Page 113 of Two Marlboros

“A walk? Where?”

“I don’t know. Around here.”

I nodded and he replied with a sketchy smile, barely illuminated by the streetlight in front of the house.

I said nothing.

I did not smile.

I simply followed him.

We stopped at a mini market to buy a couple of beers and walked for quite some time without saying anything. I wondered if this was his idea of a walk, but I didn’t want to feel compelled to say anything. Alan didn’t seem upset, so I stayed in my muteness, cozier than usual.

The beer was good. Alan must have thought so, too, since he drank it with gusto.

There was a full moon that night. The sky was clear enough to admire it in its entirety, and I paused for a moment to observe its few irregularities that we were allowed to see. The full moon, in general, was a sight that fascinated me, but that night it seemed to me to be just a pitted cluster in the sky.

I returned my gaze to the road and so did Alan, who had stopped to look at the sky with me. He made no comment about the moon, and we continued walking side by side, silent, the silence broken by the puffs we took after drinking a little from the can.

Eventually, I stopped, and he did with me.

“What exactly are we doing?” I asked.

He smiled at me. He always smiled at me, as if he wanted to reassure me every time.

“I’m following your rhythm. If you don’t feel like talking right now, that’s fine.”

“Then why don’t you leave me alone?”

Alan thought about it for a moment. “I don’t think you want to be alone.”

My mind was a tangle of thoughts and images. There was Ryan spitting out coke eggs, there was me and Alan under the parking lot, and, out of nowhere, there came the image of Alancaressing my legs, sitting on his couch. It had been a very intimate gesture, perhaps even more than a kiss.

We started walking again, with the sound of our footsteps on the asphalt and the sound of wheels speeding down the main road. If we happened to meet any couples, they would immediately shut up the moment they passed us.

It was just me, him, the beer and our footsteps, which led us down a tree-lined avenue. The plane trees, towering and majestic, seemed to greet us with a bow.

“Can I ask you a question?” I asked.

As I waited for an answer, we sat on a bench that lined the entrance to a park. In the background, I could hear the chirping of crickets, although I wasn’t sure. I liked to think they were there.

“Sure, tell me.”

“I noticed that you look at me sometimes, you know? I wanted to know what you think about in those moments.”

The echo of my words faded away to make space to the muffled sound of car horns. All around, silence.

“Do I look at you?”

“Yes.”

The moonlight became less intense. It now had more defined contours. The park was silent. Maybe someone was there getting high, but not where we were. Maybe Ryan was there, too.

“I apologize. I don’t think bad things about you, if that’s what you wanted to know.”

Well, not really. At that moment I would have liked to hear anything else. But Alan would never have done that, too caught up as he was in violating a social convention: you don’t stare at people. It made me smile that it might have been one of his main thoughts. He was such a nice guy.

There was a bird hiding in the trees. There was the fountain, in the middle of the meadow, spraying water. None of these things managed to give me any emotion.

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