Owen

The air conditioner in the office is broken. It sits silent in the window and everyone drips sweat under their shirts. Jay stops writing every few minutes to wipe his hands on his slacks before he picks up the pen again. He is copying numbers and dates from one piece of paper to another, but changing all of the dates to today’s dates. Sometimes a note has been made in pencil above the neatly printed numbers to add or subtract or multiply the numbers by this or that much. He looks forward to those notes. Then he does the math, and writes the new number down on his list.

Jay is very good at math. This and having an overactive imagination are his two best skills. In high school, people were always telling him he was very good at math and now in college people don’t tell him as much but he still knows. It’s how he was admitted to a very prestigious college and how he gets very prestigious internships like this one. He was one of dozens of applicants who pictured themselves shaking hands with important men in suits and getting invitations to after-work parties—and now he is here, copying numbers with a pen that’s slippery with sweat.

He wipes his hands on his slacks. His supervisor reminds him every time she walks by that as soon as he finishes updating the records they can get to the good stuff, the meat of things. He doesn’t remember his supervisor’s name. When he thinks of her he thinks mostly of the way she is always digging under her fingernails with a mechanical pencil and it makes a small clicking sound that he can barely hear from his desk across the room. He asked her once why they didn’t have these records digitized and she looked at him without responding until he wasn’t sure what he had said anymore

When Jay gets back to the apartment, he puts his backpack on the ground by the door and microwaves a frozen meal. “Gourmet roasted turkey and vegetable entree.” He eats straight out of the limp plastic container.

It’s Friday. At this hour, if he were on campus, he would be eating dinner with friends and planning his weekend social life. This isn’t a city he’s ever been to before, but it’s also not one with much to do. There is an important museum of contemporary art, but contemporary art has always made him feel like there’s an inside joke he’s missing out on. There are some famous gardens but he doesn’t want to be out in the sun in this heat.

Jay decides to spend the weekend moving in and getting comfortable in the apartment. He’ll be here for three months, so he should be familiar with the space. All he has done so far is put his suitcase under the bed and stack his clothes on the floor of the closet, which has no light inside it so he has to pull everything out again each morning to choose what to wear. He starts unpacking, puts his computer out on the desk in the living room and the few books he brought on the night table in the bedroom.

The owner of the apartment—Owen, he had said in the few messages they exchanged on Craigslist—appears to be a hoarder. His room is full of shelves, and the shelves are full of things. Children’s books and young adult fiction and a few novels for adults. A huge stack of dust-coated CDs in the corner. Tchotchkes everywhere. Seashells with words carved into them, jam jars full of rocks, stress balls, small enamel boxes, coins from around the world, figurines of crocodiles, interesting picture frames with nothing in them.

Jay imagines him: short, dark-haired, bespectacled, coming home with these small souvenirs and putting them on the shelves. He pictures him lying on the ground rereading childhood books. Peering in darkened antique store windows and museum gift shops for things he can add to his collection.

He moves into the kitchen, glances at the empty fridge and dusty cupboards. Owen left him some instant coffee, a few boxes of stale breakfast cereal, a large number of three-quarters-empty bottles of Windex and stainless steel cleaner under the sink.

Jay notices, as he steps out into the living room and really looks at it for the first time, that there is no couch or beanbag or anywhere for friends to sit. One folding chair at the small table that faces the TV, and one rolling chair at the desk. He runs his hand over the cracking light blue paint on the walls and tweaks his image of Owen to be a little less attractive, a little more socially awkward. He thinks about him watching TV over dinner, scrolling through Twitter at his desk. The top drawer of the desk is empty except for a dime and a clothing tag, but the large bottom drawer is duct taped shut.

In the bedroom Jay finds two boxes on the top shelf of the closet. Both are full of clothes but one has a stack of photographs on top. He thinks about putting them back without looking. If they were personal Owen would have kept them in the taped-shut drawer, so he pulls them out.

