Where We Left Off (Middle of Somewhere #3)

SPRING HAD sprung with a vengeance and the energy on campus was electric. No matter what time of day I walked through the park, there were groups of students camped out, shirts rolled up to the sun, heads on each other’s shoulders, and textbooks lying abandoned in front of them in the new grass.

Those who were staying on campus for the summer were angling for the best rooms, those who were from the city making plans to see each other after the semester ended, and everyone else was grumbling about going home or scheming about how to stay. I didn’t know a single person who hadn’t fallen in love with New York in some way.

Midway through April, I found out I’d gotten the job working as an assistant in the physics lab and could count myself among the excited ones who would be staying in the city for the summer.

The only problem was that the job was only part-time and wasn’t for credit, so I didn’t qualify for campus housing.

The next night, we all went to see Milton in his drama class’ production of Pippin. I’d never heard of it, but Milton assured me it was a classic.

“What… what is this?” Charles whispered to me, horrified, about ten minutes in. I had no answer at all. Milton was great, though. He sang, he danced, he had a few lines, and he looked thrilled the whole time. After we’d gathered our bags and the tatters of our sanity, we went backstage and found him in close conversation with a wildly gesticulating, intensely staring Jason, so we just waved and gestured that we’d see him later.

The real surprise of the night came when we got back to the dorm to find Thomas waiting for us. Only it wasn’t Thomas because Thomas had been with us.

“Oh wow, they really look alike,” I said stupidly.

“Identical twins,” Charles said, nodding once.

Thomas and his brother hugged like one of them was returning from war. They were all over each other like puppies, with no bubble of personal space. They really did look startlingly alike, but unlike Thomas, Andy was quiet, often looking over at his twin when someone addressed a question to him. I wondered if they had always been this way and, if so, how hard it must’ve been for Andy, away at school without Thomas there to speak for him.

Andy’s school was on a different schedule so he’d taken the train down as soon as the semester ended. I got the sense that he wouldn’t mind just hanging out in Thomas’ room and playing video games while Thomas studied. I told him he could come by Mug Shots the next day if he wanted a free coffee and a place to hang out, but though he nodded politely, Andy didn’t seem to like me. I guessed I couldn’t blame him if Thomas had mentioned anything about me not returning his feelings. I wouldn’t like me either.

I SAT bolt upright in the dark, confused for a second at when I had finally remembered to change my alarm sound and why of all things I’d chosen something that sounded like screaming, until I realized it was the fire alarm. Charles had clearly already been awake, though from the looks of him he’d been about to go to bed, and he was sitting at his desk shaking his head.

“Someone pulled it,” he said. “I heard them run away, giggling. But we all have to leave anyway. It’s illogical.”

“I’ll add it to the list of dorm laws: someone always pulls the fire alarm on the one fucking night I was gonna get the doctor’s recommended eight hours,” I grumbled.

“Or on the night before a big test,” Charles said. “Might have to be two different laws.”

We trooped into the hall and down the seven flights of stairs, joining the stream of people from our hall. Some were manic, clearly having been awake and studying, some were irate and ranting at being woken up when there was clearly no fire, but the majority were, like me, shambling zombie-like down the hall in an attempt to preserve something of the sleep that had been interrupted.

It was about four in the morning, but outside the city was ticking along like always. In Holiday, one of the things I’d loved was the way there were times of the night and early morning when there was actually no one else around. When I couldn’t sleep, sometimes I’d slide out of bed and dress in silence, in the dark, and walk down the streets that would, in a few hours, be full of people, each of them with their own plans and their own desires.

I’d watched them my whole life, like they were a drama playing out before me on the television screen of Holiday, but I’d rarely seen myself as part of it. In the late night and early morning emptiness, the town seemed like a movie set for that drama. And in those moments I would feel a bit sad for it, emptied out and waiting for the people who would make it less lonely.

Here, there was never total emptiness. There was no waiting, no reset where the city breathed in relief for a few hours after the people were gone. There was only a constant readiness. A kind of low-level hum beneath the bones of the city itself, like the cranking, coiled machinery of a roller coaster being pulled uphill.

