Yo, tell your little friend what happens when you fuck with us and ours.

I will! I will, I’ll let them know. I’ll stay away, I promise.

Squat, let’s go.

Don’t say my name!

He knows who took him!

Let’s go, brah.

Leave him.

Let’s go?

Let’s go.

They seemed to begin to go, but then one pair of feet thumped back to where the motherfucker who ain’t shit’s voice was and then two slaps! slapped the night sky, like gunshots probably, and then two more. And then one last one.

Tell all your motherfucking friends! the voice called Squat added.

Three or four footsteps walked toward us.

Jesus Christ, Squat!

You keep saying my name I’ll have to make you an example, too.

Then Squat exhaled a long and satisfied half-moan as a stream of piss irrigated the ground not even six paces from us by the sound of it. Xina used my arm to pull me tighter into her as if to make us quieter. I squeezed back to make us quieter still and even smaller than the shadow we were in. Her toes curls in and pressed hard into me and probably cut my shins and I made that sound pfff! like I was being hurt.

Then I stopped because the piss stopped.

I held my breath. Xina held hers, too, but her stomach was still pumping in and out, in and out, like a plugged up accordion, and when air finally went in, I was worried, we’d be looking at our last breaths.

Then footsteps and the voices gathering at the idling cars and crossing in and out of the light. Something was said there about doing something rash and stupid and something about sending a message and that you gotta sometimes. The three doors, maybe four, shut at nearly the same time and the light that pretended to be morning stretched across the field like a backward sunrise and left us clutching each other in the dark.

Did you hear his zipper go up?

No.

I didn’t either.

Hopeful

Xina was playing with fridge magnets when I met her, at a party in the dead-end roundabout on Koch, near the MSU campus. She was waiting by the fridge for the bathroom to free up. The bathroom door was pretty much the third fridge door in all the apartments on Koch, their plumbing having been built out frugally, no drain too far from the drain stack. Kitchen sink, bathroom sink, toilet, shower. All family.

Apartment layouts like this, practical by design and practical only, flanked the south side of the MSU campus and most were empty during the summer, when the property managers sent cleaners and junk haulers and handyman companies in to sterilize each one, sometimes replacing carpets whole cloth and repainting. Friends I knew and friends Xina knew were throwing parties in these apartments the summer we met, called black dot parties because no one knew where the party was until they were on Koch and saw a big black dot on the door.

You misspelled hopeful, I said to her. That an omen or a slip? First thing I said to her.

I did? Stop it! I didn’t.

It came out like one word and she hit me on the shoulder, a little hard but not too hard, really, felt kind of like a squeeze.

The magnets were word magnets, not letter magnets.

You’re a jackass, but okay, I’ll turn hopeful upside-down, she said.

Come back to it later, I said.

Hopeful the door will open soon

What’s replacing hopeful? I said.

She moved both hands over the words like someone reading shattered braille.

Upset the door will open soon

Because I’m upset at you.

Who’s behind the door?

My boyfriend, she said.

That was too bad, but I didn’t say that out loud.

Did I upset you?

Why’s he making you upset? I said.

He’s not, she said.

You picked the word, I said.

You’ve never been in a relationship, she said.

I’ve been in and out of a few.

So you haven’t, she said and she turned another magnet over.

Upset the door will open

There’s another bathroom.

Where? she said.

In the garage, I said.

Is the downstairs part of the party?

It’s just below us. All these units are the same.

There was a flush behind the door beside the fridge and all too quickly the door opened and a disembodied head hung out like it was being carried by its headless master, but that was not the most unfortunate part. He had a blonde soul patch and a neck tattoo of the Twin Towers.

Xina grabbed my hand and pulled me the direction of the garage.

Show me the where the other restroom is!

Weren’t you waiting for this one?

I like the other one better.

The one you’ve never been in?

Yes.

Any song

At the bottom of the stairs she started walking in the wrong direction so I pulled on the shoulder of her blouse to redirect her. An innocent tug but too familiar a gesture, I didn’t even know her name yet, and she turned to me and slapped my hand away and I let my hand fall with the palm up with no expectation of touching her ever again, but she saw that palm up as an invitation, a pretty awkward one, and she put her pointer finger in it and with her other hand she closed my fingers around her finger and squeezed the whole assemblage as slow and sudden as a Venus fly trap.

