When I was young I made a game called Egg. I’d sit on the sidewalk and call my sister, “Come look, come look! I am an egg!” or “Oh-no, where did this egg come from?”
First I’d curl my knees up to my chest and put my hands over my head, making muffled chirps. If she was playing along she’d knock on my head. If she was bored, I’d crack myself and burst from my own shell. Then I’d lay down and vibrate. An egg, frying on the sidewalk. Aunt Mary said it once and we thought it was the funniest thing. Ever since then I’d been trying to make her laugh.
Sometimes she wouldn’t come, or she’d sigh and walk away, so I’d lay down and watch the ants, wonder where they were going that was so sure and important, and I’d create lives for them. “Freddie, you get off of Carl. He’s trying to get home to his wife. They’re having pot roast for dinner and a baby in the oven.” I’d lay there until my mother found out and shouted at me that cooking on the ground is unsanitary and if I planned on laying around all day, at least come inside and pick the fuzz off the carpet.
I’d stand up and brush the dirt and pebbles and bugs from myself and caress gently the relief pattern the concrete pressed into my arms. I’d run inside and shout about the terrible skin disease I’d developed and probably we should call the CDC. Once, she’d called my father at work and he’d pretended to be the CDC. Since then she mostly shooed me away or told me to let her know if I started sprouting coarse black worms from the affected area.
***
On my work nights I walk home. I get off the bus, cut through an empty parking lot, and walk two blocks down an unlit street. Tonight, search lights crisscross the clouds, calling me back downtown.
All week, the same guy has been sitting in a third-floor window beside a box fan filtering dense summer air into his room. He watches movies on his computer with his shirt off and all the lights on. It’s so easy to see in, I can’t help but stop to wonder about him, to examine the visible parts of his life. It’s like he lives in a dollhouse.
I know he’s seen me at least once: yesterday, while I was between shadows in the dim edge of a porch light halo. I lifted my hand to wave and he answered.
Tonight, his light is on and the movie is playing, but he’s absent.
“Hey,” he says, from the front steps. He is wearing a white t-shirt.
“Hi.”
“What’re you doing?”
“I just got off work,” I said, looking down at my blue polo and khaki pants. Sometimes I think about showing up to work in blue pants and a khaki shirt, just to see if my manager would laugh. I’d probably have to bring my real clothes, though.
“I think I’ll probably do some writing when I get home.”
“Yeah? What do you write about?” He didn’t sound bored.
“Sex and pervasive melancholy. Mostly,” I said. “What kind of movies do you watch up there?”
Briefly his eyebrows furrowed, like someone had called his name in a roomful of strangers.
“Y’know. Whatever I can find on the internet. Sometimes I video chat my girlfriend.”
“Yeah? Does she live in Colorado or something?”
“Nah, she’s in Uptown.”
“You video chat your girlfriend who lives on the other side of the city?”
“Technology is astounding.”
Now I had a partner. Sometimes he’d come down to fry me on the sidewalk but most nights we’d just wave.
