Later that week Geoff began to teach Carter a form of Iyengar yoga, his own special routine concentrating on
the lower back: downward dog, triangle with chair, triangle with block, finishing with camel (“the most
emotional of poses,” he explained. “Don’t be surprised if you feel a lot coming loose in this one.” But Carter
never did.) and child (“a rest pose… just let everything center”). Their yoga lessons quickly became stoned
yoga lessons (“the marijuana relaxes your muscles, but more importantly helps you find your center”); stoned
yoga flowed into naked stoned yoga (“the purpose of yoga is to free the spirit from constraints”); when naked
stoned yoga degenerated into stoned sex, Geoff could hardly complain.
Still, he told his blog readers, guilt is setting in. He lives off her and spends the time that she works making
love to me. At the same time he claims that a different anatomy means a different set of rules, that sex with
me does not exclude or interfere with sex with her. He loves her and has no intention of replacing her; to be
blunt, he’s just after some cock on the side. But she also loves him and wouldn’t understand. Am I a guilty
party in this?
Only one reader posted a response: GO FOR THE 3-WAY!!!!!
“I want to be fair to Mary,” Geoff told Carter the next night in the bathtub. “I think it’d be more up front if
you offered it to her like a threesome—two men at once. Maybe there’s a way we can share you.”
“She’s not stupid, Geoff. She knows you’re gay and what it would mean.” He leaned his head back so that
his long hair spread anemone-like in the bathwater. “She suspects something already.”
Geoff froze. “What’s she going to do?”
“Nothing, I mean, we’ve been dating for years, we're practically married. Her family still isn’t speaking to her
over a girlfriend she brought back from college, so it's not like she has anywhere else to go. She’s got an
amazing temper, sure, but she’s not going to screw everything up for herself for just a suspicion.”
“But you keep coming back.”
Carter smiled, rubbed Geoff’s thigh, gave his cock a quick squeeze.
“What else can I do?” They toweled each other off and made love on the bed he shared with Mary,
separating with a kiss only minutes before Adam returned home.
That night, Geoff woke to find Henry standing over his bed.
He blinked at the impossibility, but even without his contacts he could see that it could only be him, could see
the muscular arms and the freshly-shaven head gleaming like a blade under the hallway light. Only the sleepy
numbness of his vocal chords kept his shout from waking the neighborhood.
The man said nothing. With the hall light behind him, Geoff couldn’t make out the least feature of his face.
Geoff thought of the bowl, the growling, the knife, the scars on the ceiling above. He sat up slowly in the bed,
pressing his back against the wall. If Henry had a knife at his side, Geoff would never see it in time. He tried
to visualize a kung fu disarm he had learned in high school, but couldn’t even remember where to start his
hands.
A flash of movement and Geoff flinched back, but the man had only turned on his heel and headed back into
the hall. He heard footsteps banging down the stairs, then a fist hammering on wood. Geoff jumped to his
feet, ran to the door, slammed it, and clicked the lock shut. He’s escaped, he thought. He’s lied to them and
gotten out. He’s here to make a new trampoline with our guts.
“Carter!” he heard from below—not the devil’s voice he expected, but a light tenor that in less heart-thudding
circumstances would have struck him as pleasant. “What the fuck, man!” Geoff felt himself ready to
hyperventilate and let his body slide down the rough plaster of the wall, concentrating on his breathing. In
and out. One with the Atman. The hammering began again. “Carter!”
Geoff folded himself into lotus and breathed until only fragments (my fucking room three months rent cowards
where’s my crazy rent didn’t tell police psycho Geoff two months trampoline lease rent doggie bowl love
fucking terrified rent stiffed rent doggie bowl hospital rent) drifted to him from below. One with the Atman.
When the knock pulled him back to himself, he had been meditating for hours. “It’s us,” Adam said from
behind the door. Geoff opened it to find his three roommates standing together, looking at the floor, the
doorframe, and the wall. Déjà vu pricked at him until he realized that they stood almost exactly as they had
showing him the room the first day—Mary just behind a sullen Carter, a hand on his shoulder to mark him as
hers, Adam awkwardly at their side. Tonight the tableau seemed almost a declaration of war—there’s us, and
then there’s you.
“What?” he asked. He kept his eyes on Carter, but it was Mary who finally spoke.
