The phone rings again. I see I have five voicemails from her. I better get this, or my phone’s going to be pissing everyone off in the COMS pit.

She’s screaming at me. I can’t understand what she is saying.

“Hey, slow down!”

Asshole this and Fuck you that and How could you.

I still can’t make out any complete sentences but I gather from the sound of her voice that she checked her email on my computer before she left for work and found something she didn’t want to see. Oh, the browser history. It never occurred to me, she almost never stays overnight. Then I do a quick mental inventory of every website I’ve been to and it occurs to me that she probably saw some pretty deviant shit.

Is that what you like?

You like–

“I can’t talk right now—the spinoff—gotta go,” I say, and flip shut the clamshell.

Well, that’s that. I’ll deal with her later, I think, if ever, and I reflect on this for a moment, in the middle of the crowd, with dudes to my left and right, shoving me, and I tell myself that I don’t give a fuck, that I am better off, that I have every right to jam myself in my own apartment, that I will just find someone else, but concurrently, I am aware that I have wounded her, and that it’s my fault. In a flash, I recall that I have had variations of this phone call before, other girlfriends, other times, other circumstances, and I see myself as myself, for a second, a Category 5 tornado, leaving behind a mile-wide trail of destruction.

* * * *

There are two minutes to go and there have to be like two hundred guys in here, I have never seen anything like it on the floor. I have a feeling it’s going to get physical, although I doubt anyone is going to throw a punch at me. If they do they are going to come back with a bloody stump. The pit has a different kind of noise; usually it sounds just like a bunch of dudes shouting at each other, but now the individual sounds have sort of congealed into this mass and it sounds like NASCAR, maybe combined with angry group gay sex. I am in the middle of what is turning into a fucking giant gangbang, and I never knew what it was like to be claustrophobic, but this is really starting to make me feel uncomfortable. If shit starts to get kinky, fuck that, I am going over the top of people to get out of here. There is nowhere else to go. I am surrounded by zoo animals.

Is that what you like?