His heart exploding like a hand grenade, Terah stood stock-still with Mich’s hand clapped tightly over his mouth. Someone else was coming in. Flashlight off, they stood motionless in the dark at the head of the stairs. The route to get to them was labyrinthine, but the knowledge that someone—who they had no way of knowing—was freely wandering inside with no time limit brewed an undertone of terror. How long can a person remain silent? Terah could hear the gurgling of his intestines. He had to pee in the worst possible way and hadn’t asked about how Mich ordered this particular part of his house.
Even if he were wanted, Terah reasoned, the authorities would take considerable time tracing him here. He’d accepted a ride or two, and his scent would be broken. He doubted they’d even made the connection between him and Stanton Station yet. Any homeless person could’ve started that fire, and if there was a natural resource not in short supply it was the homeless.
The intruder could be another homeless person looking for shelter. It could be a teen looking for a thrill. Vaguely aware that it was January, Terah had no idea of the day of the week without the activities of those around him for a clue. If it was a weekend, the interloper could take all day to scuttle about his new home. Mich’s hand smelled of wood fire and loam, an honest scent, earned naturally. The hand slowly came away. In the dark their ears strained for some indication of the stranger’s location. Closer? Further? How could you tell when they left—surely they didn’t think to close the door politely. Echoes of footsteps on gritty concrete hung in the air. Objects being moved around carelessly. Someone searching for treasure in a wasteland.
Time crept like a spider hanging languorously on her web. The dark felt as leathery as a bat’s wing wrapped around its rodent torso. Breaths were shallow and tasted of fear. Terah really had to urinate. Smells and sounds amplified by lack of light, he simply couldn’t let it go. January with piss-soaked underclothes and pants prevented him, but he couldn’t hold it much longer. What would this young man inches away do if he slid down his zipper in this ichor? How would such a sound be taken? My house, my rules?
The homeless were practical about piss. Discrete, but practical. If you didn’t have a home or office with a designated porcelain target, you found a secluded corner. Terah’s fingers were on his zipper tab, something had to give. If they were close enough to a wall, he could prevent the splashing sound of a cascade down the stairs, but he simply couldn’t wait any longer. Before Mich could react, he ripped the zipper down and fumbled his penis out. The sound of all that urine was impossibly loud and the outside sounds stopped when Terah’s began—but the relief! The relief made up for the danger. He peed forever. Just when he thought he’d finish up, he found yet more moisture to expel. Owner of a bashful bladder, if lights had been on he’d never have been able to perform this feat so close to another guy. The scent of his unwashed genitals mixed with the ammonia of biology’s waste as Mich stood by as silent as a ghost.
Was his benefactor angry? Terrified? Stunned? Terah gave a vigorous shake, which at least was silent and the slow zipper pull made only the slightest whisper. He reached out to pat Mich apologetically. His hand met empty air. Where had he gone? The kid moved as silently as a—he wasn’t, was he? The couple making love may have been ghosts Surely not Mich. He’d eaten a granola bar. Put his hand over Terah’s mouth only moments ago. Had an earthy, physical scent. But where had he gone? Down the stairs in the dark? Away from the bladder prisoner who’d given away their location? Out to investigate?
How weak it felt to be a visual creature left with underdeveloped hearing and olfactory abilities. If you could taste this blackness it would be like ipecac, but that was no way to navigate. He knew better than to piss in a stranger’s basement stair. Especially when he was standing right next to you. It’d been a genuine emergency. How to explain that without speaking? And now Mich was gone. He couldn’t scent him out. He heard feet in the distance, but wasn’t sure of whose they were.
In the dark, now smelling his urine, Terah’s thoughts returned to Danielle. Reporting a found body, he knew, was the law. It would’ve been the right thing to do, and he had cared for her. Reporting it would also immediately cast suspicion on the finder. Finders keepers. He knew the circumstances looked bad for him. He thought he might love her, but he still had little personal experience by which to gauge such things. He feared loneliness. Death was better than that. Danielle knew he was a professor just as much as he knew she was a student. And professors were aware that they actually knew less than their charges. The law said otherwise, but what did the law know? The more you learned the less you knew. The older you became less certain you were of anything. Everyone who thinks knows that. Why did the law assume that if you were older you’d know more?
Danielle had taken his class introducing world religions. Nobody specialized in world religions, of course, but adjuncts often picked up work by knowing little enough about lots of things. He’d met another adjunct who was teaching classical mythology although he’d only taken one course in it as an undergrad. This they called higher education? As long as the university didn’t have to pay benefits, who’s counting? Anyway, Danielle knew about chemistry. She recognized it when she saw it. And felt it.
For his part, Terah had read enough cheap novels to know the trope was hackneyed. He also knew that hackneyed wasn’t the same as untrue. Although Terah had been a first gener—a few academics, especially those fortunate enough to have been born minorities, were also first geners—his maternal grandfather had taught school without a college degree. Those were simpler times. Grandpa’d fallen in love with and married a student who happened to carry the womb that would receive Terah’s mother, herself a high school drop-out. If student-teacher couplings didn’t take place Terah would’ve never been born, an existential crisis of the highest order. Not only that, but Danielle had resulted from a similar union of teacher and student cum couple. And society would blame two such misfits coming together?
Danielle followed world religions with ancient Near Eastern religions to fill a gen ed requirement. That gen ed was to learn Prof. Economy’s personal likes. She read his blog. She ordered his dissertation on interlibrary loan. She studied her chemistry. She stayed after class to ask questions.
Terah had been a lonely adjunct, living in a studio apartment crammed with books. New Brunswick wasn’t exactly what he’d pictured from all the ads he read in comic books as a kid. He knew all kinds of cheap shit was available for mail order from New Brunswick, New Jersey. Now that he lived here he knew nothing was cheap in Jersey. His address was easily found online. When someone knocks at your door, you open it.
A sudden crash. Terah jumped, and without Mich to help him, actually yelped. The intruder had to have heard that. He waited in the blackness to be discovered in the ominous silence that followed.
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