A true perpetual-motion machine is an impossibility, we learned in physics, since it violates the laws of thermodynamics. “Even the sun, as a source of energy, will eventually burn out,” Professor Ekwensi had said, matter-of-factly and as if that weren’t basically the most terrifying sentence ever to be uttered in a college classroom. Still, if there was ever something that felt like it came close, this city was it.

I had been tearing my hair out over my final project for physics. The assignment was as irritatingly vague as it was intriguing: measure something. I’d changed my topic three times since midterms and was still searching for the right thing.

Coming home from Will’s the other morning, I’d gotten off at 33rd Street and walked over to the High Line, hoping a coffee and some fresh air would clear my head, that some bolt of inspiration would strike since I was getting down to the wire.

It was a sunny morning, with a chill still in the air, and I was in a well-fucked, under-caffeinated trance, my eye catching on the smallest details. The way tiny ruffs of new plants were pushing their way through the spaces between the metal slats. How at that exact moment the scaffolding on a nearby building cast a shadow at a perfect perpendicular to the pink edge of the mural I was walking past.

A bench where, from my angle of approach it looked like a man sat alone. When I walked five steps closer, though, I saw that the breadth of his body had completely hidden the woman sitting with him. They were looking at each other with a kind of absorption that made me soften my steps because it felt intrusive to even stir the air around them, to cause vibrations from my footfalls that would reach them. As I walked by, though, they both glanced up at me and smiled. Like the joy they shared was large enough to include me, and the plants, and the shadows, and everything around them.

I smiled back and lifted my coffee in a toast, not just to them but to the High Line and the river and the traffic, and the whole goddamned beautiful city around us. I was so giddy with it that for a moment, grin wrinkling my whole face, I made the kind of sound that’s completely embarrassing outside of, like, a movie musical or an episode of Glee.

It was a perfect moment. So perfect that I found myself almost frantically trying to catalog it. To break it down to its component parts so I could re-create it. But as I tried to measure it—to make it reducible to some kind of system or law—it slipped away.

And that was my problem. Measure something. All the things that truly mattered were immeasurable. Using any system of quantification currently in existence, anyway. And I wanted to do something meaningful, otherwise, what was the point?

I’d tried to think of ways to measure everything important in my life. And god knew Milton had given me enough shit about it, singing that damn song from Rent about measuring a life until I actually wondered if the professor had ever needed to ban its lyrics from being the titles of final projects.

In an admittedly sappy moment—though I consoled myself that sappiness and science were not necessarily opposed by thinking of Carl Sagan and Anne Druyan—I’d even tried to think through how I would measure love.

I’d been in the physics lab scribbling ideas in my notebook when Max, one of the grad students came in. Max had intimidated me when I first started at the lab. He was tall and muscular, and I heard someone say he was ex-military. He narrowed his eyes when he listened closely, which made it look like he doubted what you were saying, and though he was taller than everyone in the lab, he never inclined his head when he spoke to people, which gave him the impression of being even taller. But he was wicked good at physics and clearly loved it.

So when he asked what I was working on, I posed the question, though I imagined he’d probably laugh in my face.

“Do you think it’s possible to… measure love?”

He cocked his head, eyes sharp. “Didn’t they do that in that Christopher Nolan movie? Interstellar?”

“Oh, I dunno, I didn’t see it.”

He squinted at me and then leaned over the lab table, tapping my notebook.

“Well, you can’t measure something unless we can agree on what it actually is, which is a problem, since love is abstract… but, okay, let’s see. Maybe we can’t measure it directly, but we could measure its effects, like with entropy. Love… people do some crazy-ass shit for love,” he mused, gaze fixed on the wall above my head.

I knew Max had a wife and a baby daughter—he’d shown me their picture on his phone one day, with soft eyes and a private smile. I wondered if he was thinking about them. I wondered what kind of crazy-ass shit he’d done for love.

