Taking shelter in the absolute pits of the stacks like a true extremophile, Hatch Cutterson skidded her librarian’s cart to a halt to take her five in the fourth-floor women’s bathroom of Donny D. Research Library.  Five would become ten, and ten fifteen due to the simple and odd truth that, like any respectable and business savvy casino, Donny D.’s had not installed a clock anywhere in its premises, banishing time to the abstract. 

This oversight led to the unfortunate consequence of many a late-night graduate student, already bleary and over and under caffeinated, becoming stranded amongst the shelves without any sense of time (a contrarian modern architect had rejected his contemporary’s infatuation with natural light and decided to forgo windows on every other floor) or any sense of space; for the students of the early English novel, the experience nauseatingly reminded them of The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, leaving behind a retinue of despairing students crying for their good man Friday until they crawled their way into a foreign language section of the stacks where the seemingly drunken script of the book titles and their non-Western story structures metamorphosized these castaways’ delirium into thinking they had arrived at the post-colonial level of Dante’s Inferno.  Directing these students back to their combobulation was not one of Hatch Cutterson’ jobs as student librarian. 

Carting her own stack of books which were as equally eclectic as the library’s collection – a statistician’s ideal research sample – Hatch called it momentarily quits moments before she would begin reshelving returns to the voyages in forestry chapter of the university library’s catalog.  Intent on making every motion intentional, a guru bite of wisdom that came to her in an Instagram reel vision that morning, she ceremoniously parked her cart to blockade the bathroom door and squeezed her way inside.

Rarely ever serviced because they rarely ever served anyone, the college library bathrooms felt to Hatch like a death whose decades of decomposition was delayed by some sort of once upon a year janitor’s embalmment, a preservation of an earlier age whose decrepitude showed only at the seams – a returned GI from the pre-coed years had immortally scribbled “Kilroy was here” on the cinder block above one of the commodes.  Rarely did Hatch mind the ever-present sensation of death-on-ice as she found herself and her hard-earned privacy guaranteed by the double barricade of a Women Only sign and a cart blockade. 

Like a trained beret, she first swept the room for bystanders and was relieved to see no legs lurking behind any three of the ivory green stalls.  Alone in a room not much taller than her already short stature, she turned to the one yellowed sink and let the hot water run.  She set atop the pho-marbled counter phone facedown and her work keys aside yesteryear’s anonymous sharpie self-portrait.  The faucet’s scandalously hot water had already begun fogging the room like she liked it.  With the sleeve of her white coat – one of those invertible coats that are fuzzy on the inside and sleek on the out that she unfailingly wore that way – she wiped a vignette of sweat from the mirror to open her reflection, giving it a long look.

Her eyes were her favorite part of the expression the saw.  They were an emerald made jade in the warm, low restroom lights, and though they lost their sharpness in the mirror’s haze, the webs spun in her irises and the jagged scar of amber in her left eye held nebulas of meaning, show a soul hidden in plain sight for the careful observer.  For the same reason she loved her eyes, she thanked her brows – wicker accomplices to the glares and glances she cast to spare her mouth the trouble of words.  Her full lips a naturally painted light rose, equally tensed as a nylon string to sound the right tone of approval or irritation.  Why, she mused, she could become a mute diplomat should she choose to throw herself into it.  Even her curls, deep golden-brown strands that fell like idyll vines to her gentle collar bone, complemented this picture, this bath of vanity, until a bulb went out.

…

Lit from the left, strobed from the right, she felt something was lost to her.  Back, forth, back and forth, she turned ajar to her mirrored self, scrubbing through each pose hoping she’d remember the look, the feel, that caught her.  Then her phone began to buzz.

Even on silent mode the beast of a device managed to tear into her peace.  An iPhone cased in a transparent case, a bubble of lamination scratched and chiseled from each sacrificial fall it took, saving the actual phone its pristine natural form, the phone managed to send ripples through the splashed puddles spilled from the still running magmatic tap.  Hardening her face as though her phone were not only an intrusion to her five minutes of peace but maybe even radioactive, the ringing phone face shone the profile of a rather moody man whose pursed lips seemed to be the punchline to his leprechaun’s hat: Facetime from Rainer Pen.  Summoning both a meditative one-two breath cycle and a fond but distant memory, Hatch accepted the call.

“Babe! Babe – battle axe to my flimsy shield, you cut right through my walls and see into the guts of me.  What do you think would happen if I mix salt with Vaseline?” a hoarse but bright voice creaked out through the static of Donny D’s renowned reception. 

“Repeat that for me,” she said staring ramrod straight into the draining sink.

“Well, I was just thinking, I’ve got this tub of Vaseline you’ve given me on my deathbed – wonder workers both you and this rub, don’t get me wrong – but what if I made it better.”