“The hospital released him,” she said, rubbing the blond fuzz on her head, her voice still ragged from
yelling. “And his name’s on the lease. So there’s nothing we can do. But he knows it’s not your fault. He’s
willing to stay on the couch.”
“You didn’t tell him you had given his room away.”
“We’re not any happier about this than you are, Geoff.”
“He’ll stay on the couch,” Adam mumbled, and started back across the hall to his room.
“No,” Geoff said. “No. No. No. Absolutely no. This is not a good thing.” He looked at Mary, then at Carter.
Carter just shrugged, still avoiding his eyes. “You’re going to have to live with it.”
Normally Geoff began his sun salutations in the living room at six, but the next morning he hid in his room
until nearly ten. Finally his hunger overwhelmed his frustration and fear, and he ventured downstairs. Henry
sat on the couch, back to the stairs, legs folded under him, a well-used guitar resting on his thigh. In the
daylight, he looked surprisingly manageable—shorter than Geoff, and certainly fit, but no more so than the
average Saturday-morning jogger.
“Sorry about last night,” Henry said, never raising his eyes from the guitar. “I didn’t mean to scare you. I
didn’t know you were there.” He half-smiled, something jumping in his cheek.
“I’m sorry about your room,” Geoff said, and started to go on, but stopped. The doggie bowl hung weightily
in the air between them.
“Well, cool. I’m Henry.” He looked up now and held out a steady hand, his face almost babyish beneath his
bald scalp.
“Geoff.” They shook, and Geoff advanced to the kitchen with an absurd sense of victory. Carter, a note on
the table explained, had gone out to the park for the day to paint; Mary to work an extra shift; Adam to a
coffee house to write his next roleplay. Cowards, Henry had called them the night before. No wonder he was
still on their couch. Geoff thought of Carter’s shrug and burned anew. He saw it again over his lunch of tofu
dogs, over the Star Assassins manual, over an online backgammon match. It’s not as if he had asked for love,
but there’s a certain amount of courtesy that you show to a man who blows you four times a week. Finally,
without the slightest plan for what he might say or ask, he picked up the phone to dial Mary’s cell.
“—but I can’t stop thinking about you—” Henry, sobbing. Geoff tossed the phone like a live snake, then
lunged for it as it banged down behind his desk. He pulled it back up by the cord and placed it carefully in its
cradle. Sitting back in the chair, he closed his eyes and laid his forehead down on the cool wood. Not good.
After a decent interval he went down to apologize. Henry, eyes puffy, shook his head as curtly as if nothing
had even happened, strummed a few chords, tightened a string, strummed again. Geoff went back to his
room and locked the door.
"He's going to kill us all," Geoff said to Carter in a moment alone that night. When Carter just shrugged and
scratched his chest, staring at the pile of plates by the sink—"I’m sure it'll be OK"—Geoff dug his nails into his
palms and headed back upstairs. Breathe out the anger; breathe in the peace.
Late that night the Beijing hotel owner e-mailed him that the position had been filled. Geoff rearranged his
desk, worked half of a crossword puzzle, did a few push-ups, and then, abandoning all pretense of
productivity, smoked another joint. Finally he slumped down against the edge of the bed, staring at the faded
blue carpet. It’s just sex, he thought. Sex, and a mattress, and a 7th-rank Octoroid Smuggler. Nothing that I
can’t walk away from. He picked up a pubic hair, twirled it in his fingers: Carter’s. Now if only I had
somewhere to go, he thought.
Not long after, the carpet began to sing. “God can do immeasura-bubbly more than you can eeeeeeeeever
dream; God can do immeasura-bubbly bubbly bubbly bubbly bubbly more!” Geoff shuddered, closed his eyes,
and waited for it to go away. It took him several verses (“What, higher than a mountain? Bubbly more! What,
deeper than the sea? Bubbly more!”) to realize that the sound was actually coming from below the floor. He
unlocked his door and stepped into the hall, and yes, the song floated to him straight up the stairs, and now
he could hear a bouncy guitar accompaniment running under the words (“Help you know that he's with
you—'bubbly more! Help you trust him forever—'bubbly more!”). He walked down the stairs until he could see
the back of Henry’s bobbing head. Geoff sat, leaning against the banister, and when the song finished
(“Bubbly bubbly bubbly bubbly bubbly bubbly bubbly bubbly more!”), applauded softly.
