Iris Has Free Time. Iris Smyles

those attempted flirtations where you try to manufacture pull, but finally feel nothing and after a while just give up and turn on the TV.

      More bored to Reggie than attracted to anyone else, every now and then we’d find ourselves alone—he was there, I was there, and for a little while, there we were—and kiss. But sharing a joint with May and Felix a little later, the kiss would be forgotten. That is until the next time Reggie and I found ourselves alone, thrust against each other once again, unable to resist the physical equations of the bored state.

      And another little lesson, this time in Biology: After graduation, I left for Greece, where I remained for the next four months. By the time I returned to Manhattan in the fall, things between May and Felix had gotten serious. The symptoms of their relationship had progressed and like a chronic condition, Felix was flaring up daily; he’d practically moved in with us.

      You know how Lyme disease makes you not want to do the things you used to want to do? May’s relationship with Felix was sort of like that. She rarely wanted to hang out with me anymore and after a while, I hardly ever even saw her without him by her side. May and Felix were, “like, best friends,” May told me privately, during one of the few lucid moments that very occasionally punctuated her fever. Outside of that, she’d completely stopped reporting on their relationship to me, but had actually begun reporting on ours to him.

      She’d slip out to the corner deli to buy crackers or crazy straws for Felix—“he likes the ones shaped like flamingos”—and Felix would come up to me and say, “Maybe you should clean your hair out of the shower drain after you’re done, Iris. It’s not fair when May and I end up doing it.” I contemplated reminding him that May was my roommate, not he, and considering the fact that he was an unpaying tenant, it was actually quite fair that he not only clean the shower drain but also sweep and mop the living room. Instead I apologized. Though Felix was out of line, May had a point. But I had a point, too, which was this: Judging by the seriousness with which your illness is progressing, perhaps it’s time you two seek quarantine—I’m paraphrasing. “Maybe you guys should get your own place.”

      May did eventually move out. And then I met Martin and came down with the fever, too. We got pretty serious and then, you know how it goes. How many close relationships can a single person juggle? In the beginning, May and I still saw each other; we went on a few double dates. But gradually, we saw each other less and less until eventually we did not see each other at all. It was the exact opposite of a big deal. It was more like the end of the world.

      Just another word or two about Physics and the Second Law of Thermodynamics in particular: When I was a kid I thought often about what the end of the world would look like. I mean, the edge of the universe, how does that work? What exactly is the border between something and nothing? But now I see I was thinking about it all wrong, that there is no edge, no hard and fast end of the world, just like there is no end to certain friendships. People, like stars and planets and everything else, just drift apart.

      May and I were like space. We didn’t end our friendship as much as let it go. Things got cold, the universe expanded between us, disorder replaced order, chaos and entropy and all that. Cosmic stuff. Until I didn’t even know her phone number anymore, until the next thing I knew about her was coming from Reggie’s mouth two years later after I ran into him downtown, on line outside The Halloween Store.

      I looked up from my book—The Elegant Universe—and there he was cued up right behind me, the laws of boredom thrusting us together once again. He’d ended up settling permanently in New York and was renting an apartment in the East Village, he told me. And hadn’t I heard? May and Felix had gone out to L. A. about a year ago and were living together over there, trying to break into movies.

      I told Reggie my idea about the end of the world, about expansion and cooling and increasingly entropic conditions resulting in a state of perpetual California—I’m paraphrasing.

      “Yeah, L. A. sucks,” he replied, before craning his neck to see inside the costume shop window. “So what are you going to be for Halloween?”

      “Oh, I have my costume already squared away. I’m just here to buy a mustache for Martin’s costume. Martin’s my boyfriend,” I explained.

       4

      Martin and I were going as “The Damsel in Distress” and “The Villain,” archetypes from the silent film era. I’d built a stretch of train tracks extending five feet, out of some balsa wood, nails, and silver spray paint, and planned to tie myself to them. My idea was to carry them around on my back, as if I’d been freed by cutting the tracks instead of the ropes. The rest of my costume was an old-fashioned, damsel-like lace dress.

      The idea was born out of Martin’s unwillingness to participate altogether. Martin said he hated Halloween and never ever dressed for it, so I had to come up with a couple’s costume that wouldn’t require much on his end. It was a battle just to get him to don the mustache and black hat—barely a costume at all—and he refused “on principle” to take part in any of the preparations, which is how I ended up at The Halloween Store alone.

      We’d had an argument before I left. I asked him why he couldn’t just dress up because I wanted to and not make such a big deal about it. Martin said he was being civilly disobedient as a way of defying my increasingly totalitarian reign over his life. I said that he was the dictator, and why couldn’t he just compromise? I told him that Halloween was important to me, that it would be fun—I said this while crying.

      I pointed out that I’d attended multiple Seders and Yom Kippur suppers for his religion, and he said Halloween was not my religion and my comparing it to his religion was further evidence of my being an anti-Semite. Somehow all our arguments, which were increasingly frequent, ended up with his declaring me an anti-Semite. I said that was unfair, and he said my resorting to tears was unfair. Then he said he’d wear the mustache if I got it for him, but that’s it.

      So I got all the stuff—including the mustache—and was very excited. I hadn’t observed Halloween in two whole years, not since I met Martin because I’d been too tired and depressed about my new life as a schoolteacher to make the effort. That, coupled with the fact that I’d recently stopped flying in my dreams, suggested a significant psychological shift about which I was deeply concerned. I felt my soul was dying and I didn’t know what to do. Martin said this was called “growing up.”

      When I arrived at his place with the supplies, Martin was in a miserable mood and made a big show of it; it was like he put himself in that mood just to get back at me. I persevered. I handed Martin the black hat and mustache and offered to help him prepare the rest of his look.

      He took the mustache with him into the bathroom and swatted me away. “I’ll do it.”

      From the open door, I watched him apply a thin line of spirit gum above his upper lip before carefully pressing the mustache into place.

      I smiled.

      He scowled.

      “You make a perfect villain,” I said.

      “Because I’m so cruel to you, right? You’re just the innocent victim, I suppose.”

      “Damsel,” I corrected him, twirling my hair.

      He rolled his eyes.

      Fred, Martin’s friend, was having a costume party downtown, so Martin’s other friend Zach, and Zach’s girlfriend, Michelle—both of whom lived on the Upper East Side—had decided to come over to smoke pot and have a drink before heading down all together. Zach and Michelle arrived as a wounded hockey player and a witch, respectively.

      “Last-minute costumes,” Zach explained, heading directly to the kitchen.

      “I would have loved to do something creative like you,” Michelle told me sweetly, as we waited for our drinks, “but I had no time and couldn’t think of anything anyway.” We sat on the couch where Martin was packing his bong. “I’m boring,” she said.