“Made it better like using the thing like I told you to instead of calling me up about it?”

“Made it better like taking it to the next level.  Now you know how I hate to feel pinched for time and kept in bed made useless.  I remember an old chemistry friend of mine, maybe it was a teacher, told me salt speeds up reactions…”

“You mean the chemistry class you took six years ago?” she said knowing he rarely left the room and could not possibly have made inquiries with a chemist.  “The class you told me you tried to nitroglycerin blast your way out the back of?”

“That’s the one!  Thanks for the reminder, it’s like you massaged that wrinkle out my brain.”

Sometimes she wondered what wrinkles he had left up there.  “Hurry up I’m at work, what’s your grand plan here?”

“Well, as I was theorizing, before you rudely intruded on my conjectures about this damned cold, I’ll mix some salt into this Vaseline and should get out of this imposed rest in no time.”

 “Knock yourself out.  Anything else while you have me, my love?” she surrendered.

“Just that.  I’ll report back once you get back tonight.  That is, if I’m not dead by then…”

“What a shame that would be.”

“Love ya, gotta go poison myself.  Tell me about how it went with Marg when you get back.”

Her phone returned to a blank, black screen, reflecting a moment’s transition where her amusingly nonplussed, steady smiled and eyebrows raised expression seemingly became vacuumed away and replaced with shaky, tense eyes spying at themselves to see if their color predicted their mood.  After some time, it felt as though her stare broke beyond the phone screen reflection and settled at a place indeterminably far away.  Like a pendulum hitting a sandbank on its downward stroke and coming back up again, this time slower, this time grounded, she thought she saw a truth in her racing thoughts.  The forest from the trees, she thought. 

Thoughts of her friend Marg, the girl who slapped her back in a general ed class on the pursuit of happiness and had befriended her ever since, and her curtly put, rare solemn words she said that morning at the diner collided with pictures of Rainer – one, the hometown mad scientist, half-rambling fool, but her fool; the other, the self-absorbed, non-reflective ass he could be.  How would she tell him that night?  She would have to admit that the troubled friend she had to console was really herself seeking Marg’s counsel, seeking the words that could stop the ride calmly and allow them to go their own ways.  She gripped the edge of the counter so tightly that her already not tan fingers lost almost all their color, contrasting with her deep crimson nails the way a bleach pH strip should return red. 

He never had his own way to go in the first place, she thought.  Rainer sometimes reminded her of a directionless dog surfing any wave he could find, no thought of the chops ahead.  That was part of his charm.  A free spirit.  Imagining the conversation waiting for her with Rainer that night smothered her mental almost as much as the steam from the sink hazed the room. 

So, when the sharp knock at the door came, an isolated popping sound, she half imagined that a Plank in reason broke and that she was tumbling into a void.  Either that or the aneurism finally arrived.

…

“One moment: library business!” she shouted to the person in queue.

She turned off the faucet, pocketed her phone, and looked up to see the mirror frosted completely with steam.  With a paper towel she squeegeed down the condensation and noticed the light had fixed itself.  In this new light she collected her expression, trying to throw herself one of those eye of the tiger looks, and breathed in deeply.  On the exhale she nodded her chin and became mindful of a thin, jacketless book in the reflection projecting out from the wastebin amongst the wave chops of used paper towels. 

Students often left books scattered across the library and the bathrooms were no exception, though she had yet to see one disposed of like it was criminal evidence. She lifted the book.  In her hands its soft cover gave off the color of a dull red darkened in random ripples like a water stain or a tie-dye pattern, and its frayed, black binding looked as if it would come apart in even the gentlest grip.  Yet the book did not disintegrate in her hand.  Seeing it lacked a title and any sort of library label, Hatch concluded it must be a journal someone had forgotten and, as a lover of pocket mole skins, thought how much a shame it was to lose such a thing. 

The knocking returned, this time in force and repetition but still no shout back.  She ignored the person lingering outside – or maybe, she thought, it was a motley line of bathroom goers gradually more agitated as they approached the locked room she had repurposed into an ivory tower.

“Hold your horses, geez,” Hatch called out.  She carefully opened the book to the first page, hoping to find more about the journal’s owner.  All she found was an onionskin curtain that obscured what looked to be a page full of finely set typing – not a journal after all, but still not part of the library collection.  Odd, once again.  Before she could plod further into the plot and turn the page, an older male voice moaned through the door:

“Hatch!  Get your ass out of there.  This cart should’ve been emptied half an hour ago – you keep shirking your shit and you’ll soon be saying sayonara to your shifts.”