Henry gave a start, then turned and smiled. “Did I wake you?”
Geoff shook his head. “Rough night.”
Henry patted the couch next to him. “Come here, I’ll sing you another.” Another proved to be “God Made the
Dinosaurs,” complete with restrained foot-stomping and roaring, followed by “Who Swallowed Jonah?” then “I
Am Special” to the tune of “Frère Jacques.” Geoff studied him as he sang, the first chance he had really had to
do so. He could see the shaving cuts under Henry’s chin now, the way his smile stopped short of his brown,
pained eyes, and the way he handled even his guitar as if it were filled with dynamite. Geoff's seen this look
before on a maid in a Shanghai guest house; she had been in the laogai, she told him, the forced labor
camps. Politics, she said, then took the trashcan and hurried from the room. The memory seemed so far from
him now, more like something he read in a magazine at the doctor's office than something he actually lived.
His heart sank as he realized that between the four of them, they hadn’t even spoken twenty words to Henry
today.
Eventually Geoff thought to offer him some pot. Henry shook his head.
“Medication,” he said, launching into “God Made Me and All of You.”
“Where did you learn all these?” Geoff asked him when he finished.
“The last few weeks.” Henry’s cheek jumped a little more. “A guy I met. I like them… a lot, actually.”
“Are you very religious, then?”
Henry smiled and shook his head. “I’m not at all, actually. But they… it’s like being a little kid again,
reaching for something out there. Something little and happy. Like...” He struck up another song: “Twinkle
twinkle precious star, Jesus loves you as you are. He loves your smile, he loves your voice. He thinks you are
pretty choice. Twinkle twinkle precious star, Jesus loves you as you are.” He stretched his legs out and
smiled. “It’s just something good, you know?"
By dawn, Geoff could already play three of the songs. Henry promised to teach him “Immeasure-bubbly”
the following night, “once you’ve got a few more chords down.”
Meanwhile, battle lines established themselves across the house. The other roommates avoided the living
room; Henry never went upstairs; each spent only a minimum of time in areas of mutual necessity like the
kitchen or bathroom. Even so he saw Mary and Adam pacing the hall as Henry grilled a cheese sandwich,
trying not to look like they were waiting.
Carter slipped into his room as soon as Mary left for work that night.
“Henry’s home,” Geoff said, jumping up from his desk. Carter just smiled, closing the door behind him and
slipping off his belt. “I’m not kidding,” Geoff said, “Henry’s right down there.”
Carter shrugged. “Would she believe him?” He put his hands on Geoff’s hips, and Geoff didn’t stop him.
They kissed, Carter’s lips chapped and rough under his. They kissed again, and then Carter tugged him by his
belt down onto the bed.
“Henry tried to get his job back today,” Carter told him, after. “Adam heard him on the phone. What a sad
fucking guy.”
“Did it work?”
“What do you think?” He laughed, toying with Geoff’s chest hair. “How did you like the Jesus songs last
night?”
“Fine. He’s not so bad a guy.”
“Just don’t get too attached.”
Two days later Geoff came downstairs to find Henry and his guitar gone, the yellow comforter folded neatly
across the back of the couch. He walked to the kitchen, found Adam flipping pancakes for Carter and Mary
with an unmistakably festive air.
"Where's Henry?"
"Moved out this morning," Mary told him. "Grabbed his boxes out of the basement and left without a word
to anybody." The grill sizzled as Adam poured on another spiral of batter.
"But I was just talking to him--" he broke off at a look from Adam. He had skipped the previous night's
roleplay to learn the last chords of "Immeasure-Bubbly," and half of the players had died on the claws of
Nazdorian Slayers, "all because of Gilgapod going AWOL." "It'll be a sore point with the group for weeks,"
Adam had warned him, looking rather pissed-off himself.
"Why would he just leave like that?" he said instead, looking at the drizzling rain outside.
Mary looked over at the others. "Well, he couldn't get Becky back, he couldn't get his job back… he didn't
have anything really keeping him here…"
"Maybe he was just afraid of going crazy again," Carter said, spreading syrup over his plate. "Checked
himself back into the hospital. You want pancakes?" Geoff stepped back into the living room and searched
through the clutter on the coffee table for a note. Maybe it had fluttered away. He ran his hand behind the
couch cushions, pulling out a lighter, a condom wrapper, and a handful of change, then knelt down and looked
under the edge.
