“It’s awesome that you’ve already got all this furniture here, man.”
Noah slid the glass door open and watched a bright orange pickup creep closer to his apartment. It was heaped with junk.
“Yeah,” Noah said. “I’ve got pretty much everything except beds. Y’all brought beds, right?”
“Kinda.” The wispy hipster shrugged. He was wearing a Hellsing shirt and glasses. He leaned against the brick wall outside Noah’s apartment and motioned for the truck to come nearer the curb.
The truck stopped, and two other guys got out. The driver wore plaid and jeans. He had a beard. He played football. It was his truck. It was his bright, bright orange truck. It rode low.
“Hey, man!” He shot out his hand. “I’m Wilson.”
“Noah. Nice to meet you.”
“I’m Vincent!” the other guy called out. He was crawling around inside the cab trying to find something.”
“Noah!”
“Good to meet you!”
“Same!”
Wilson peered inside, looked over his shoulder at the truck. “So where you want this stuff?”
Noah shrugged. “Anywhere. My room’s around the left corner, but everywhere else is fair game.”
The hipster stepped inside and smiled. He kept his arms folded, of course. His name was Colton.
“This is going to be so third world.”
“Yeah,” Noah said, “and if it doesn’t work out—”
Colton interrupted. “No. I mean I like it.” He drummed his fingers on his arm. “Now which part of the floor am I going to be sleeping on . . .”
Noah went around to the other side of the truck, where Vincent was just wriggling out. He was wearing a coral polo; his hair was immaculately fauxhawked. A torrent of biology and chemistry textbooks spilled out onto the asphalt after him. Noah scooped up an armload and headed inside with him.
“So how do y’all know each other?”
“Highschool,” Vincent said.
“Oh yeah? Where?”
Colton threw down his cot in the corner. “Just this little Christian school in Magnolia.”
Noah stopped what he was doing. “The Gilead School?”
“That’s it,” Wilson said. He was carrying about thirteen different gaming consoles. “Home of the Judges.”
Noah shook his head. “You know Asher Sterne? And Judith Rockwell?”
“Pssh. Yeah. How do you know them? You go there?”
“No,” Noah said. “I’m not from around here. They’re just—acquaintances.”
The four worked in silence for a while. Noah got tasked with stuffing DVDs into his makeshift cinderblock entertainment center. When he came across 300, it triggered a thought.
“Hey, you guys like Zack Snyder, right? You know he’s got a new movie coming out?”
“Frickin GRIMDARK man!” Wilson was euphoric. “That’s going to be so leet.”
Colton looked at the ceiling, ran the numbers. “So 300 was awesome, right?”
“Right.”
“And GRIMDARK‘s in the Warhammer 40,000 universe, right?”
“Right!”
“So that means it’s going to be 133.333333333 times more awesome than 300.”
Vincent sighed. “We were actually planning on going to see it when it opens tomorrow. You want to come?”
“I don’t know,” Noah said. “I definitely want to see it, but it’s hard to tell about my schedule sometimes.”
Noah grunted to his feet and surveyed the room. He nervously spun his wedding ring around his finger. Wilson saw it.
“You married?”
“Um.” Noah breathed; he could feel his hands starting to shake. “Kinda.”
“She here? I mean, if it’s not a good time—if she’s in the shower or whatever—not that I’d—or, you know—we could come back. Or whatever.”
“No,” Noah said. “She’s not here. She left me.”
“That sucks, man.” Vincent had already alphabetized his books. “How long has it—”
“I don’t want to talk about it, alright? Is it okay if we don’t talk about it?”
All at once, jumbled: “Yeah, man, sure, dude, yeah, man, cool.”
“So, uhhhh . . .” Colton fumbled. “So what do you do? Like, for money and stuff?”
Noah snorted. “I deliver pizzas.”
“Sweet! You can get us a special, right?”
Noah managed to smile. “Yeah, I think I could swing that.”
“You got to go in today?”
“Nah. I took off.”
“So you want to hang out?” Wilson brought in a whole crate of ramen. “We’re going to play some D&D tonight, and you could—”
“You had to come right out and say that, didn’t you?” Colton sighed. “Not even give him a chance to think we’re normal?”
“Sorry, guys. Got plans tonight. In fact,” Noah looked at his phone, “I’ve got to be going now. Got an errand or two. Nice to meet y’all. Lock up if you leave.”
Noah exited to a chorus of sure things and yeah dudes. He slid in his car and cranked up NPR till he got sick of it. He switched to local talk until he got sick of it. Then silence. The machine rattled across potholes. He drove down dead ends; he reversed out of them. He idled beneath the shadows of rusted roofs. He watched minutes tick by in the center of abandoned lots.
His was trying to find a lead, but he couldn’t think. When he closed his eyes, he heard her voice; when he kept them open, he saw her naked on their bed. He wondered if Mara had been right. He wondered if he should have talked to the guys about it. But even thinking about that made his stomach punch against his chest.
He felt like time was going faster. All afternoon, there was nothing: a mother in Southtown beating her kid, a cop squirming atop a homeless guy, a fat old prostitute in yellow bike shorts. The only monsters he saw were human.
On the way back, the speedometer never crested 35. Noah felt no need to be anywhere. Tomorrow, he would deliver pizzas to Medicare beneficiaries in tanktops and oxygen masks. Tomorrow, he would ingest a calzone at 1 and excrete a calzone at 6. Tomorrow, he would make change. Tomorrow, he would sit on the couch. Tomorrow, he would sleep, and he didn’t care if he woke up for another one.
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