“Zachary – take Erin home.”
It was Lou’s voice.
Erin woke up, disoriented, foggy. How long was she out? Did she actually just have some sort of narcoleptic episode in a bar? Why were her glasses off? She grappled for them, in a looking-glass world. It must be after last call. The lights were on, only a couple of stragglers left. Erin was piercingly embarrassed.
“Z, why didn’t you wake me?”
“‘Cause I didn’t feel like it.”
“How long did I sleep?”
“I don’t know … half an hour? 45 minutes? Who cares, Erin. Who cares how long it was?”
Erin felt like it was very bad manners to fall asleep in a bar. People might think she was a homeless person. Or terribly drunk. Her mother would be mortified. Molly would be pissed. Now, more than ever, she was “that girl”.
Another stern command from Lou: “Z, take our little lady home. She needs to be in bed.”
Zachary stood up. “Let’s go.” Erin didn’t know where she was, when she was, who she was. So Zachary helped her. “Come on now, crazy girl. Let’s get you home.” Helping her off the stool, picking up her wallet, her cigarettes, handing it all to her.
Zack was never solicitous like this. His manly touch on her back, guiding her out of Compton’s. He seemed changed to her. Or maybe it was she who was changed. It worried her. Confirmation of the broken thing. He saw it better than she did. That’s what it meant to her when he held open the door for her, letting her go through first.
A soft rain was now falling. Zachary felt the drops on his face and gushed excitedly, “Awesome! Hope it’s still coming down tomorrow so I can try my new wipers.”
Erin had never said to Zack, “Oh, I just love how you are so into and enraptured by ‘things’.” It seemed like such an odd thing to love about someone, and also she didn’t want him to get self-conscious about the “things thing”. Talking about it would have killed it. And so it was her little secret. She took note of when he did it, and filed it away happily. And now, raindrops on her face, she located the “Zack and his Things” folder and catalogued the windshield-wiper moment. For safekeeping. But it was an awful ritual suddenly. She wanted to turn to him, take his face in her hands and say, open, “You love ‘things’. I’ve never met someone who loves ‘things’ like you do. I love this about you.”
The spell might then be broken. Or maybe the spell was already broken. She no longer trusted herself. She couldn’t tell the difference between tenderness and pity. Zachary looked at her brokenness with tenderness. He had from the beginning. She looked at his brokenness with pity. And he had known this all along.
They headed through the rain to Zack’s walk-up beside the EL tracks five blocks away. Chicago was asleep. The only sounds in the night were their footsteps and the rainfall. Erin forced herself to focus only on Zack’s cool white sheets waiting for her, her head on his pillows.
Halfway in between Compton’s and Zack’s was St. Mary’s, a big brick Catholic church, surrounded by black wrought-iron gates, a jungly lawn flourishing within, bushes crowding the paths, flowers falling over each other in profusion. Stone benches hidden in the tangled abundant green. As they passed, Erin peered through the gates at the dripping black leaves. A statue of Mary stood in a niche by the wall, softly lit in blue. Mary had her hands out, palms open and facing up, her eyes lowered. The expression on Mary’s face brushed over Erin’s heart, and stopped her in her tracks. She moved away from Zack and pressed her face up against the wet gate. Zack stopped. Erin could feel his dark shape hovering next to her, patient.
Rain fell on Mary’s blue stone face, trickling down. Now there was true tenderness.
“She looks like she’s crying, doesn’t she?” Erin asked.
Zack’s hands reached out and uncurled Erin’s fingers from the gate. He gently pulled on her. “Come on, nutso. Let’s go.”
They walked again, holding hands – a rare event in the world of Erin and Z. A random car passed them in the night and Erin clutched onto Z’s fingers. He looked down at her, with no expression on his face. Pieces of Zack had always been slightly hidden from her. That had been part of her fascination with him. Until now.
“What?” Zack asked.
“I’m sorry about your legs, Zack. I know you don’t want me to be, but I am.”
Zack sighed, and didn’t speak for half a block. Then he said, beleaguered, grumpy, “I’m walkin’, ain’t I?”
Zack shook off the gloom, broke away from her, stalked out into the empty street, and hollered, “I’M WALKIN’ HERE!” It was so loud Erin half-expected lights to come on in apartment windows. Zack screamed again, “I’M WALKIN’ HERE!” and threw a laughing glance at her, stepping back up onto the curb. “Member that? Midnight Cowboy? So fucking great.”
“Yeah. I remember.”
She held out her hand to him again, but he didn’t notice. He informed her quickly, “A velociraptor can get up to forty miles per hour.” And then he was off, a fierce marauding beast, racing down the sidewalk, stopping randomly to peer through the windows of parked cars, bolting behind trees and popping out at her voraciously as she approached. He flew all the way to the end of the block and all the way back in what felt like five seconds. He definitely was approaching forty miles an hour. The velociraptor would race back to her side, jam its face up against hers, and glare manically into her eyeballs. Looking for what she had no idea. Then it would gallop away again.
He needed her to laugh.
So she did.
Zack would snap back into his own form for a second or two, and give her little-known facts about velociraptors (“The velociraptors traveled in packs.” “They had great vision.”), and then he immediately would dinosaur-ize again, and caterwaul like a lunatic down the street. The velociraptor careened into the alley behind Z’s walk-up. Erin and Zachary always used the staircase on the back of the building to get to his apartment. Erin reached the bottom of the stairs, only to find a panting grunting dinosaur lying in wait for her.
She felt increasingly disconnected from him. It was terrible.
As she watched, the velociraptor lit a cigarette. Erin wondered if Zack would ever congeal back into himself. She also wondered if this would be the last dinosaur she would ever see.
The velociraptor began to harass her, in a tough-guy voice, cigarette dangling. “You wanna fuck me tonight, bitch? Huh? Huh? Do I turn you on, bitch?” It casually leaned on the stair railing beside her, taking a long sexy drag of smoke, and blowing it into her face. “Come on, bitch. I know you want me,” it leered.
“Zachary,” Erin said. “Snap out of it.”
Her tone jolted Zack; he looked at her with startled human eyes, and burst into a laugh. Laughing at himself. Erin couldn’t laugh. He leaned over and kissed her, a man again.