“Hannah, I swear to god,” she yelled back, half grateful it was her runt of a co-worker on the other side and on the power tripped supervisor who was only a year older than her.  “I’m on my five, give me a minute, will you?”

“I’ve been waiting to use the loo for ten!”

She slid the nameless book into an inner coat pocket, one that she regularly took pride in for how it concealed small books and journals and unlocked the door. 

…

Sitting on the college commuter bus, doused in the whimpering electric overheads that blackened the windowed wintry night, Hatch would discover that the first page of the secret book contained the start to a story:

Together that night in autumn they lingered by the pond’s edge below the one faltering streetlight in Dorchester Park, each alone but hand in hand, blindly bracing for the voyage of a nascent romance.  Together that night in autumn, they swayed in the dappled iridescence of a harvest moon passing through a wind tousled maple tree.

Margaret Wall, auburn haired and shorter statured than March Peters, sprung up to kiss him for the first time.  He stood there stunned for a moment before a smile gathered across his face like orange blossoms sweet and swelling in springtime. 

In that lull between gusts, March pulled Margaret close into the fold of his frayed woolen coat so that she too was covered, sheltered, and he yielded to another kiss, this one longer, this one infinite.  Silent promises were made then and there: Promises to ebb and flow in the love to come; to play the invisible bounds openly and fairly; to never let go, even if it killed them.

And so, promises were made that night dancing together in autumn, bonds kept through season’s change, secret words the world was to discover the winter after when their pale bodies, embraced, were dredged out from the cerulean waters of an icy pond in Dorchester Park.  

Hatch let her eyes drift from the rough-edged page and across the night bus, blissfully ignoring the last words that tickled at the back of her brain, thinking of the first night she met Rainer in private, so far from here, so long ago.  Sitting in the back in an empty row facing against another empty row, she turned and looked down toward the driver.  The bus was empty of passengers save a young-looking couple huddling for warmth in a booth of their own.  Every so often one of them would chirp in silent laughter, to which the other would lean for a kiss.  A bump in the road clonked the two’s heads together, melding them even more, and they both let out even louder a laugh.  Hatch let her eyes drift from the couple and into the moonless night outside her window. 

She squeezed the cuffs of her fawny macintosh and shivered.  A slanted window was cracked open and funneled in a breeze.  She counted three more stops until Rainer’s. 

…

Rainer lived beneath the bluff in an apartment he liked to call his “squalid shack.”  At night, his second-floor window glowed warmly and alone like a castaway’s fire in inordinate darkness.  Somehow, Hatch thought as she stood outside waiting to be buzzed in, the cliff felt even more immense in this darkness. 

During daylight, when she would lay in Rainer’s bed sleepily, she would look out his rear window and study the waves of granite that stacked together to form the cliffs.  The cliffside commanded the canvas of his window, leaving room for nothing but it.  She spent hours distinguishing its details.  She watched it shed its different shades of gray as the sun rose along its arc, creating new shadows and new highlights.  She traced its crevices.  Each line in that wall of rock would lead her eyes back to Rainer sleeping beside her, and she memorized their two faces, the cliffs dominant with his drowsed face at the fore, close to her. 

But tonight, standing before the stoop shivering, Hatch felt the light from Rainer’s room glowed vulnerably like the coughing embers of a fire, as if the silent cliffs had finally swallowed the little home beneath the bluff.  She shuddered when she found she could not remember his sleeping face.  And then he opened the door.

“I can’t tell what’s more contagious: this cold of mine or your looks.  Get in here before you catch one of your own.”

Rainer turned back inside before she could snap out a word in reply.  She shut the door behind her, following this gaunt, green-eyed figure to the place where the moon ought to have been hung.

…

Sitting inside his room atop the Target scatter rug, Hatch listened as Rainer ran through the repertoire of names he’d given his room: “sanitarium;” “cage and a coop;” “a cloche for the cake I am.”  He stretched across the bed that rose to half the size of a loft and drooped his long, slender arms down over the edge, lacing his fingers into a bridge that tightened and loosened with that cadence to his voice she had grown to listen for more than his words.  Presently, Hatch knew by his flurried speech that he was joking about his cold to avoid the more serious conversation hovering in the low-ceilinged room.

He brought his hands up to ruffle back his short, black hair, gripping it almost into a forward-facing man-bun that, in the ambient light of the place, shimmered a jet black streaked with slivers of red.  “So the Vaseline and salt did not get me the patent-worthy invention I thought I might have on my hands,” he shared.  “Though I did end up with some very dry hands.  Maybe it’s the world’s first anti-moisturizer, a dehumidifier balm made by the world’s looniest convalescent.”

“A loon, maybe, but not a convalescent.  You look fine.”  She fell back onto the floor and rolled her head back so that the room flipped upside down.