Henry, the red, round plastic announced. Henry Henry Henry Henry Henry Henry. He stared at it in
confusion, then pulled it free. Inside was half of a hot dog, loaded with ketchup, mustard, and relish. Both
ends had been gnawed at. Three cuts in the rim—the same bowl.
"How the hell did he get this back?" Geoff asked from the kitchen door. Adam looked over from the stove and
flinched. Mary kept her eyes on the pancake she was slicing into neat, careful squares. Only Carter met his
gaze.
"He must have stolen it," he said. "I put it back in the basement after you found it in your room." He took
another bite of pancake, then wiped the syrup from his lips.
"Why would you--?"
"Look, we were doing you a favor," Adam burst in, face flushed red behind his brown beard. "We said, he'll
stay, you said, no, no, no, absolutely no. So don't fucking lecture us now."
"So you left this out for him. Put food in it to make him think he was losing it again." Geoff kept his voice
calm. Ice. Breathe out the anger. The hand holding the bowl began to shake wildly.
"Well…" Adam said, his eyes flicking to Carter. Carter took a deep breath.
"Well, yeah," he said, shrugging. "I mean, yeah. I did. But, I mean, we all--"
Geoff threw the bowl like a discus into the stack of plates by the sink. The stack toppled, striking the floor and
exploding like a series of ceramic grenades. Adam jumped away, dropping his spatula with a clatter. Carter's
chair banged down to the tiles behind him as he shot to his feet.
"What the fuck--"
"I can't believe I ever let you suck my dick," Geoff said, and left the room.
By the time Geoff taped the last box shut, the yelling had died down to sporadic bursts of asshole and liar
and freeloader. He heard the snapping of Carter's Velvet Underground vinyls and the shattering of his Snoopy
mugs, saw him scurrying through the rain to rescue unfinished canvases of abstract swing sets. He heard
Adam venture down, then retreat again after a minute of deadly quiet, the screaming resuming in his wake.
Geoff had left his map of Bangladesh for last, and he took it from the wall now, folded it carefully, and
tucked it into his shirt pocket.
Anywhere but here, he thought, and carried the last of his boxes out to his car.
the lower back: downward dog, triangle with chair, triangle with block, finishing with camel (“the most
emotional of poses,” he explained. “Don’t be surprised if you feel a lot coming loose in this one.” But Carter
never did.) and child (“a rest pose… just let everything center”). Their yoga lessons quickly became stoned
yoga lessons (“the marijuana relaxes your muscles, but more importantly helps you find your center”); stoned
yoga flowed into naked stoned yoga (“the purpose of yoga is to free the spirit from constraints”); when naked
stoned yoga degenerated into stoned sex, Geoff could hardly complain.
Still, he told his blog readers, guilt is setting in. He lives off her and spends the time that she works making
love to me. At the same time he claims that a different anatomy means a different set of rules, that sex with
me does not exclude or interfere with sex with her. He loves her and has no intention of replacing her; to be
blunt, he’s just after some cock on the side. But she also loves him and wouldn’t understand. Am I a guilty
party in this?
Only one reader posted a response: GO FOR THE 3-WAY!!!!!
“I want to be fair to Mary,” Geoff told Carter the next night in the bathtub. “I think it’d be more up front if
you offered it to her like a threesome—two men at once. Maybe there’s a way we can share you.”
“She’s not stupid, Geoff. She knows you’re gay and what it would mean.” He leaned his head back so that
his long hair spread anemone-like in the bathwater. “She suspects something already.”
Geoff froze. “What’s she going to do?”
“Nothing, I mean, we’ve been dating for years, we're practically married. Her family still isn’t speaking to her
over a girlfriend she brought back from college, so it's not like she has anywhere else to go. She’s got an
amazing temper, sure, but she’s not going to screw everything up for herself for just a suspicion.”
“But you keep coming back.”
Carter smiled, rubbed Geoff’s thigh, gave his cock a quick squeeze.
“What else can I do?” They toweled each other off and made love on the bed he shared with Mary,
separating with a kiss only minutes before Adam returned home.
That night, Geoff woke to find Henry standing over his bed.
He blinked at the impossibility, but even without his contacts he could see that it could only be him, could see
the muscular arms and the freshly-shaven head gleaming like a blade under the hallway light. Only the sleepy
numbness of his vocal chords kept his shout from waking the neighborhood.