“Does the degree of crazy imply a greater degree of love?” he mused. “A higher intensity, or larger… amount. Are there different flavors of love like there are flavors of quarks?—heh, yeah. Up love and down love, charm love and strange love, top love and bottom love. I like that.”

He lapsed into silence, like he’d forgotten I was there. When he remembered me, he stabbed a thick finger at my notebook. “Yeah, I’d try and formulate a hypothesis that measured the effects of love on something.” Then he nodded once, signaling that he’d said all he had to say on the matter, and bent back over his own work.

My mind went immediately to the way Will had writhed beneath me days before as I worshiped his cock with my mouth. It had been love for me—love that made me want to shake him apart with pleasure, to transmit my adoration. I blinked until I cleared the images of Will from my mind, but when I thanked Max for his help, he just raised an eyebrow as he wished me good luck. And I had the sense that he didn’t just mean with my physics project.

So, yeah, I’d tried to explain wanting to do my project on something meaningful to Will the night before. Will, practical as ever, had cut rather to the chase.

“You don’t need to make your major contribution to the discipline in the last three weeks of your first year at NYU, Leo,” he’d said. “Just pick something—it doesn’t matter what—and do a good job with it. If you have grand ambitions to create the…” He searched for an incisive example and came up adorably short. His physics knowledge was basically nil. “…to create whatever, then write your ideas down in that damn raggedy-ass notebook you’re always hauling around and get back to them when you write your dissertation or whatever. You’re wasting time you could just be doing it. And honestly, you’re driving me fucking nuts trying to turn my can openers and shit into your physics project.”

I knew he was right. That this was just one project for one class, and as far as that went, it didn’t technically matter what I did.

“Ooh, okay, I know,” Will said when it was clear I was still sulking about it. “You could measure how fast Superman would have had to fly around the world backward to actually reverse time. Cartoon physics, get it?” He winked at me.

I smiled at him. “I think there’s a book about that, actually. That explains all the physics of comic books and superheroes and stuff. Pretty cool.”

“Soooo geeky.” But I could tell he thought it was cool too. Then he was off, listing what seemed to be an experiment I could do from every sci-fi show or movie we’d watched together.

“Oh! You could do like an Orphan Black thing, and—”

“Cloning is biology, not physics,” I said, and I kissed him to shut him up.

He narrowed his eyes at me like I was spoiling all his fun, then brightened and shoved down his pants.

“I’ve got it,” he said with a wicked grin. “You can measure my dick with your mouth.” He waggled his eyebrows and tilted his hips toward me as I cracked up.

NOW, STANDING with my hallmates in the middle of the night, the stars splashed high above us through the clouds, I imagined Will asleep five miles away, the same moonlight sneaking through the window to alight on his hair, pillow-mussed, or the soft curve of his shoulder, or the groove of his spine. And I liked that, at the level of starlight and moonlight, something connected us even when we weren’t together. Will would give me immense shit if I said something like that out loud, but it was maybe why my project did matter to me. Because the laws that governed Will’s can opener were the laws that governed the moon, that governed both of us, even miles apart.

Gretchen came to stand beside me. “I know what we have to do.” Her voice was low and calm as always, but she grabbed my arm with uncharacteristic excitement.

“Uh… go back to bed?” I asked hopefully.

“Sunrise. Yoga.”

Sunrise yoga was more myth than reality. I knew it existed since Tonya always announced it. I knew there were true devotees who showed up every morning, ready to welcome the sunrise with yoga. But though I had sometimes randomly woken up early in Holiday because I couldn’t sleep, I was not a morning person. And now that I routinely didn’t get enough sleep, I was certainly never up before I had to be.

“Absolutely not.”

“Oh, come on, Leo, when will we have another chance?”

“Like… every morning that isn’t today.”

“Yes, but we won’t. We’re already up! And the class starts at five. That means we have an hour to change, get breakfast, and get to the gym. Besides, the year’s almost over and we’ve been saying we were going to go since September.”

This wasn’t strictly true. Gretchen had been saying she wanted to go since September and I had routinely smiled and nodded, assuming she was aware that this meant I had no interest whatsoever.

