Fellow Travelers

by Thomas Mallon

When he got to I Street, his head off-kilter from the old-fashioneds, Tim looked up and saw that the apartment was dark. He wondered if he should sit on the steps and wait until Hawk returned with some weeknight conquest. For a few minutes he stood on the sidewalk, trying to decide, until he felt an enormous, unexpected surge of anger. In his mind’s eye, Hawk was bobbing atop the clean blue ocean in his pressed naval uniform, while he himself was being dragged to its weed-choked depths. Drunk as he was, he could feel the hint of autumn in the air. A “School’s Open Drive Carefully” poster flapped against the streetlamp. NO DANCING. NO CARRYING DRINKS. He walked up the building’s steps and, once inside the vestibule, took down the super’s posted instruction that tenants keep their new air conditioners pitched at a five-degree angle toward the street; drips were damaging rugs and seeping into floorboards. On the back of the paper, he wrote a note to leave in Hawkins’ mail slot: You said knowledge is insurance. Against what? The chance that somebody might turn out to be what he appears to be? That somebody might not own somebody else? I’ll never own you, no matter how many times I hum “You Belong to Me” in the shower. But I belong to you—whether you like it or not. After the cab ride, he had no money for even the streetcar. And so he walked all the way home, miles, wishing he could sing in his chains like the sea.