It was autumn, or late summer. She existed more than half her waking life in the coat-room she called home. At this palace of a department store—she, the coat-check girl, I, the elevator guy. It was a long time ago. We didn’t see ourselves as past due or endangered, maybe couldn’t see beyond the stomach-aches and migraines born of a gnawing and nameless unease. If questions became us, in the way plague claims a hand or foot, we remained answerless in our stupefaction, entropic automatons clocking in each day with a punch and a smile. Inside I was dying slowly. Perhaps that’s why I approached her. My memory of that encounter is vividly olfactory—her rosewater perfume commingled with filmy workingclass sweat, compelling me to breach the sanctum of her coat-room, whereupon I delivered a truly terrible elevator pun about going down, which, much to my surprise, delighted her, and next thing I knew we were

clothes torn skin rented

fucking.

We fucked with the world-ending rhythm of two people who were poor and knew that they’d always be poor. We fucked with clawing vicegrip intimacy, third-class citizens whose visions of richness would remain a glossy mirage and wasted syringe discarded at the edge of a postcard calling to us from a sanitized distance. Amidst a bleating orgy of Technicolor saturation, we screwed the blues into and out of us. Also, we became instant credit and expedient loans for each other’s defaulting, high-interest loneliness. Why did we do this only once? Did we ever talk about what we had done? Did we ever speak to each other again? I can’t say. Memory no longer serves me. Only fiction, and even that is beginning to lose its grip. Lately, though, I find myself returning to that time, and wondering what became of her, but then this line of speculation leads to an even louder question, echoing in a small room—What became of me?