He has to change the picture in his mind again. Owen is skinny and red-haired and taller than most. There are no pictures close enough to his face to see his eye color, but they’re light. Owen has a lot of female friends, one of whom resembles him enough to be his sister. There are photos of them at parties, at restaurants, standing next to national monuments.

Jay wonders what he spends his days doing, where he is and what he’s doing this summer. He wonders why these photos aren’t in the drawer, and what could be so personal that it was taped shut anyway. He wonders what Owen’s voice sounds like, why he keeps so many useless items, whether he feels happy or exhausted when he looks around the cluttered apartment.

His mother calls while he is looking at photos. He feels guilty, as if he is a small child again, caught doing something he shouldn’t. She talks to him in Korean and he answers in English. The apartment is stiflingly hot and the phone sticks uncomfortably to his face. He tries opening the one window, but it’s even hotter outside.

* * *

The clothes Jay found in the closet are more weather-appropriate than what he brought so he starts wearing them to work. The pants are too long but they fit well at the waist. There is no laundry machine in the apartment so to save money and time he decides not to wash anything until after he wears it once. The shirts smell like what he imagines Owen must smell like, coffee and soap and the artificial sweetness of laundry detergent.

On Tuesday evening he spreads himself out on the bed staring up at the ceiling. There are a few indistinct scuff marks and a mottled stain that might be from the apartment above. It’s too dark for him to see much but the lamp is just slightly out of reach of the bed and he doesn’t move to turn it on. Instead he tries to think of ways that those marks may have gotten there. The ceiling isn’t very high. Owen could probably touch it from the ground, though Jay has to stand on the bed to reach. He imagines Owen stretching an arm up to scrape his fingernails on the ceiling and shudders at the noise. On the night table there is a bagel sandwich still wrapped in paper that Jay picked up before getting on the bus, but he doesn’t feel hungry.

He doesn’t remember falling asleep, and returns to consciousness not long after three in the morning. Getting undressed, brushing his teeth, and getting back in bed only takes a few minutes, but by then he is too restless to get back to sleep. He spends an hour watching videos he doesn’t care about on his phone, and then remembers that he’s supposed to avoid blue light, and then tosses his phone across the room and lies in the uncomfortable darkness for a long time. Eventually he tells himself he’s more likely to feel tired again if he gets up and does something so he switches on the light and eats his dinner, which has gone room temperature and slightly soggy, and then meanders into the living room.

The apartment is spooky in its emptiness. He’s never lived alone before. On some childish impulse he turns on all the lights in every room. It helps, even though the dim wash makes everything look dingier than before.

Bored, Jay finds himself sitting on the floor by the desk, fingering the sticky corner of the peeling tape keeping the bottom drawer shut. If its contents are a secret, why wouldn’t Owen have brought them with him? Or at least secured them with something more than tape? Anyone could easily take this off. If he didn’t want anyone to look inside he would have used a lock or left a note saying not to open it. But he hadn’t mentioned it at all.

Maybe he meant for Jay to look at whatever was inside. He imagines Owen sitting in front of the drawer, his long body scrunched into the space between it and the wall, pressing down on the pieces of tape he’d used to conceal whatever it is. A message, or a secret.

A part of Jay—the part that recognizes that it’s the middle of the night and he hasn’t been sleeping well lately—knows this train of thought is ridiculous.

But another part of him wants to open the drawer. Nothing bad can happen. He’ll just put everything back after and nobody will be the wiser and his curiosity will be satisfied and maybe then he can get to sleep.

* * *

Jay wakes, disoriented by the bright light turning the insides of his eyelids orange. He doesn’t know the time but the sun streaming in through the window tells him it’s late. He feels sticky and his whole body aches. He peels his sweaty face off of where it’s resting on his hands and hurries to get to work. He’s late but not unforgivably, and is grateful to fall back into the repetitive dullness of his job. He thought he was almost two thirds of the way done with the binders full of numbers and dates, but his supervisor shows him another full shelf of them this morning. She echoes her refrain that he will be done soon and then he can get on to the good stuff. The meat of things.

