I wanted to hear more about Cal’s trip up the Mississippi, about the people he’d met, the people who’d met him. I envied them, whoever they were, for the opportunity they’d had to know him. Had they even realized they were lucky to spend time with him? Maybe they’d recognized it as easily as I had, that he was worth listening to, that his words were more than syllables, that there was weight behind them because he had taken the time to utter them.

I tried to count how many phrases I had tacked together in his presence, concerned he thought I was a crumb. Had I told him anything about myself? Had he asked? In the past, I’d only seen men as muscles, bones, and need; maybe Cal saw me the same way I had seen them: lips, hips, and dicks, nothing more than bodies, pliant to my pleasure. I wanted him to see me as more, as a whole being, not pulled apart by my desire for him. I imagined him standing on the beach, slivers of my skin in his hands while I bled beneath him, peeled by the Peach, nothing more than a massacred man, a helpless heap for a person who made me believe it was difficult to speak—not that I’d wanted to do much of that prior to meeting him anyway. For some reason, though, for some inexplicable, alien reason, I wanted to be heard by him and wanted to hear myself through him. He was a sieve I would pour myself into, and he’d cradle the good bits, hold onto them to stop them from circling the drain, if he found any of me worth keeping.

I didn’t understand how it was possible to miss something I never had, to wrap my arms around a wraith and believe it wasn’t destined to float away, even when I knew it would. Maybe I had been transformed by the trace of him, the only life-form to receive his light among the depths of the aphotic lake. Everything around us was growing darker by the day, but I remembered his luminance and felt comforted in a way.

Life in Chicago had never been easy, but it was even more difficult now. While Towertown was surviving, it was no longer thriving the way it had been. Even Abraham was cutting back. Each month when Maks came back with his numbers, I was more and more surprised. I decided I needed to go sit down with Abe to figure out what was going on, perhaps as an excuse to then do the same with Cal.

“Long time no see, Egg,” Abraham greeted as I entered The Gallery on State late on a Saturday afternoon. I glanced around, half expecting, but mostly wishing, I would see Cal milling among the stragglers. I didn’t.