“Maybe, maybe.  All things body a river, all things mind dreams and delusion.”

That’s the fourth time he’s said that this week, she thought.  Trying to get the conversation started, or maybe to set it in motion towards the words she wanted to hear, from him, from herself, she asked the steppingstone of a question: “So, how was your day?”

From the corner of her eye she saw Rainer turn over in the bed, knocking a pillow to the ground.  He placed his face against his nested arms and looked down to her.  She could tell by his silence and the way he quickly scrunched his nose that he was now studying her. 

“Oh, well, you know.  The same as always really.  Woke up at the crack of dawn, which I then fell through – they really need to fix that rift up before someone seriously gets hurt…”

“God,” she chuckled against herself. 

“You’re right, maybe that was He on the other end.  I didn’t get good enough a glimpse at Him before the crack spat me back out, and I’ve been on bedrest for the rest of it.”

“Good.  You look rested enough.” She tossed the pillow back at him. 

“You’ve got something on your mind,” he muffled through the throw balanced against his face.  Hatch looked back again thinking the world felt better upside down.

“Don’t you?  How was your talk with Marg? You left so suddenly this morning I didn’t even have time to interrogate you to the door.”

She had left in a hurry that morning, and in spite of the case of nerves she had felt, a full throttle flight urge, she was weirdly proud of her ability to roll out in under five minutes.  But she had also fibbed about the hour of her meeting with Marg.  She rolled to face away from Rainer pictured the cliff waiting silently beyond the window glass.  She flipped through her memories of that morning when she wandered alone through the Commons. 

Ice had taken over the crisscrossing paths, so she treaded on the light, crunching snowfall aside the path.  She had been careful not to stray too far out from the sidewalk: one, for thinking a clear patch of sidewalk was just up ahead; two, for a fear she knew to be irrational that somehow, should she abandon the shore, the snow would give and would plummet her down the frozen shoot, through glacial strata of snow, ice and rock, into an eternity where she might rest or forget it all. 

The sight of a boy sledding across the field had popped this bubbling worry.

The impact of a pillow thudding against her face popped this memory.

“Where’d you go, space cadet?”

She resented the throw thinking it callous, but chose to say nothing of it.  One more night, she thought.  “Sorry, Marg was well.  She’s been going through it with her boyfriend and needed to vent.  I wouldn’t blame her, the guy sounds like he’s from a comic book.”

“Maybe we’ll meet him someday.  We’ll play it off like we work for the Comic Book Authority and vet him out.”

“Right.  What’s a failing grade for you?”

This question brought Rainer back to life.  He lifted himself up like a man climbing an invisible rope and jumped down to the floor where Hatch just narrowly dodged out from his tumble.

“Hmm, the failing grade for a man.  Okay, here’s the criteria.  He has to be passionate.  What he is passionate about, I do not care (he said iterating each syllable).  As long as he carries himself with purpose, he’s good for a loan.”

“That’s not necessarily the stuff of a relationship, though, is it? Passion?” she said, drawing her knees up to hold her arms over.  “Hot blooded men tend to erupt into the atmosphere.  Tough to reach someone when they’re in defense mode.”

“I disagree.  I think there’s no other moment to reach someone than when they’re speaking with pathos, with their blood.”

“So, you think a good man is argumentative? I can see passion as a virtue and fighting for the things you care for to be noble, but intolerant passion just isn’t constructive, you can’t build a relationship from that.”

He reciprocated Hatch’s pose but let one leg loose so that his ankle rested against her thigh.  “Sure, you have to listen, but I think conviction is crucial.  We each have our realities, and the moment you slip up on believing in your own is the moment you’ve lost something essential.  It’s all a downhill identity crisis from there.”

“Rainer, compromise doesn’t have to be so damn existential.  And I’m not saying it means capitulating on your sense of self, it means listening and bridging, reasoning a solution, agreeing on something concrete that might not be perfect but is within this world.”  She buried her head into her folded arms.  “Superimpose your passions and open yourself to the possibility you might like that new wave.”

Who knows if those last words made it to Rainer, they were spoken awfully quietly and into her chest.  But if they did, he showed no reaction, his face did not melt into vulnerability, instead, he showed a small smile and a moment of light glimmered in his dirty green eyes.  

“You never asked what I was passionate about.”

She looked up fast.  “We were talking about Marg’s boyfriend.”

“I know, but as the Comic Book Authority I feel I need to be transparent.”

“Okay.  What are you so passionate about it ends all conversation?”

He took a moment, his smile grew even bigger, and he said: “you.”

Hell, she thought, one more night, and she pulled him onto her, drinking his poison for the last time.