Right? I mean, the horrors pile up, too, but no one wants to die before the end of the story.
“And I really used to believe we’d be the last generation. Like, if I thought about it, if I worried about death, it was all of us I was thinking about, the whole planet. And now it’s like, no, it’s just you, Yale. You’re the one who’s gonna miss out. Not even on the end of the world—like, let’s hope the world goes on another billion years, right?—but just the normal stuff.”
Asher didn’t answer, but he took Yale’s right hand in his left hand, wound their fingers together. They walked on like that, Yale’s heart pinballing around his battered ribcage.
If Yale weren’t physically incapable of sex right now, if Asher hadn’t just been talking about the leg pain and nausea he was still experiencing from his pills, Yale might have held out hope that the afternoon would end in someone’s bed. A one-time thing. As it was, the hand-holding was an end in itself. An acknowledgment, a dip into that same parallel universe he’d spied on back at the Briar house. And was friendship that different in the end from love? You took the possibility of sex out of it, and it was all about the moment anyway. Being here, right now, in someone’s life. Making room for someone in yours.
“Get a load of these two!”
A male voice, close behind. Asher tightened his grip on Yale’s hand before Yale could even figure it out.
“Hey, Louise! Get a load of these two!”
“Don’t turn around,” Asher whispered.
Yale thought Asher might want to drop his hand, but of course he didn’t. Asher didn’t even quicken his pace.
A woman’s voice, farther back: “Bert, don’t be an ass.”
“I’m not the one into asses! Hey, ladies! Gimme your time, will you? I got some questions!”
“Bert!”
“Listen, ladies. Hold on.”
But the voices were farther away now; perhaps Louise had detained Bert.
Distantly: “Get a load of those two!”
* * *
—
Asher and Yale didn’t say anything else the rest of the way to St. Joe’s.
Yale promised he’d get a cab, but then he didn’t. He walked to the El. He wanted to be near other riders, packed tight. He wanted to see the city from above, to pass close enough to people’s windows that he could see their kitchen tables, their fights.
The world was a terrible, beautiful place, and if he wasn’t going to be here much longer he could do whatever he wanted, and the thing he wanted most in the world, besides to run after Asher, was to fix Nora’s show, to give Ranko Novak’s awkward paintings and sketches their due, such as it was.
He thought about people who could help. There were the Sharps, but after everything they’d done for him, he couldn’t ask another favor. He hardly knew anyone at Northwestern anymore. He certainly couldn’t drag Cecily back into things. Across from him on the El stood a teenager with a column of silver hoops up her ear. It made Yale think of Gloria. Gloria was at the Trib. Gloria would help. He had no idea how, but she would know how.
One stop before his own, a man limped onto the train and looked like he was about to lurch into Yale’s lap, but then he opened a canvas bag. “Got socks for sale,” he slurred to Yale and the woman next to him. “Dollar pair. Two dollar, three pair. One size fit your foot.” He pulled out a Ziploc with a pair of clean athletic socks, yellow stripes at the top. They looked improbably thick and comfortable. “You got holes in your sock?” This was to Yale. “These make you feel better. Good socks, you feel all better. One dollar, all better.”
Yale found a dollar and gave it to the man, who grinned, toothless, and presented him with the socks. Yale stood for his stop and squeezed the bag.
A gift from the city, it felt like. Something soft to put between himself and the earth.
2015
Fiona and Cecily took a painfully long cab ride up to Montmartre, to the garden square where Claire had told them to wait. Traffic was terrible throughout the city; everyone was back on the road, but the roads weren’t back to normal. Fiona wondered if news trucks were still blocking things up, or if everyone was just driving distracted, skittish.
Square Jehan-Rictus wasn’t square-shaped but an oblong stretch of sidewalk looping through shrubbery, enclosed by fences and low brick walls. The green benches,