The man said nothing. With the hall light behind him, Geoff couldn’t make out the least feature of his face.
Geoff thought of the bowl, the growling, the knife, the scars on the ceiling above. He sat up slowly in the bed,
pressing his back against the wall. If Henry had a knife at his side, Geoff would never see it in time. He tried
to visualize a kung fu disarm he had learned in high school, but couldn’t even remember where to start his
hands.
A flash of movement and Geoff flinched back, but the man had only turned on his heel and headed back into
the hall. He heard footsteps banging down the stairs, then a fist hammering on wood. Geoff jumped to his
feet, ran to the door, slammed it, and clicked the lock shut. He’s escaped, he thought. He’s lied to them and
gotten out. He’s here to make a new trampoline with our guts.
“Carter!” he heard from below—not the devil’s voice he expected, but a light tenor that in less heart-thudding
circumstances would have struck him as pleasant. “What the fuck, man!” Geoff felt himself ready to
hyperventilate and let his body slide down the rough plaster of the wall, concentrating on his breathing. In
and out. One with the Atman. The hammering began again. “Carter!”
Geoff folded himself into lotus and breathed until only fragments (my fucking room three months rent cowards
where’s my crazy rent didn’t tell police psycho Geoff two months trampoline lease rent doggie bowl love
fucking terrified rent stiffed rent doggie bowl hospital rent) drifted to him from below. One with the Atman.
When the knock pulled him back to himself, he had been meditating for hours. “It’s us,” Adam said from
behind the door. Geoff opened it to find his three roommates standing together, looking at the floor, the
doorframe, and the wall. Déjà vu pricked at him until he realized that they stood almost exactly as they had
showing him the room the first day—Mary just behind a sullen Carter, a hand on his shoulder to mark him as
hers, Adam awkwardly at their side. Tonight the tableau seemed almost a declaration of war—there’s us, and
then there’s you.
“What?” he asked. He kept his eyes on Carter, but it was Mary who finally spoke.
“The hospital released him,” she said, rubbing the blond fuzz on her head, her voice still ragged from
yelling. “And his name’s on the lease. So there’s nothing we can do. But he knows it’s not your fault. He’s
willing to stay on the couch.”
“You didn’t tell him you had given his room away.”
“We’re not any happier about this than you are, Geoff.”
“He’ll stay on the couch,” Adam mumbled, and started back across the hall to his room.
“No,” Geoff said. “No. No. No. Absolutely no. This is not a good thing.” He looked at Mary, then at Carter.
Carter just shrugged, still avoiding his eyes. “You’re going to have to live with it.”
Normally Geoff began his sun salutations in the living room at six, but the next morning he hid in his room
until nearly ten. Finally his hunger overwhelmed his frustration and fear, and he ventured downstairs. Henry
sat on the couch, back to the stairs, legs folded under him, a well-used guitar resting on his thigh. In the
daylight, he looked surprisingly manageable—shorter than Geoff, and certainly fit, but no more so than the
average Saturday-morning jogger.
“Sorry about last night,” Henry said, never raising his eyes from the guitar. “I didn’t mean to scare you. I
didn’t know you were there.” He half-smiled, something jumping in his cheek.
“I’m sorry about your room,” Geoff said, and started to go on, but stopped. The doggie bowl hung weightily
in the air between them.
“Well, cool. I’m Henry.” He looked up now and held out a steady hand, his face almost babyish beneath his
bald scalp.
“Geoff.” They shook, and Geoff advanced to the kitchen with an absurd sense of victory. Carter, a note on
the table explained, had gone out to the park for the day to paint; Mary to work an extra shift; Adam to a
coffee house to write his next roleplay. Cowards, Henry had called them the night before. No wonder he was
still on their couch. Geoff thought of Carter’s shrug and burned anew. He saw it again over his lunch of tofu
dogs, over the Star Assassins manual, over an online backgammon match. It’s not as if he had asked for love,
but there’s a certain amount of courtesy that you show to a man who blows you four times a week. Finally,
without the slightest plan for what he might say or ask, he picked up the phone to dial Mary’s cell.
