Jonathan Daniel Gardner

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What Dread Steps to Being

I stood there, holding myself together badly. I’d brought my own body, which was not ideal. Forty hours awake. Things weren’t adding up anymore, but they still counted.

I was in Hell’s Kitchen waiting for Bran outside The Annex. The sidewalk was busy. People moved with a purpose I didn’t share. Everyone seemed dressed for better versions of themselves. I stood off to the side and tried not to take up space.

Bran arrived the way he always did, as if the night had been waiting for him. Tall, beautiful, immediately legible. People noticed him without meaning to. We hugged and got a table outside. We each got a quart of frozen margarita with straws shaped like penises.

“Is this going to challenge your sexuality?” he asked, pulling from the straw.

“I’m choosing to experience this ironically,” I said, drinking from my own.

“So not awesome news,” he said. “I just got into a fight with Michael.”

I waited. 

“He thinks I party too much,” he said. “I’ve been on a tear, that is true, but it’s not what he’s making it.”

“What’s he making it?” I asked.

“He thinks I’m avoiding something.”

“Are you?”

“I’m avoiding being boring.”

“Sounds like self-care.” 

His knee bounced.

“We can’t go back to my place later,” he said. 

“Yeah,” I said. “We don’t need domestic tension.”

The night was humid and suggestible.

“Do you want to do something irresponsible?” I asked.

He looked at me, eyes bright.

“Always.”

We stopped in front of one of those weed stores that looked temporary. I suggested shroom chocolate.

“I’ll pay,” I said. “If you go inside.”

“Easy,” he said.

Shortly after, he stuck his head out the door and called me in.

“I got overwhelmed,” he said. “Help me decide.”

The guy behind the counter could barely open his eyes.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hi,” Bran said. “We want shrooms.”

The guy shook his head slowly. “No.”

“No?” I said.

“No shrooms,” he said. “Wellness.”

“Wellness mushrooms,” Bran said.

“Chocolate,” I said.

“Yes,” the guy said, pointing vaguely.

I chose a familiar bar, and we left quickly. 

The hours without sleep caught up to me at once. My body stopped keeping up.

“I’m going to take some,” I said, showing my pill case. “You want in?”

“You monster,” he said. “Of course I do.”

We bought water at a bodega and walked toward the Hudson. The river looked patient. We sat on the grass and broke the chocolate badly, guessing at portions. 

“Cheers,” Bran said.

“If this gets weird,” I said. “I’m stepping outside.”

My thoughts loosened their ties. Bran talked about Michael, about fear disguised as concern. I told him I feel perpetually useless as a person.

We walked south along the path by the West Side Highway.

“Ice is fake abundance,” I said. “It’s an illusion of more when it’s mostly absence.”

“You remember I’m a scientist, right?” he said. “That’s nonsensical.”

“I can explain,” I said. “But it won’t help.”

I felt assembled incorrectly. My breathing had become a task. Sounds arrived slightly late, as if they’d been routed through something first.

“You feel okay,” he asked. “Looking a little weird.”

“Nothing’s wrong,” I said. “I’m just not right yet.”

Time was becoming an issue. Seconds stretched and snapped back without warning. I checked my phone and immediately forgot why. My hands felt like they were waiting for orders.

His phone buzzed. Michael. Dinner. Olive branch. I’ll meet you guys.

He showed me. We stared at each other. I took more pills out of reflex.

Always the grenade, never the shrapnel.

“We can’t go,” Bran said.

“We can absolutely go,” I said. “We just won’t tell him.”

“We’re coming up,” he said.

“We are definitely coming down,” I said. “It’s been like two hours.”

“It’s been half an hour.”

I tried to take up a posture that conveyed confidence and support. 

“What are you doing?” he asked.

I took my hands off my hips. “You seem totally fine,” I said.

“I am fine,” he said. “And that’s not the endorsement you think it is.”

“I know a spot near here,” I said. “We’ll do some deep breaths, pour some water on our faces, high-five, and walk over.”

We got to 10^th and W 20^th, and the sidewalk was suddenly busier than I remembered. Not louder. More populated. Everyone was closer than they needed to be. I became aware of how much of me there was.

The light ahead of us looked wrong. Brighter than the street deserved. I tried to remember how I normally walked.

The restaurant was overwhelming. Brick, bodies everywhere. A room full of people having a correct evening.

I stood there trying to look harmless. It felt like being observed by consequences.

Michael arrived, kind and worried and trying.

I fumbled the greeting, so I went in for a hug and hoped for the best. One of the hosts led us to a table in the middle of the room. The walls were bare. The sound roared. 

Bran looked like angst and vengeance.

Our server came over and said words. I watched her face until it seemed like my turn to talk, and I guessed a response.

“Do you have a Pinot Noir from the Willamette Valley?” I asked and immediately felt betrayed.  

“I’ll have to check,” she said. “We have one from Sonoma by the glass.”

“Marvelous,” I said, like I was trying the word out for future use.

“You want to do that one?”

“And so it is.”

She gave me a look I couldn’t parse. I tried to move my face into a smile shape.