He tries to think about the “good stuff” he’ll get to work on once he finishes, but his mind circles back to Owen.

The night before he had found all manner of things in the taped-shut desk drawer—a bong, a deck of trick cards, a high school diploma, a necklace—but he was most interested in the journals. A stack of them, all slightly different models of the same lined black notebook. Jay read half a page of the first one before he realized what it was: a journal entry from October 2014 filled with Owen’s neat handwriting. He had written about his freshman year roommate who left empty cans of soda everywhere. Jay wanted to read more but it felt intrusive, so he fell asleep on the floor trying to remember card tricks he used to know how to do.

He wants to read them. It’s reasonable to just look at the last few pages, to see if Owen said anything about what he was doing this summer, or about him. If not then Jay won’t read any further. He dries his sweaty hands on Owen’s slacks, wipes his upper lip on his sleeve, and tries to focus on his work.

* * *

Each night since he found them Jay has been staying up late to read Owen’s diaries. He’s still in high school. Every day there are long and diligent entries that chronicle major (getting into a car crash) and minor (losing his favorite pen) events in his life. Jay learns so much about him he feels as if he knows him. Owen is insecure about his slight stutter. He is gay but hasn’t ever had a boyfriend. He is a terrible cook but a good singer. He wanted to be a pilot for a long time but was told it was too dangerous so many times he gave it up. His voice is clear in Jay’s mind, self-assured and jocular most of the time but sometimes serious and sad.

Learning Owen’s sexuality shouldn’t change anything, but it does. When Jay imagines him now, it’s much closer. The curves of his shoulders, the profile of his lips, the fan of his eyelashes against his cheek. Jay imagines him a lot. He’s a companion through the long, boring days of work and lonely evenings, joking and smiling beside him. From his writing and the pictures and a fair amount of social media stalking, Jay can imagine almost everything about him, the things he thinks are funny and the expressions he makes. The only thing this daydream lacks is solidity. Every imaginary interaction evaporates when they touch.

* * *

For three days, Jay has been sweating constantly. As soon as he gets out of the shower it starts again. On Friday the back of his shirt doesn’t dry out all day. His wrists are sore from all the writing and the rest of his body is sore for no reason. He feels feverish, distanced from his body in the way the very sick are, floating a little ways outside of his life. His thermometer says he’s fine. Maybe it’s broken.

He goes to a doctor on Saturday morning. She presses on different parts of his body and asks if it hurts. She tells him to stay hydrated and stay inside and lots of people feel unwell in the heat. She says to come back if he still feels sick in a week. He imagines Owen cocking his head and mimicking the doctor’s jerky way of moving behind her back. He tells Jay that at this rate if he drinks more water he’ll drown. Jay sends the bill to his parents, whom he hasn’t called for a week.

His supervisor hovers behind him and clucks her tongue. She uses his full name, Jaeyong, which nobody calls him except his mother. She sounds disappointed and points at his work. 6/13/2019, 458, 209, 3117. Next line, 6/13/2019, 21, 960, 14, 2827. These are completely different numbers than the ones on the sheet Jay is supposed to be copying from. She asks him where he is coming up with these. He wipes his hands on his slacks and apologizes. She sighs and it pushes hot stale breath up against the back of his neck. In his mind, Owen laughs and blows a thin stream of cool air at the other side of his face.

Jay looks up some card tricks online and practices them surreptitiously at his desk with Owen’s deck. It’s difficult because his fingers are slippery with sweat and he keeps fumbling the cards. The heat keeps getting worse. He has trouble focusing on anything. Owen’s clothes start to develop stains under the arms and on the thighs where he wipes his hands compulsively. Once a day, he lets himself stand in front of the open refrigerator for five full minutes.

He goes back to the doctor after work on Tuesday and she tells him everything is still normal. His body temperature is half a degree above average but that isn’t anything to worry about. She tells him if he continues to experience discomfort it’s likely not physiological. She tells him he should talk to a psychiatrist. Owen makes a mocking face at him from across the room and he has to hide a smile.

