MacArthur Park. Andrew Durbin

his forehead like a liquid crown. The lights changed, from purple to blue to yellow to cold white, then back to purple, blue, yellow, cold white again. I glanced at myself in the mirror: my vision refused to sharpen into a clear view, but I was recklessly drunk. In the blur my features swam up in the smudged glass—my large, slightly hooked nose, full lips, cleft chin, green uneven eyes, with the skin around the left one’s lower lid a bruised, sleepier shade than the rest of my face. My short brown hair was slicked back. I was not so far gone that I didn’t recognize my own reflection, but I wanted to refuse it, give it back to the mirror, to whomever had appeared there. The dancers around us organized their clutter into a second portrait behind me, one that my face eased toward as Zachary tugged me back into their embrace. Maybe I was too stoned, too high on coke to dance with someone, I thought. Or it was too late.

      “I’ll hold you to that ‘later’ later,” he said.

      We went along with the crowd, sometimes with others who joined us, sometimes alone. I went and got us beers, then came back and found him making out with someone else. I turned to retreat to the couch, but Zachary caught me and dragged me over to the front of the club with his new friend. I opened the beers, handed one to Zachary, but he waved it off. The three of us started to make out while I held the two PBRs awkwardly behind their backs, fumbling with the cans while moving with the new boy, who shot his tongue into my mouth as soon as I arrived. Eventually, I managed to untangle myself from them long enough to set the beers down on the floor, before their four hands ferried me back to our threesome.

      We were locked in a flat, endless no-time in the growing throng that swelled on the dance floor, distorting space and any sense of the hour. With the crowd, we pushed toward the right wall, up against the glass, into a pit of other dancers who closed in around us, tightening into an iron maiden.

      In this we had no choice but to go at it, at one another, our mouths in hungry competition for attention, with Zachary’s hard-on pushing up against my stomach while the new boy, who was already just some other boy and no longer very new now that I’d been on the inside of his mouth with my tongue for what felt like a half hour, pushed his hand down into my pants and began to play with my cock. Out of the corner of my eye I could see our reflection in the mirror up close again, Zachary’s thin profile and the other boy’s darker eyes, which clicked into mine as he looked over, too, and together our features arranged and rearranged themselves in a collage of flesh tones lit in brief by the colored lights before plunging back into shadow. In the dense cloud of smoke, I felt this big, wolf-like hunger hound up my spine with each kiss.

      Zachary abruptly dropped away. “Should we follow him?” I asked the other boy.

      “No. Take this,” he said. His features were briefly illuminated as he opened his palm to offer me a pill, and I could see that he was handsome, with a square jaw and bushy eyebrows that he had studiously trimmed, before we were sunk back into blackness. He told me his name was Simon, though I couldn’t make out anything he said except an occasional “How are you?” as though that question mattered at all, could be in any way answered to a satisfying degree in the swamp of our surroundings, goodbye, I thought, goodbye, and slipped further into myself, away from him, “It’s molly, is that OK?” Perfectly OK. I’m fine, into it, I said, I’m always fine. He had thick, curly black hair that I kept running my hands through. I looked at the pill in my hand. I hadn’t taken it yet.

      “Then do it.” I did it.

      I woke up naked, rolled over to cover my face with a pillow that wasn’t my pillow and shield my eyes from the sunlight that poured into the room like concrete, burying me in the thick sludge of day. Remembered almost nothing, but noticed when I’d come to that the window across the room from me was not my window, didn’t look out to Brooklyn, but instead to Manhattan.

      It was snowing. Or it was not snowing.

      My head ached, and words refused to form into coherent sentences when I opened my mouth. Move your jaw and tongue, talk, what, where am I, but even the simplest question, what time is it, halted—and directed to whom, anyway? no one was in bed next to me—at the what that crept up on my tongue and stopped there like a nervous child standing at the deep end of a pool. (After the no-time of the Spectrum, time always re-enforces its regime with characteristic force: all that remains the morning after is the clock, ticking through a hangover like a wagging finger.) Where was I? Not home, but somewhere else, Zachary’s maybe, whoever Zachary was, or perhaps I was at the other boy’s place. That was where I was, at this boy’s apartment whose name warbled back as … Simon?

      “You were pretty fucked up last night,” he said.

      I pulled the pillow away from my face. Squinting, I could see his outline opposite me, the sunlight behind him. He was fully dressed, with a big water bottle in his hand. “Water?”

      “Yes … Is this … Where is this?”

      “We’re at my apartment,” he laughed. “We went back … to my place.” Recognizing my puzzled look: “Oh, well, maybe you don’t remember. I’m Simon. We came back here after the Spectrum. You wanted to. You said your place was a mess.”

      “Yes. Right … right.” Simon. The boy with the pill who lives on Ludlow Street and who must be rich, as I had said to him in the cab ride over the Williamsburg Bridge. “Do you obsess about other people’s money?” he’d asked. “I just want to know, well, your politics,” I said, the last of the molly still coursing through my blood in a supercharge of emotions. We’d paused mid-make-out to watch the sun rise over Lower Manhattan as the car clipped along the empty bridge until we met a brief wakeup snarl on Delancey Street. It might have been snowing. All winter I kept thinking that it was snowing, though it was often too warm to stick or seemingly too cold to snow, and so the silver-gray clouds, like the underbellies of fish, kept their close, mindful distance, always refusing to break out of their steady overhead stream into an event. The weather did not like to make itself understood.

      “I’m not rich,” he had said, though he was. That was his politics, to the extent that he had any. I said sure and went back to kissing him. My hands, on their own journey across Simon’s body, found their way into his pants as the driver eyed us in the mirror, neither offended nor interested but something else, a twinkling, passing curiosity that I thought meant he might want to join.

      “Simon, right. Right. I’m sorry. It must be so late.”

      “It’s four.”

      “In the afternoon?” I couldn’t believe it. “Oh, god.”

      “I know. You were out. It was like you’d died but you were breathing so.”

      I grunted, tried to laugh, went into a coughing fit, then managed: “I definitely died.”

      I leaned up in bed to look around. The room was small and oddly shaped, with the bed pushed up against the wall near two doors—one that opened to a kitchen with a shower in it and the other to a bathroom (or, really, to a closet with a toilet but no sink). From the bed, you could see the entire apartment.

      My eyes finally adjusted to the afternoon. It was snowing. This was Manhattan. Simon extended the water bottle to me. Tangles of his curly hair hung across his forehead, down nearly to his eyelids. I could see him better, finally. He had serious, cold eyes set in a thin, serious face and a nose that was scarred at the tip, like it had been cut. “So,” he said.

      I slid the comforter off. I was naked, and my arms were marked with dark bruises. I ran my index finger over the blotches, unsure of how they got there, and then looked up at Simon. “Last night was crazy?”

      “Yeah.”

      Simon. I rolled this name around in my head. Simon from the Spectrum.

      “What do you do?”

      “I’m a stylist,” he said without much confidence. I knew several stylists but never knew what they did.

      “Oh OK,” I said.

      An uncomfortable silence fell over us. He broke it with a funny smirk: “You should come up to my