Natalie locked eyes with her computer. She was at work and the early afternoon was trudging forward, nearing the hour when she started longing for flashy smiles and saturated photos. Tinder Online hovered next to a lineup of tabs that composed the contents of her boss’s life: a colonoscopy appointment, a conference at the Marriott on Broadway, a meeting with his divorce attorney, and several potential birthday gifts for his adult son. As Thorter Chase–he asked everyone to call him Thorn–approached Natalie’s desk, she relished three seconds of eye contact with a freckled banker looking for something “short term,” and forced herself to tabulate over to her boss’s burgeoning Amazon cart.
“Hey, Nat.” He leaned over her desk, training a lazy stare on her clavicle.
She raised a vigilant eyebrow.
“It’s 2:30.”
She cocked her chin.
“Coffee.”
“Right!”
Natalie stood and shuffled toward the lounge. She could hear the subtle croak of her boss’s dress shoes as he turned towards her.
“Nat,” he said.
“Yes?”
“Remind me again when my procedure is.”
“Friday, eight in the morning,” she said, still facing the doorway. He walked behind her, placed a hand on the small of her back, and filled the air in front of them with a broad, sour breath.
“Listen, I’m thinking I’ll be a little out of commission on Thursday. Why don’t you take the day off.”
“Oh, sure. Thanks, Thorn,” she said, thinking of something “short term” as she slid away.
A coffee pot hummed inside; a siren yodeled outside. By the time Natalie was refilling Thorn’s mug, he was seated, silent, and busy. She was steadying her wrist and looking at a picture. She’d seen it on Thorn’s desk before, but only in the way one sees an old building to be razed for new construction: once it’s gone, you can’t remember what was there before. The thrill of her impending day off rendered her surroundings novel, and she was seeing that blonde teenager next to a spritely version of his father, her boss, for the first time. Natalie took it in: Thorn’s diminished beer belly; his eyes, a slightly less sleuthing, more friendly blue than today; his arm, naked of its usual sport coat, around his lanky son, who stood lazily, contrapposto style, his sun-blonde swoosh like lemon zest on top of a mechanical head.
Between making copies, altering lunch reservations, putting in salad orders, filling in spreadsheet cells, Natalie endured the unwelcome quips of the office with a keen sense of balance. She was passive enough not to cause disruption but engaged enough to feign cheer. It was a boring game, and added nothing to her young adulthood, a period which Natalie believed had to be volatile to be interesting. She had been a skinny child with a passion for pink pants. In high school, she nursed a tic that involved scratching a squiggly line, over and over, into her right thumb. She kicked this habit while studying English at a small women’s college surrounded by mulch and trees, taking up smoking instead. She kicked that habit when the iPhone dropped. Between the hours of nine and five, Natalie found great fulfillment in pittering among cubicles of clean-shaven, statistical men. And yet, when she tacked up her eyeballs on the fluorescent ceiling, she saw a rat in a maze, and craved the kind of wild precarity that only exists on the mobile, gorgeous, scary Internet.
Mostly she met them on Tinder. Or Hinge. Bumble, sometimes. Some had long stringy hair and stony toenails. Others, coffee-stained teeth and stretch marks between tattooed ribs. Some had hiked the Appalachian trail alone in dead winter; others had been homeless. One made jewelry. One brewed his own beer. Another grew shrooms in a row of old Timberland boots. They stayed as long as Natalie was interested. Then, when she felt an itch scratched and sensed a slightly more testing, more excellent world open up, she left them strewn where they came from – on stoops, in basements, with their tongues flying out of the windows of humid, crowded cars. And she got back to her Jane Austen, devouring teatime rendezvous and English manners with hungry green eyes.
Her swiping was formulaic. As the ratio of inked to bare skin–the share of pierced to unblemished–increased, so did her interest. She wasn’t attracted to them, necessarily. She was interested in the way they altered their bodies to mark moments in their lives they deemed significant. She wanted to inhibit these moments, usurp these memories as hers, and enliven her coffee-spreadsheet-cream-filled days with other lives. Max had three eyebrow piercings on one side, an asymmetry Natalie found unsettling and delicious. His tattoos started below his jaw and traveled in hearts and rivulets down to his clavicle. He liked car-racing and oak trees. He was nearly perfect.
The first night they hung out, Max came over to Natalie’s apartment. He said he didn’t like public spaces and wanted to meet her cat. He talked on her living room floor. This lady on the subway, that bully in elementary school, this guy walking a lizard in Washington Square Park. Trifles. Just fluff around the substance Natalie knew would surface.
