We’re sitting on the back porch of a hookah lounge when Jack looks up at me, hookah tip in one hand and cigarette in the other, and says, ‘Tell me a story.’

‘A story,’ I repeat. ‘Yeah,’ he says, ‘you’re a writer, aren’t you,’ and I want to say yeah and you’re a painter, paint me a painting, and then stick out the backs of my palms so he can paint it right on me, but I know he’s right, a writer should have a story to tell. I lick my lips, take a sip of the Smirnoff Ice he bought me, unironically. I stall. ‘Once upon a—’

He grimaces. ‘No, not like that.’ I raise an eyebrow. See at this moment I think I’m past the phase where I let men act like they can teach me a lesson but I’m not, I’m not there yet, I just think I am and that’s somehow more dangerous, somehow worse, like a lamb that sees a wolf and thinks she knows what a friendly one looks like.

‘Tell me a story from real life,’ he says, leaning back into his chair, and I’m surprised because up until this moment he’s wanted to know as little as possible, it absolves his guilt, you see, it keeps him clean, keeps him free, if he doesn’t know about what I’ve given up to be here, at this dingy little bar sitting next to a broken heat lamp on a freezing night in November he can take care of the 20 quid bar tab like that’s all there is, like there are no consequences to be paid.

A story from life, I’m thinking, well Christ, because this was the season I started thinking about people’s lives like strands of spaghetti, all twisted noodles overlapping, no longer the nice mountain peaks your high school English teacher drew on the chalkboard next to the words climax and denouement but instead something sloppy and doused in sauce, and now he’s asking me to pull out a strand, tell him how I’ve lived. And have I?

Well it’s funny because when I go home to the mess that I have made people will comfort me by saying at least you got a story out of it. They will listen, wide-eyed, to the narrative I piece together that validates my hard-earned recklessness but what I carry will not be something cohesive and melancholy, what I carry will be moments, moments like this one, as he gets up to switch out the coals and I realize we’ve been sitting next to a river the whole night, and like that the geography of the evening unfolds below me like I’m a bird caught on an upwind and the formation I’ve been a part of lies below me now and there’s no story there, just the beating of wings carrying the night to some unseen, intuitive destination in the dark.

Shoot the bird back down from the sky. ‘Tell me a story,’ Jack is saying and I should say, No, let me keep this one for someone who doesn’t ask, let me whisper it like a gift, not a performance, not a reply to a command. But instead I begin.

‘There’s this man and he has so much stuff,’ I say, ‘So much crap he’s acquired through years of living — books and watches and dress pants and dog food, and a wife and three children and a car that’s all paid for, one house then two houses, I guess you’d call the second one a cabin, but still. And more and more the things he’s acquiring are things he can’t throw away because they’re bigger than him, physically bigger, heavier. And the man gets scared, he starts waking up in the middle of the night from these panic attacks where he feels like he can’t breathe, like there’s a house on his chest, and when he wakes he sees it’s just his wife’s hand but the weight’s still there like everything you ever put in a storage locker dumped right down from above. And then one late late night he wakes like this but it’s not the weight this time, it’s the doorbell, and he slides out of the bed, right, he rushes across the carpet and down the stairs and when he gets to the door of his big brick house there’s no one there. Huff and puff and blow this house down, he says to no one in particular as he shuts the door, locks it, and heads back up the stairs.’

At this point, Jack’s just staring at me, enthralled because he doesn’t realize I’m just telling him his life in reverse. ‘And then what.’ It’s not a question, it’s a statement.

‘Alright,’ I say, ‘And then he goes upstairs and suddenly it hits him. He’s not safe here. He’s never been safe here. So he puts on dress shoes, just with his pajamas, and he wakes his wife and says Sweetheart we gotta get out of here, and he wakes the kids and he stuffs them into one of the four cars in the driveway, and he leaves the front door open and they drive out, out, and when they’re on the highway he steps on the gas with his left foot and rips the shoe off of his right and tosses it out the sunroof, and the youngest kid is crying but his wife is silent and he rips off the left shoe and throws it up above too, and they’re booking it, just racing into the night on this island that’s a country, going straight East because that’s fastest, and when they reach the end of the land, the wife has tears just streaming down her cheeks and two of the kids are screaming bloody murder, pulling each other’s white blonde hair, and they all think it’s the end, even the man himself thinks This is it.’

I stop there, for a breath. Smoky air. Stories. What good do they do you. I just want to know where I arrive. But there’s Jack across the table, grinning like a child in a dirty sandbox who’s found a doll that speaks when you squeeze its belly and I’m not me now, then. I’m going on my run-ons with the conviction of strong emotion or the nearness of death by secondhand smoke, Pull the string again, Jack, I’ll give you stories for days, and I go on.

‘But then he stops the car. Right there up at the edge of the country he’s never left he stops. And he opens the car door and walks down the dunes and up to the water where he spent summers as a boy and he crouches down and falls over right there on the beach, and he lies there curled up trying to find some thread that will bring him back into the linear sense of his life but all he’s got are these fragments that he can’t piece back together.’

Jack’s staring at me.

‘The end,’ I say, and I’m lying but Jack doesn’t care, he’s reaching out for the bill, he wants to get out of here.

And this is what you get in life. Not stories. Just— nights. The smack of cold air between the moment you exit the taxi and step into the apartment. The feel of grape skin stuck to the backs of your teeth. The echo of water running out the tap in the room next door. The look of a window that’s dirty from the outside in. Not touch itself, but the moments right before. You don’t get narratives, you get the uncanny sheen of cheap polished wood, you get the cobweb caught across the lampshade, swept up in one hand and dropped in the wastebasket lined with an orange plastic bag. The glow of tiny screens, the bookshelf full of borrowed things, and the tone of voice a doomed man takes when he says, You make me feel less alone. The color of morning when it comes too soon, the brightness of noon when you try to will it away. If you think you get to keep the sex or the man, you’re wrong, it makes for a good story but you’re making it up in memory as you go along.

What you keep is just what frames them. The nearly-bare tree with arms like a grandmother’s fingers and tiny delicate red fruit like baubles filled with poison, lazy poison that would just slow your gait for a few weeks before taking you down some idle early Wednesday afternoon, that hour when no one ever knows what to do. The taste of the 4:50 a.m. sky while you’re waiting for the bus to Heathrow, gut empty for lack of goodbyes the last moment you ever expect to get one because after this you won’t, anymore.

And it’s only much, much later, that I realize the closure I will seek for years is laying there right before me on the table. Jack’s hands are shaking. Trembling.

Yes the whole time, the whole time Jack’s hands were vibrating, quivering like he was hungry, real hungry, like he was a man who hadn’t eaten in days, like the food he needed was somewhere deep deep inside me where he could never reach, like my kidney, or my youth, or all the places I would go, long after the man pulls his body up off the beach, pushes the sand off his heels and walks to the car, kisses his wife on the cheek and kids on the forehead, and drives, back across the coast, even-breathed, backlit by dawn.