Where are you taking me? she said.

Right where you asked, I said.

There’s no one down here.

No one said there would be.

That’s someone’s bedroom.

The bathroom’s this way.

Wait here, she said.

I indicated I would.

But don’t listen, she said. I can’t pee when just anyone can hear me.

I won’t listen.

Hum something.

Hum something?

A song.

And she went into the bathroom and closed the thin hollow door and when she spoke to me again it was like there was nothing between us.

I don’t hear any music.

I had been reading Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers and that just came to mind as somehow helpful, so I said, I can’t sing, and proceeded to summarize the best parts of the story of Joseph. How he was sold to traders who took him to Egypt and how his brothers, who sold him, slayed a lamb or a sheep and dribbled its blood onto the coat they had torn from him and tore it some more and took it home to their father who wept and covered himself in ashes.

Like David did after the Bathsheeba thing.

You know the David story?

The main bullet points.

She came out of the bathroom and she was messing with her skirt. You don’t see many women her age wearing skirts day to day. I would find out later the casual skirt was kind of her thing, and I was already getting that impression now. If she got cold ever, she’d just wear a shirt with long sleeves. Her legs were out there always, like bodyguards.

I saw you looking at me, you know.

I haven’t been.

Like an hour ago.

Maybe just a glance, I said.

You can admit it.

I can’t lie, I said. And that was kind of true. I wasn’t very good at it was the whole truth.

The door at the top of the stairs opened and Xina pulled me by my shirt into the bathroom and she locked the cheap, loud lock and flipped the light off and she sat me on the toilet seat and she sat on my knees and we heard her name.

Xina! the voice at the top of the stairs said.

And then there were footsteps, loud creaky things with a lot of force behind the heels. You can tell by the way someone walks down stairs whether they have a neck tattoo or think they can pull off a soul patch.

I’m Xina, Xina whispered.

Good to meet you. I’m Todd.

He’ll give up fast, Xina said. He’s fucking dumb when he shrooms.

Does he know where to get shrooms?

What do you think?

What else does he know how to get?

She hit me.

Xina! the dumb voice said again. It was on the garage floor now and you could hear him pacing and hear some kind of menace building momentum. You heard an empty keg pulled to the center of the floor, or at least away from the wall, and you heard a second one, too, pulled away from the wall.

Where are you! he said, this boyfriend lunk said, said into the bedroom Xina had almost walked into.

Is he violent? I asked, and Xina put a hand over my mouth to shut me up but after thirty seconds, which is a long time to hold your hand over someone’s mouth, after about thirty seconds it felt like she was trying to slip me a finger to slurp on, which is a kind of foreplay you can only perform sexily if you’re feeding someone something.

Where did you go, Xina? he said as he rattled our locked bathroom door.

Keith! Where’s the key! he shouted to the ceiling. The key to the bathroom, though, was only a pin or a six- or eight-penny nail or a paper clip and I was almost peeing myself on top of the toilet seat now.

Xina put her hand on my mouth again and put her head against me, her quivering lips against my temple.

It’s time to go! I’m coming down.

I would learn later that he confused coming down as another way to say kicking in. The drugs are coming down on me, I suppose is what he meant.

We heard a tap on one of the kegs, like it was hit by a stick.

I’m reeeeeaally coming down!

Another strike against the keg.

It’s about to get crazy, he said.

Another hit.

The lunk had somehow tracked down drumsticks. He began banging on the empty kegs in the middle of the garage and improvising lyrics you couldn’t possibly hear or understand or comprehend.

What’s he playing? I mouthed into her hand.

What’s that? she whispered in my ear.

Is this a song? I tried to say.

I can’t hear you.

It was then that she took her hand off my lips and lifted my chin to hers and kissed me.

Just kissed me.

Just kissed me was all it took.

What began right then and for the entire summer and for four years of college was a tacit understanding that we’d cheat on our partners and do so mostly in bathrooms, a thrill that never got old and never ventured too far past the drain stack.