“—but I can’t stop thinking about you—” Henry, sobbing. Geoff tossed the phone like a live snake, then
lunged for it as it banged down behind his desk. He pulled it back up by the cord and placed it carefully in its
cradle. Sitting back in the chair, he closed his eyes and laid his forehead down on the cool wood. Not good.
After a decent interval he went down to apologize. Henry, eyes puffy, shook his head as curtly as if nothing
had even happened, strummed a few chords, tightened a string, strummed again. Geoff went back to his
room and locked the door.
"He's going to kill us all," Geoff said to Carter in a moment alone that night. When Carter just shrugged and
scratched his chest, staring at the pile of plates by the sink—"I’m sure it'll be OK"—Geoff dug his nails into his
palms and headed back upstairs. Breathe out the anger; breathe in the peace.
Late that night the Beijing hotel owner e-mailed him that the position had been filled. Geoff rearranged his
desk, worked half of a crossword puzzle, did a few push-ups, and then, abandoning all pretense of
productivity, smoked another joint. Finally he slumped down against the edge of the bed, staring at the faded
blue carpet. It’s just sex, he thought. Sex, and a mattress, and a 7th-rank Octoroid Smuggler. Nothing that I
can’t walk away from. He picked up a pubic hair, twirled it in his fingers: Carter’s. Now if only I had
somewhere to go, he thought.
Not long after, the carpet began to sing. “God can do immeasura-bubbly more than you can eeeeeeeeever
dream; God can do immeasura-bubbly bubbly bubbly bubbly bubbly more!” Geoff shuddered, closed his eyes,
and waited for it to go away. It took him several verses (“What, higher than a mountain? Bubbly more! What,
deeper than the sea? Bubbly more!”) to realize that the sound was actually coming from below the floor. He
unlocked his door and stepped into the hall, and yes, the song floated to him straight up the stairs, and now
he could hear a bouncy guitar accompaniment running under the words (“Help you know that he's with
you—'bubbly more! Help you trust him forever—'bubbly more!”). He walked down the stairs until he could see
the back of Henry’s bobbing head. Geoff sat, leaning against the banister, and when the song finished
(“Bubbly bubbly bubbly bubbly bubbly bubbly bubbly bubbly more!”), applauded softly.
Henry gave a start, then turned and smiled. “Did I wake you?”
Geoff shook his head. “Rough night.”
Henry patted the couch next to him. “Come here, I’ll sing you another.” Another proved to be “God Made the
Dinosaurs,” complete with restrained foot-stomping and roaring, followed by “Who Swallowed Jonah?” then “I
Am Special” to the tune of “Frère Jacques.” Geoff studied him as he sang, the first chance he had really had to
do so. He could see the shaving cuts under Henry’s chin now, the way his smile stopped short of his brown,
pained eyes, and the way he handled even his guitar as if it were filled with dynamite. Geoff's seen this look
before on a maid in a Shanghai guest house; she had been in the laogai, she told him, the forced labor
camps. Politics, she said, then took the trashcan and hurried from the room. The memory seemed so far from
him now, more like something he read in a magazine at the doctor's office than something he actually lived.
His heart sank as he realized that between the four of them, they hadn’t even spoken twenty words to Henry
today.
Eventually Geoff thought to offer him some pot. Henry shook his head.
“Medication,” he said, launching into “God Made Me and All of You.”
“Where did you learn all these?” Geoff asked him when he finished.
“The last few weeks.” Henry’s cheek jumped a little more. “A guy I met. I like them… a lot, actually.”
“Are you very religious, then?”
Henry smiled and shook his head. “I’m not at all, actually. But they… it’s like being a little kid again,
reaching for something out there. Something little and happy. Like...” He struck up another song: “Twinkle
twinkle precious star, Jesus loves you as you are. He loves your smile, he loves your voice. He thinks you are
pretty choice. Twinkle twinkle precious star, Jesus loves you as you are.” He stretched his legs out and
smiled. “It’s just something good, you know?"
By dawn, Geoff could already play three of the songs. Henry promised to teach him “Immeasure-bubbly”
the following night, “once you’ve got a few more chords down.”
Meanwhile, battle lines established themselves across the house. The other roommates avoided the living
room; Henry never went upstairs; each spent only a minimum of time in areas of mutual necessity like the
kitchen or bathroom. Even so he saw Mary and Adam pacing the hall as Henry grilled a cheese sandwich,
trying not to look like they were waiting.
