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By Christopher Stoddard
The clock on the man’s iPhone read 9:11 a.m. He only saw the time briefly, just a quick peek at the hour as he, with a tap of his finger, set the alarm to snooze yet again. He left the phone on the floor beside the bed. As he turned on his right side, before closing his eyes for the third time that morning, he shot a glance at the uncovered window. He didn’t see what all the fuss was about. Everyone in the city swore it was going to be the storm of the century, but as far as he could see, there was nothing going on out there except for a light sprinkle. When they saw a blizzard, he only saw flurries.
His boss called and woke him up for good. She wanted to know if he’d be coming into the office that day. She didn’t ask in that demanding boss-tone, no; she was more concerned with how he was doing, if he was feeling better, for it hadn’t been too long since “it” happened. The man told her no, blamed it on the weather. His dog greeted him with bad-breath morning kisses. The dog’s autumn coat littered the floor of the bedroom. The man never got around to vacuuming, so in certain corners it looked like the Wild West after a windstorm. The brightness of the daytime sky, albeit overcast and still snowing, reflected off the fallen snow and lit up the man’s room. The white light accentuated the white in the fur that had been shed by the dog; the light made the fur look whiter than it really was.
The door to his roommate’s bedroom opened, but instead of his longtime friend exiting the living room that had been converted into a second bedroom, an olive-skinned gentleman materialized. He had a mild beard and tousled, thick, semi-greasy hair. All morning the man had been wondering who owned the worn-out, electric blue and black, medium-top Nikes sitting at the front door, a pair of wrinkly socks shoved inside them. The man smiled blandly at his roommate’s trick then walked the dog and left for work.
As he walked through the “backyard” of Stuyvesant Town, a private property located in the East Village of Manhattan, children who had the day off from school frolicked in the snow. The man mused at the spectacle; the children lay in the same areas where his and his neighbors’ dogs had pissed and shit. The children made snowmen speckled with yellow and brown stains.
He walked to the subway wearing rubber boots from Tretorn, a subsidiary of Puma. They weren’t the rubber boots that reached to the knees, no, those ones were more for girls and really gay guys, he thought. The rubber boots he wore cut off at the ankle. They were black with white soles. In between the black and white was a thin blue border. The inside lining of the boots was made of Sherpa fur.
The L train was surprisingly empty. Because of the previous day’s weather warnings of a potential nor’easter, most people stayed home from work. The man couldn’t do that. He couldn’t sit in the apartment all day and work off his company laptop. There were too many distractions, too many easy ways to obsess about other things that were still fresh in his memory.
At the deli downstairs from the office in TriBeCa, the man couldn’t decide what to eat for breakfast, so he bought one of everything: an everything bagel toasted with scallion cream cheese, a single serving of raisin bran cereal, assorted sliced fruit, a whole orange, Tropicana orange juice, not from concentrate and with some pulp, and a bacon, egg and cheese. He also got a blueberry muffin toasted with butter. He paid for everything using his new credit card from Citi.
In his cubicle in the ghost town office, he stared at the smorgasbord of food before him and decided he wasn’t hungry. He received a text from a dude he must’ve hooked up with before because the dude asked the man if he was up for doing it again. The dude had the day off from work like most folks. The man was horny.
The man left work soon after he’d arrived. He took a cab from TriBeCa back to the East Village. The drive took nearly 30 minutes because the cabbie went extra slow in the snow. The man recognized the dude only vaguely. The dude had a very nice-looking face, a toned torso, but thin legs, and only an average-sized cock. The man sucked the dude’s cock while the dude jerked off the man’s cock. The dude came in the man’s mouth without warning. The man ejaculated almost immediately after the dude had. He got dressed and said goodbye.
Outside the dude’s apartment, the man chatted on the phone with his mother and stepfather. They talked about superficial things, the weather and how she loved the Capote novel he’d bought her for Christmas. He told his mother and stepfather he loved them. He found a cab and rode back to the office.
The snow started coming down harder mere minutes after he’d returned, so he used it as an excuse to call it a day. He phoned his boss, who lived and worked in Boston, and told her he was leaving. “Are you okay?” she asked. “Go home and get there safe!” she instructed. She was his Jewish mother and he loved her but not as much as his Roman Catholic mother.
The falling snow looked like a translucent veil hanging over TriBeCa, and also in SoHo. The man stopped at the Angelika Film Center located on the corner of Broadway and Mercer. He bought a single ticket to Single Man, Tom Ford’s directorial debut. He watched it alone and felt like a cliché but did it anyway. The man owned a silk cardigan designed by Tom Ford. It cost 950 dollars. It was the most expensive garment he owned other than his Dior suit, which he rarely wore. He hadn’t paid for either of them. They’d been gifts from friends several years back. The man enjoyed the movie, especially the cinematography. But when he thought about the story further, which had been loosely based on Christopher Isherwood and his life partner, Don Bachardy, who was only a fifteen-year-old boy when they met, it turned the man off.
Prior to watching the film, the man had eaten in the café above the theater: a turkey sandwich with mozzarella and hummus, made fresh and delivered daily, so said the sticker on the plastic package. Downstairs the man had indulged in regular movie food: M&M’s chocolate-covered peanut candies and a Diet Coke.
Upon exiting the theater the man checked his iPhone. No one had texted or called. He walked uptown to Strand, a well-known used bookstore in Union Square. He bought two books written by Aldous Huxley. They were very old editions of Brave New World and Those Barren Leaves, had been printed in 1925 and were falling apart. He also bought Another Country by James Baldwin.
A friend texted the man and invited him to dinner. The snow came down harder. When the man looked up at what looked like a dandruff nightmare, the frozen flakes landed on his eyeballs. The icy sensation was soothing. The man wanted to go home and see his dog, so he respectfully rain-checked the invitation. On his walk toward Stuyvesant Town, the man stopped at Gracefully, an independent, semi-gourmet grocery store on First Avenue. He only wanted to buy vegetables, but the bill totaled less than five dollars, and the store had a credit card minimum of five dollars, so the man also bought salt and vinegar-flavored Popchips.
In the lobby of the apartment building, the man checked his mailbox. In it was the latest issue of the New Yorker, which he would add to the ever-growing stack of New Yorkers that he’d never read. Also included were two concert tickets to see The National, playing at Radio City Music Hall in June. When he’d bought them he hadn’t understood why the tickets were being sold nearly six months in advance. The man’s roommate also had mail: New York Magazine and several pieces of junk mail. For some reason, the roommate had refused to receive paperless credit card statements, among other monthly bills, so there was a pile of them in the mailbox as well.
Once inside the apartment, the man rested his packages on the dining room table, released his dog from the crate and took him for a severely brief walk—so the dog could shit and piss where the children played earlier in the day—and then immediately returned to the warmth of the apartment. The dog had left a chewed rope in his water bowl. The dog often played with the rope while caged during the man’s outings; it wasn’t uncommon for the dog to drop his toys in the water bowl. The man fed the dog then sat on the chair at the desk in his bedroom. He glanced at the time on the computer monitor and it said 8:11 p.m.