God moved over the face of the water

Forty-five minutes is what I’ll call it. We lay there in the field forty-five minutes and it felt like fifteen. But also like two full days. Neither of us moved and neither of us breathed a breath shorter than eight seconds. Trying to make ourselves so still and tiny no one could ever find us, not even if they’d imagined us here. I felt sweat leaking out of my pores on the half of my body facing Xina. 

She was first to move. She turned her head to the black and star-pocked sky and looked at me, probably, I can’t be sure, looked at me with one swan eye and said, I have to pee.

Go, I said.

Will they come back? she said.

There’s no way, I said, but I didn’t mean it, exactly, because I was thinking of the aphorism about criminals and returning. But I was also thinking it can’t apply to murder. At least, not until much later. Maybe give it a week and they’d come back. Although, they didn’t seem like the types to pretend to go on nature strolls along fields’ edges or set up lawn chairs and drink boxed wine around a campfire as their ruse to see if any of them left clues behind.

That’s unfair. I obviously didn’t see them at their best. Maybe they did drink boxed wine.

Xina was peeing so loud against the ground I could picture her stream cutting into the soil and winding and wending its way to the ditch and to a creek and then a river to the ocean, where all things go. Her piss, the murderer’s piss, a glass of water, somebody’s tears, the dew on the grass that isn’t evaporated, blood.

Then there was silence except I thought I could hear the swish of footsteps.

Don’t go too far, I said.

I’m not going to touch him.

I know that, I said, but I didn’t really know she wouldn’t until she said it.

There’s no blood, she said. It’s all soaked up.

It’s probably spattered. Don’t go too close. Don’t make us part of it.

I wish I could see who it is, she said after a long silence.

He probably had friends, I thought. And family. And I dreamed up several more observations equally cheap and stupid and I kept myself from saying them by trying to decipher, without touching my arm, if I was cold or wet from lying on the ground.

For what it’s worth, I was cold only. I’d kept the earth beneath me from growing dew.

I can’t believe this happened, Xina said.

From the back of the deceased’s head I could make out his face. It was a Francis Bacon painting.

That was a person, I said.

On this little hill. It’s not even a hill.

It’s just the edge of a field.

What a stupid place to kill someone.

For a second I saw what she saw. Packed clay where tires tread but only tread so far, vanishing close to us, where a farmer or his hired man might park his flatbed and survey his wheel lines, making double sure with his failing eyes each sprinkler head was turning.

I saw faint but hurried sunlight bend and irradiate power lines. I saw an unremarkable tree, maybe dead. There was a hum from pump shack but no sprinklers turning anywhere.

Could that really be? I thought. Nothing?

Nothing.

Who knew you could desecrate such a banal space?

Opioid

We were only fifteen or sixteen blocks away from my home when I noticed Xina was neither holding nor wearing shoes. I tried to give her mine but that was stupid.

Do you think anyone knows it was us?

It wasn’t, I said.

I had no idea what she was trying to say, so I said more for her. I said, do you think they sensed there were others there? Maybe that others there was possible.

No, in the bathroom. At Cheever Hall. People were talking in the lobby that somebody was fucking in the bathroom.

We left separately.

People always leave separately.

We walked in silence except for our scuds against the sidewalk. There were probably birds I didn’t hear.

I hope nobody knows, Xina said. Then she said, at the next light I’ll take a right. I should go home.

Xina turned and brushed off the side of my shirt with dirt on it. I had something to say to her about feelings for her, something a couple notches above liking her, but I couldn’t say it because maybe it was just adrenaline burning off my overheated heart a couple hours after the killing. So I did my part, walking in silence until Xina had to take her right.

She did her part, too.

Nothing.

There were two executioners in custody not even twenty-four hours from when Xina and I separated. There was a picture online. There was a caption that said his name was Martin. He didn’t look like a Martin. Or a Squat.

It’s a wonder people are allowed to murder. Ever since Cain killed Abel we’ve been bungling almost every goddamn one, each slightly more pointless than the last. Maybe I’m wrong about the pointlessness.

The murder we witnessed, incidentally, snuck into two statistical columns, a little political double-dip: another Bozeman gun homicide and Bozeman’s first opioid-related death.

I guess there were drugs involved.

No one found Xina’s shoes, which was a surprise, but no one was looking for shoes. Still, in a universe that bends toward justice, you’d think we’d have to answer for them.