Carter slipped into his room as soon as Mary left for work that night.
“Henry’s home,” Geoff said, jumping up from his desk. Carter just smiled, closing the door behind him and
slipping off his belt. “I’m not kidding,” Geoff said, “Henry’s right down there.”
Carter shrugged. “Would she believe him?” He put his hands on Geoff’s hips, and Geoff didn’t stop him.
They kissed, Carter’s lips chapped and rough under his. They kissed again, and then Carter tugged him by his
belt down onto the bed.
“Henry tried to get his job back today,” Carter told him, after. “Adam heard him on the phone. What a sad
fucking guy.”
“Did it work?”
“What do you think?” He laughed, toying with Geoff’s chest hair. “How did you like the Jesus songs last
night?”
“Fine. He’s not so bad a guy.”
“Just don’t get too attached.”
Two days later Geoff came downstairs to find Henry and his guitar gone, the yellow comforter folded neatly
across the back of the couch. He walked to the kitchen, found Adam flipping pancakes for Carter and Mary
with an unmistakably festive air.
"Where's Henry?"
"Moved out this morning," Mary told him. "Grabbed his boxes out of the basement and left without a word
to anybody." The grill sizzled as Adam poured on another spiral of batter.
"But I was just talking to him--" he broke off at a look from Adam. He had skipped the previous night's
roleplay to learn the last chords of "Immeasure-Bubbly," and half of the players had died on the claws of
Nazdorian Slayers, "all because of Gilgapod going AWOL." "It'll be a sore point with the group for weeks,"
Adam had warned him, looking rather pissed-off himself.
"Why would he just leave like that?" he said instead, looking at the drizzling rain outside.
Mary looked over at the others. "Well, he couldn't get Becky back, he couldn't get his job back… he didn't
have anything really keeping him here…"
"Maybe he was just afraid of going crazy again," Carter said, spreading syrup over his plate. "Checked
himself back into the hospital. You want pancakes?" Geoff stepped back into the living room and searched
through the clutter on the coffee table for a note. Maybe it had fluttered away. He ran his hand behind the
couch cushions, pulling out a lighter, a condom wrapper, and a handful of change, then knelt down and looked
under the edge.
Henry, the red, round plastic announced. Henry Henry Henry Henry Henry Henry. He stared at it in
confusion, then pulled it free. Inside was half of a hot dog, loaded with ketchup, mustard, and relish. Both
ends had been gnawed at. Three cuts in the rim—the same bowl.
"How the hell did he get this back?" Geoff asked from the kitchen door. Adam looked over from the stove and
flinched. Mary kept her eyes on the pancake she was slicing into neat, careful squares. Only Carter met his
gaze.
"He must have stolen it," he said. "I put it back in the basement after you found it in your room." He took
another bite of pancake, then wiped the syrup from his lips.
"Why would you--?"
"Look, we were doing you a favor," Adam burst in, face flushed red behind his brown beard. "We said, he'll
stay, you said, no, no, no, absolutely no. So don't fucking lecture us now."
"So you left this out for him. Put food in it to make him think he was losing it again." Geoff kept his voice
calm. Ice. Breathe out the anger. The hand holding the bowl began to shake wildly.
"Well…" Adam said, his eyes flicking to Carter. Carter took a deep breath.
"Well, yeah," he said, shrugging. "I mean, yeah. I did. But, I mean, we all--"
Geoff threw the bowl like a discus into the stack of plates by the sink. The stack toppled, striking the floor and
exploding like a series of ceramic grenades. Adam jumped away, dropping his spatula with a clatter. Carter's
chair banged down to the tiles behind him as he shot to his feet.
"What the fuck--"
"I can't believe I ever let you suck my dick," Geoff said, and left the room.
By the time Geoff taped the last box shut, the yelling had died down to sporadic bursts of asshole and liar
and freeloader. He heard the snapping of Carter's Velvet Underground vinyls and the shattering of his Snoopy
mugs, saw him scurrying through the rain to rescue unfinished canvases of abstract swing sets. He heard
Adam venture down, then retreat again after a minute of deadly quiet, the screaming resuming in his wake.
Geoff had left his map of Bangladesh for last, and he took it from the wall now, folded it carefully, and
tucked it into his shirt pocket.
Anywhere but here, he thought, and carried the last of his boxes out to his car.
the doggie bowl page two