“One Pinot,” she said, writing on her pad.

After she left, Michael blew out a held breath.

“Wine was a good idea,” he said. “I should have jumped on that with you.”

Score, I thought with the confidence of someone who was often wrong.

Bran avoided eye contact. He was absorbed in the question of whether the lime wedge went inside the drink or on the edge of the glass. 

When the empty wine glass arrived, my muddled brain couldn’t place it. Then it could. I would be tasting the wine first. The color, the swirl, the sniff, the sip, the savor. Dread steps to a performance of humiliation.

My hands had completely stopped listening to reason. Shapes and colors were melding together, their outlines still sharp. My thoughts were only intelligible enough to understand my doomed position. I shoved my hands into my lap and pinned them there with my thighs.

Michael excused himself to the facilities. Fireworks of joy went off inside me. I only had to survive our server’s judgment.

I took out my pill box with what I hoped was subtlety and removed two. I swallowed them with the grace and poise of a cinderblock. 

Bran kicked me under the table. I looked around and practiced invisibility.

The server arrived and presented the bottle. I nodded before it reached my eyeline. She struggled with the cork. Michael returned just as she won.

The color was first. She poured heavily, and her twist left drops running down the side of the glass and bottle. 

I willed my hands steady and took the glass by the stem as the entire world watched. When the glass was almost where I wanted, a tremor ran through me. I improvised by trying to pass it off as the swirl. No one bought it, so I had to deflect.

“Raucous color,” I said. “Almost luminescent.”

My brain was straining every synapse.

I tilted the glass back, stuck my nose in, and breathed in through my mouth instead. Luckily, it seemed to just register as regular weird to everyone. 

My control was reaching its limit. With a visibly shaky hand, I spilled the wine in the direction of my mouth and paused for three seconds before giving two overly energetic nods.

Our server was watching a busser struggle with their dish tub. I stared at her until she remembered.

“Oh,” she said. “It’s good?”

“Perfect,” I said.

She underpoured my glass and left.

Michael was texting. Bran was lost in the high ceilings.

“Finished,” Michael said. “Sorry.”

“You didn’t miss much,” I said. 

I felt sharper. My mind was still behind my mouth, but they were usually in agreement.

Our server returned for our food order. Bran was first and had clearly been rehearsing. It came out fast, robotic, overeager. Michael ordered like a normal person.

“And for you?” she asked me.

I hadn’t looked at the menu. My stomach turned at the thought of food.

“One second,” I said, opening it. “Just need to remember.”

The menu was a drip painting, legible only by feeling colors. I panicked and played the only gambit I had.

“This,” I said, pointing at a swirl of letters in the top right corner.

She looked and nodded slowly as she wrote on her pad.

“Okay,” she said. “The large margherita for you.”

“Wow,” Michael said. “Someone’s hungry.”

Bran was noticeably quiet and overwhelmed. I couldn’t read, but I could distract Michael.

“Are you still writing your book?” I asked. “Remind me what it’s about.”

I asked Michael about his anxiety, his students, his politics. I nodded when I could and filled every silence with another question. I couldn’t follow what he or even I said, but his tone and body language made me feel warm. 

The pizza was set in front of me, preposterously large. I ate one bite and battled heaven and earth to not retch. I pretended to have swallowed wrong and held my water glass to my mouth to cover it.

Bran was becoming a person again and saw my travails. He took a slice of pizza and spoke to Michael. He could only think of asking his opinion on whether the lime wedge went in the drink or on the rim, but I was grateful.

“What’s the plan for later?” Michael asked.

Bran froze. 

“Later is a dangerous word,” I said. “A future that keeps absorbing obligations without ever arriving.” It sounded casual until it left my mouth.

Bran blinked twice. Code maybe.

“I like that,” Michael said. “I don’t know what it means, but I like it.”

My body had the energy of a full laundry bag. To keep going, I had to constantly toss it down the stairs.

Michael began to say something but was interrupted by an unenthusiastic rendition of “Happy Birthday,” sung to a woman at the table next to us. The tempo was slow. The voices were disaffected. It sounded like a dirge. Someone clapped too early and then committed.

I felt wrung out. Bran was lucid enough to ask for the check. I handed over my library card and said I was buying.

I made it outside, but it was the end of my night.

“I’m tired,” I said. “I should go to sleep.”

Michael gave me a hug and held on to it a little longer than before.

I slipped a few pills in Bran’s back pocket during ours.

“Sorry,” I said. 

“Thanks,” he said. “This was fun.”

“Was it?” I said. “I was afraid I made it worse for you.”

“We’re good. You can take the day off from self-flagellation.”

“I deserved that.”

I grabbed my pizza box and walked over to 23^rd. A mostly empty F train shrieked in at the same time. 

I sat across from a man in a blue velvet blazer eating a bowl of Italian wedding soup. My eyes were too tired to move fast, and he caught me looking. He winked and slurped a meatball.

Nothing miraculous happened that day.

I didn’t dare inflict meaning on it.

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Banner Art:
Albert Gleizes, On Brooklyn Bridge, 1917, WikiArt