He is almost at the end of the diaries. In college Owen studied physics. He auditioned for an a capella group but didn’t get in. He lost his virginity to a closeted boy in a fraternity. He changed his major to chemistry and then back to physics again. He got really drunk for the first time and threw up in his dorm shower. He went on dates with boys who never texted back.

Jay thinks that if he had a chance with Owen he would be better than those boys. He would call and bring flowers and take him on picnics. He imagines that they are on a date right now, Owen reading over his shoulder and holding his hand. Owen’s fingers are longer than his and their knuckles would slot together perfectly. He holds for a second in his mind the feeling of the hand in his but can’t sustain it for long.

* * *

On Wednesday he calls in sick. He is still sweating and somewhere behind his ears his head hurts. It is too hot to read or do card tricks or even hold his phone comfortably. He takes two aspirin before turning the lights off and closing the curtains so he can take off his clothes. After an hour the apartment is still stifling and it feels cut off from the whole world. He has the TV on and sits on the floor on a pillow propped up against the wall.

There are home renovation shows playing all day so he watches those. He likes the way things look when they are torn down to their foundations. He only puts on a pair of boxers once, to open the door for the pizza he has delivered for dinner. When he takes them off again he sees Owen, lounging in the folding chair, raise an eyebrow at him. Jay thinks of something bold he would say in response and is left with the image of Owen’s freckled face stained red with a blush before he fades away.

In the morning Jay’s headache is worse so he takes four aspirin and watches more TV. When he gets so hungry he can’t ignore it anymore he stuffs himself into one of Owen’s t-shirts and a pair of shorts and shuffles down to the store. Walking outside makes him feel strange, like he is moving in a thick bubble and everybody is muffled and distant from him. Frequently he thinks he hears someone saying his name, but every time he turns his head he is just left disoriented. He hurries home with a few bags of chips and salsa and some more frozen meals.

When he gets back to the apartment he sees Owen eating a bowl of Cheerios at the table with the TV on. Jay thought he had turned it off before he left, but he might have forgotten. Jay pulls up the desk chair and watches next to him, thinking up conversations they could have late into the night.

* * *

Jay doesn’t know what time it is. He doesn’t know if he is just waking up from sleep or if he has been awake the whole time just lost in the glare of the TV. He knows it’s day because the sun is blazing through the thick curtain and heating up the room like an oven. His head is pounding and it worsens every time he moves. He realizes that he left the frozen meals out on the counter by the sink all night but microwaves one anyway. He takes a few aspirin, he doesn’t check how many, and thinks about going back to the doctor. The air is so hot and humid it feels wet.

He eats slowly, not paying attention to the show that’s on. His legs and gut feel heavy but his arms are light and buzzing and his head is a mess of pain. It’s still too hot to put on clothes but he is starting to feel self-conscious about his nudity, like his body is somebody else’s.

Jay dries his sweaty hands on a dishtowel, then soaks the towel in cool water and slings it over the back of his neck. The noise from the TV is making his head hurt but he can’t find the remote so he just unplugs it. He sees Owen in the bedroom towelling off his hair like he has just taken a shower. Jay tiptoes in and closes the door behind him. He is dizzy and a steadying hand on the wall doesn’t help because the wall seems to be moving too.

He collapses on the bed and then wishes he hadn’t. The blanket is too warm and his head is ringing from the movement. Owen’s face hovers above his own with a look of concern. The towel he had been wearing around his waist is gone. They are both naked. Jay’s brain feels like it’s about to burst out of his skull. He wants to be alone. He lifts up a hand to brush away the image but it doesn’t disappear. Instead it comes closer until there is a mouth on his, the brush of a tongue against his lips. Curls of red hair falling in his face, gentle hands on his ribcage. His skin burns and his head is fuzzy with pain. All he can feel is Owen’s body pressing down on his, slippery with sweat, the heat and the weight of him.