I opened my mouth to tell her absolutely not. That I had too much work the next day. That I was tired. That the idea of doing yoga in the dark before dawn sounded like a total suckfest. But she was holding my arm, her white-blonde hair escaping its nighttime braid in frizzy puffs and curls, like the plants on the High Line, and her strangely colorless eyes looked like twin moons, yellow-gray and luminous, and I started to smile.

“Okay, sure. Why not.”

“Yes!” Gretchen’s excitement was reward enough. She squeezed my arm in triumph and tipped her chin up to the night sky.

AS WE walked down 14th Street in our yoga clothes, sipping coffee and eating cinnamon bagels, Gretchen said, “It’s strange to see the city this early in the morning. It’s so empty, it’s like everything’s still asleep.” And I nodded at her, but was struck by the intensely dislocating feeling that hit me whenever I was reminded how staggeringly different people’s impressions of the same thing could be.

If Tonya was surprised to see us, she didn’t show it, just nodded warmly and smiled. There were only three other people there, clearly regulars by the way they greeted each other silently and settled onto their mats with none of the chatter of our usual classes.

The yoga studio had windows on one side, and Tonya had us positioned so that we were facing them. Her voice was serene, almost lulling, where usually she had more energy.

“In the Yoga Sutras, we find the principles of Abhyasa and Vairagya. Practice and nonattachment. Practice means always showing up to do the work. Putting forth effort. Nonattachment means letting go of the outcome of that work. Letting go of the things that prevent us from seeing ourselves clearly—fear or pain, expectation or pleasure. We observe those things, and then we let them pass us by.

“Together, we can express Abhyasa and Vairagya as ‘Never give up and always surrender.’ Always keep striving in the direction of what you want to bring into being. But recognize when you’ve done all you can and have reached the moment to surrender to the outcomes of that work. The moment when doing more becomes detrimental to your efforts.

“In practical terms this might look like riding your bike up a hill: you have to pedal hard, hard, hard enough to get the bike to the top of the hill. But then, when you start to crest the hill, you can stop pedaling. Stop exerting effort and surrender to the way gravity will carry you down the other side. Recognize that in fact the attempt to keep pedaling when your wheels are moving so fast is dangerous and won’t serve you.

“This is the balance. Never giving up in working to achieve what you desire. Always remembering that sometimes the outcome of your work can look different than you expected. And sometimes it might give you things you couldn’t have anticipated. Let’s practice with that in mind today.”

I’d been thinking about my physics project so single-mindedly that physics was where my brain went naturally. Though I’d heard Tonya use the phrase “never give up and always surrender” before, the bike metaphor somehow made it stunningly clear. Because that was just physics. But as I moved through sun salutations—which definitely felt a bit more salutatory in advance of the actual sun—I kept thinking of her words in terms of Will.

How I’d done the work. So much damn work, if I was being honest. And it hadn’t gotten me what I’d wanted. It hadn’t gotten me Will. Not an acknowledged monogamous relationship with Will, anyway.

But the part about surrendering to the unexpected things that the work can bring about stuck with me. Will telling me that I was his best friend. Telling me that I was the first one he called when shit went down with Claire. That I was the one he wanted to tell when good things happened. Showing me that he trusted me more than he trusted other people, let me in farther than he let in others. That he cared about me.

I wondered how many more things like that I’d dismissed or undervalued, too distracted by the fact that I wasn’t getting the results I’d set my sights on. How often important, meaningful, real things had slipped away from me, unacknowledged, as I measured only their distance from what I’d wanted.

They were unrecoverable losses. But maybe things could be different going forward.

I could be different.

We moved from Standing Split to Warrior III and finally settled in Warrior II, sinking deeper and deeper into the pose as the sun began to peek up over the buildings, spilling its rays down on the waking city below.

At the end of the class, the sun had fully risen, appearing to rest in my hands like a child’s ball, as if we’d dragged it from the very depths of the cosmos with our outstretched arms, all laws of physics shattered in the wake of sheer perception and will.