She tried to figure out what that meat was without asking too many questions. It was a game of deduction that started with the obvious: there was something metallic about Max. He gave Natalie the impression that he was teeming with copper, like if he opened his mouth and blew, the room would smell like pennies. It was a subtle deviation, but it had to signal some kind of deeper vice (they all had one). She saw it in the way Max’s eyes flickered to the side when she talked about herself, not like he was ignoring her but rather like he had something very important and time-sensitive to get to, and he was trying hard to stay engaged.
One day he jumped up from the couch, mid-sentence, cranked her kitchen window open and stuck his head out. He opened his mouth and panted like the humidity would smother him otherwise. Then he jumped back on the couch and resumed his sentence like nothing had happened. Another time, he dove for the nearest outlet and pressed his ear against it, positioning his body in a feline contortion on the floor so his head was upright. Sometimes, Max would kind of shake his head around and his extremities would twitch. He’d look relieved and freshly focused on Natalie. Particularly touching was the smell of burning hair. Natalie walked into the kitchen to find Max leaned over, his torso still facing her but curving like the branch of an umbrella pine—with his head in the stove. He barely had hair, just a slightly grown-out buzz, but he was combing through his wire-straight strands with his fingers, positioning each one in the orange tip of the blue flame, so that his fingernails and scalp were dangerously close to the fire. When he saw Natalie standing taxidermy-stiff in the doorway, Max restored himself to an upright, room temperature position, a cluster of hairs curling like dying embers on the top of his head, so that his blonde hair was really glowing. Natalie felt a rare pang of tenderness, something close to ecstasy and not far from madness, the kind of thing that had to be kept from swelling and taking hold.
They’d spent a couple days together when the gifts started coming. They were made in Taiwan or Bangladesh or China. They were usually at least 85% polyester. Denim skirts, halter tops, and the occasional button down arrived in droves. Max didn’t expect her to wear any of it. He liked cramming items into her four dresser drawers, seeing the mass accumulate, gradually changing in color and shape. He would step back after a new delivery and admire her ever-amassing piles, looking not stressed, not claustrophobic, but visibly and positively satisfied. To make room, Natalie had to leave her drawers open so that clothes could creep above the edges and over the sides. She made her adjustments. She liked watching his cycles of compulsion and satisfaction. Twitch-buy-deliver-smile. It was a fine arrangement.
After two weeks, Natalie and Max had watched fifteen movies, eaten twelve ramen cups and sixteen pop tarts, finished two dozen beers, and shared no more than six personal anecdotes each. Max had tweezed out half of his left eyebrow, flipped the light-switch on-and-off, in spurts, a total of one-thousand-and-forty times, and urinated down Natalie’s laundry chute (in discretion) twice. Natalie had gotten rid of one spare duvet to make room for seventy-three new articles of clothing she would never wear. It was under these statistical conditions that Max abruptly stopped coming by.
Natalie called him twice and gave up. They never hung out outside of her apartment, so she didn’t know where to look for him, if she really cared to find him. She never asked about where he lived, where he went in his free time, what he did for work. She knew he played pickup basketball. That didn’t narrow things down. Natalie figured it didn’t count as ghosting if she gave up looking for him. She decided to take a hiatus, maybe get back on the apps when she got bored thinking of Max’s antics and felt starved of material. For the moment he was still orchestrating a dying circus in her brain. He would skate upside-down when she poured coffee and slither between walls when she merged spreadsheet cells. When she fell asleep, he bounced around like a pinball in a hollow rib cage, slowing down but still smoothing bones, fumigating the negative space.
A few days later, at work, Natalie was thinking about the nervous way Max would enter her apartment and fold his legs under him before sitting down, all in one swift origami motion. Each day since he left, his photo on Thorn’s desk sparkled more with the shine of familiarity. It asserted itself; it threatened to turn Natalie’s stomach upside down if only her powers of denial weren’t so strong. Thorn blabbed on the phone behind her as Natalie stared out the window, waiting for her cue to pour her boss’s afternoon cup. She saw a parasol hovering above the sidewalk, floating northward, a baby spouting tears into the sunshine, a shrinking woman swinging a bag of tangerines, and a blonde head whipping past it all. The bright dot drew a sunny tattoo along the city’s narrow torso, from its bellybutton to its Adam’s apple. Colors jumped from either side of the dusty orb. Purple, blue, and yellow fabrics, translucent tights, and sequin-covered things trailed behind, some floating, abandoned, into the dirty wind, others settling into grates. More clothes emerged as the blonde head accelerated, disappearing into pollution and crowds. Natalie leaned forward and followed the runner as long as she could down Fifth Ave, almost yearning to chase after him. Her right arm, previously sustaining the coffee-pot with a devoted grip, swung sideways and her wrist slackened. Natalie heard Thorn swivel in his chair and open his mouth.
“Natalie,” he said, a muffled voice still droning on from the phone.
“Yes?” she said, smelling the burnt steam of the coffee as it spattered the green-brown carpet.