But they are not the imminent tears of joy, and the aspirations that only I can hear are not caused by the sudden apprehension of momentousness. They are something very different.

“What?” Charlie says, barely audible.

“Do you know what that sound is?”

I am overwhelmed by the feeling that the ring box I’m hiding behind my back is a live grenade. I want to throw it as far away as possible; I want to fall on it; I want to hand it off to someone who knows what to do with it.

I feel faint. The world around me shudders and dilates. Objects go melted-clocky.

“Do you know what that sound is?” I say in a voice that sounds as if someone has been using my tongue to streetsweep Flatbush Avenue.

As I start bending down onto one knee, Charlie’s left foot takes a step backwards. Then her right. Her lips twitch with words that won’t come and her eyes explode with water like a busted fire hydrant. Then she is spinning on her heels and running down the pavement away from me. I make a few Reliant-like noises, a few Reliant-like spasms, as I watch her sprint past the crippled buildings and thresh between the clots of unrecognizable people. I watch her get smaller and smaller until I see her disappear down the stairs into the Clinton / Washington G stop like a boat slipping beneath the waves.

I pop open the box. The ring is still sparkling. It doesn’t know any better.

“Do you know what that sound is?” I say to it. My voice is weak and hollow and has the faraway acoustic property of enbottlement. I shake the ring box but it produces no noise whatsoever. I shake it a second time and get only silence. “That is the sound of our future together.”

Bullet by Bullet

Bullet by Bullet

Down at the Snug things are quiet. Tracey isn’t working and none of the mimes I know are there. Not even Alpha. Herk doesn’t answer his phone. I start dialing Po-Mo but then realize he is not actually my friend and hang up. I search my pockets for a dose of Nix but, luckily, come up empty. For the ten thousandth time I wish my family were still alive. For the ten thousandth time I wish I were someone else. On a hunch I take a cab through the hardscrabble backroads of Queens to the firing range, where I find Herk, who, with one hand, pinwheels a sinister, matte-black handgun in the manner of a wild west showman and, with the other, pulls me into the kind of hug I wish I had received from Charlie: unpremeditated, unresistant, honest.

He is glad to see me.

“Unfuckingbelievable,” he says.

“What?”

“I’m going to have to buy you a whole new underwear wardrobe, my man.”

“What do you mean?”