It was impressive how articulate he could be even when he was stoned out of his mind.
“More or less?” he asked in a prog metal voice.
I laughed. “You’re so washed, dude.”
“More or less, Harp?”
“More,” I said. “For sure. More.”
“Way more.”
“Way.”
That’s what I was thinking about when I finally got up the nerve to kiss October. Cal and his concept of more.
It happened at work, at the beginning of what was supposed to be a long night shoot.
October and I had gone on one more dinner date that week, though it was to Super Duper for burgers and shakes, which we got to go and ate on the swings in Old Mill Park because October was in one of her moods where she didn’t feel like being around people. We’d fallen into the habit of sending flirty texts back and forth before bed, but I hadn’t touched her yet. I wanted to. And I could feel a tacit, palpable desire buzzing between us like a delay pedal on an endless feedback loop whenever I got within a two-foot radius of her. But she’d put the ball in my court, and that meant she had to wait for me to get my head out of my ass.
On Wednesday, October announced that Thursday’s selfie would consist of me filming her entire night’s sleep. She planned on condensing that into a four-minute video, on top of which she would overlay carefully selected words and phrases about time and death.
“And could you make the set look like a hospital room?”
She wanted it simple: just a bed, some medical equipment on the side, which I rented, and a working clock on the wall. “The biggest clock you can find so the numbers are visible above the bed.”
She gave me the next day off to rest so that I wasn’t too tired to man the camera for six hours that night, and she filmed and uploaded a selfie on her own that afternoon.
We reconvened late Thursday evening. October showed up in a hospital gown with a pair of white silk pajama pants underneath. Her hair was wet from a shower.
“Are you really going to be able to fall asleep with a camera running and a strange man staring at you?”
“I can fall asleep any place and under any circumstance.” She sat up against the headboard and pulled the covers up to her chest like she was cold. “Last year, Chris and I took my parents to see Bruce Springsteen at Madison Square Garden. We had seats in the first row, and about two hours in I fell asleep.” She bit her lip and chuckled. “To be fair, I was jetlagged. I’d flown in from an exhibit in London that morning. But the worst part of this story is that Bruce actually saw me sleeping, and in between songs he looked down at Chris and said, ‘Am I boring your date?’ to which Chris said, “Sorry, Boss. That appears to be the case.”
“That’s pretty funny,” I said, though the ease with which she spoke to me about Chris made me uncomfortable.
“Mortifying is more like it.” She shook her head as if clearing it of unnecessary debris. “OK. Less talking, more sleeping. Let’s do this.”
I checked the levels on the camera, gave her a thumbs-up, and pushed “Record.”
She slid down into the bed, turned onto her side, and closed her eyes.
Less than a minute later she flipped onto her back, lay there for another few minutes, and sighed. “Remember when I said I could sleep anywhere? That only works if I’m actually tired.”
As a joke I said, “Here, maybe this will help,” and I played “Dancing in the Dark” on my phone. That cracked her up, which, in turn, cracked me up. After that we tried to right ourselves back into work mode, but we couldn’t. October would settle back down, and I would stifle a laugh; then I would settle, and she would laugh. Finally she threw a pillow at me and said, “You’re ruining this selfie!” But she wasn’t mad, she was being playful. And right then I had a sense I was going to remember the night in some meaningful way for a long time.
I handed her back the pillow and she said, “What time is it?”
I looked at the clock above her head—it was one of those big digital ones you’d imagine a fancy advertising agency or the NYSE might’ve had on the wall in the 1980s. I’d found it in a consignment shop in San Anselmo.
“11:09.”
She sat up against the headboard again and said, “Tell me when it’s 11:11 so I can make a wish.”
I waited until it was 11:11 and said, “It’s 11:11.”
She closed her eyes, presumably made a wish, then opened them and looked at me in a way that tugged at my body.
I imagined Cal’s voice in my head: More or less, Harp?
I asked her what she’d wished for and she said, “If I tell you it won’t come true.”
We looked at each other some more.
“Now what?” I said.
“Well, since you derailed the work, it’s your responsibility to come up with something that makes up for it. This night can’t be a total bust.”
More or less, Harp?
I shut off the camera and the lights. The only illumination in the room was the soft glimmer coming from a floor lamp near the front of the studio and the weird red glow of the large digital clock above our heads.
I walked toward the bed, watching
