B<\/span>egin with this: You have never been to Cedar Rapids. When anyone heads your way from Milwaukee or St. Paul or Madison for whatever reason, Cedar Rapids will most likely be their portal mid-sized metropolis in eastern Iowa\u2014the last sprawling stretch calling itself a city, with buildings more than five-stories high, before they get to the tree-lined, grassy-knolled avenues of your stout-hearted town, so stout it mistakes itself for a city.<\/p>\n But you came, tail between your legs or so you say, from Chicago. You settled some months ago in the staid suburban hug of Coralville, a football pigskin\u2019s throw from the academic wet dream of Iowa City. You had journeyed by car through Interstate 80, motoring past the exit signs to throw-away towns with the airy, borrowed names such as Joliet, Marseilles, Malta, Woosung, Ottawa, La Salle, Peru, Le Claire, Cambridge, Princeton, Milan\u2014names which struck you as sad. Almost forlorn, like an empty promise.<\/p>\n On that trip, the ghosts of Chicago still after you, you had maneuvered your beat-up sedan, more than ten years old, towards one of those small towns just west of the Mississippi. It was a dump called Jaspers. It had a seedy-looking strip mall at the center of things where a Wendy\u2019s stood with no signs of life. You could have chosen not to be there in that deadness of a place, but it was the town with the nearest exit for late lunch on the road, and you were hungry enough to eat a squirrel. This was compounded by your boredom of the landscape\u2014the endless stretches of cornfields punctuated only on occasions by generic-looking barns and silos. Barns and silos. An eternity of them.<\/p>\n Revise that: You had no care for boredom or hunger. But it was something to do, a stop in the middle of nowhere, like the rest of your life. Food was the convenient excuse for a short detour into nothing.<\/p>\n In Jaspers, you had a turkey breast and black forest ham sandwich from a sad-looking Subway stop tucked into a corner of a grocery slash gas station. An Indian girl curled your order with a thick Mumbai accent. She seemed frightened, or tired; whatever she was, you didn\u2019t care to know. You thought the fluorescent lighting above her counter, which seemed to contain a scarce supply of the sliced mishmash of her sandwiches to-go, cast shadows below her eyes that made her look old. She gave you your total and then her \u201cthank you\u201d spiel in a thick fog of sounds you could not understand, and you soon found yourself back in your car, behind the wheel, munching away at the sandwich like an absent-minded dog, slicing pieces of it with your small Swiss knife, your only souvenir from a best-forgotten past. And all you could think about was how the Indian girl seemed trapped, like a gerbil in a cage, in that horridly lit space behind the sandwich counter. It was not as if you felt sorry for her\u2014you didn\u2019t, but all you could do was wonder how people could survive with lives like that, like a gerbil in bad lighting, muttering sandwich ingredients for a living.<\/p>\n You turned the ignition on, and looked up the sky through the windshield. It was the bluest blue you had ever seen, not a trace of clouds anywhere. There were only the white streaks of random aircrafts\u2014headed perhaps to Denver, to Des Moines, to Chicago\u2014marring this blanket of cobalt sky. You would think of that moment often, still wondering why it would come to exist in your memory in such persistent details, still wondering why it would come to you paired with some trepidation. Something about the blue. Something about all that endlessness. Something about those jet streams trailing towards an infinity of somewhere else.<\/p>\n In Coralville, you settled in the cheapest one-room apartment you could find that was decent enough, and found yourself a job in Iowa City muttering the names of cocktails and cheap beer in a gay bar called Studio 13. It was in an alley off Dubuque Street; the main strip itself was lined with banks, bookstores, and bars\u2014all that passed for regular life in town. On Tuesdays, the town folk came in for the karaoke and the $3 draft beer. The rest of the weekdays, you rolled your eyes as the deejay spun dance music almost a decade old. On weekends, Saturdays for the most part, between ten o\u2019clock at night and two o\u2019clock in the wee hours of morning, you took off your shirt, flexed your biceps and pectorals, and played flirtatious bartender to the young college boys coming in, their eyes always darting around in the dim light, always hunting. The small space of the dive bar was a beehive of sound and frenetic dancing, the darkness animated only by glow sticks and laser lights and the incandescence of white skin off the twinkie boys showing off\u2014with the sweet abandon only the desirable young could pull off\u2014the promise of tactile misadventures. You had seen all these before, in various incarnations or manifestations, and all you could do\u2014all you ever wanted to do\u2014was shake your head. Not in disapproval. Certainly not in disapproval. Only in the acknowledgment that you had perhaps lived too much, and had seen too much of everything. Nothing holds surprise anymore.<\/p>\n He came in one Saturday night a few months ago. Let\u2019s take this as a necessary dramatic shift in the story. He looked almost out of place in that beehive, an almond-eyed man in his mid-thirties, with spectacles that was slightly too big for his small face. That face, Asian and fragile, was a wonderland of curiosity and amused disbelief, it was almost comic to behold. It was as if he had never seen men dance with other men before, as if he had never seen that much skin in the throng of writhing bodies in the worship of Kylie Minogue, or Madonna, or Lady Gaga.<\/p>\n He ordered a tall glass of strawberry soda, no ice.<\/p>\n You raised an eyebrow and gave a smile that bordered on a smirk. \u201cIs that all you\u2019re having?\u201d you asked.<\/p>\n He flashed a nervous smile back at you and said in an almost apologetic tone, \u201cI don\u2019t really drink.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThen why are you in a bar?\u201d you said, eyebrow still raised.<\/p>\n You leaned towards him, your elbows on the counter, your face coming near his. Your calculation worked. You could feel his skin flushing.<\/p>\n \u201cOh.\u201d He laughed a little, backing away just a bit. \u201cI thought it was a good Saturday night to get away from my hotel room, at least for a while. I was tired of writing.\u201d<\/p>\n You stared down at his lips, made sure he knew what you were doing. \u201cSo, you\u2019re one of those famous Iowa writers.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYes,\u201d he said, \u201cexcept for the famous part.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWell, maybe one day, you will be.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cMaybe,\u201d he smiled. \u201cCould I buy you a drink? A beer maybe?\u201d<\/p>\n You shook your head. \u201cI\u2019m more of a wine guy. Beer easily makes me drunk.\u201d You smiled. \u201cBut thanks, anyway.\u201d The man looked away.<\/p>\n Still you considered it part of your job description to flirt just a little. It kept the drink orders coming, or so you were told. You didn\u2019t mind. You liked flirting. You thought of it as a kind of sport. You thought of it as something you did to make other people feel better about themselves.<\/p>\n You were the Mother Teresa of flirtation.<\/p>\n So you said slowly, \u201cSo\u2026 maybe, if I play my cards just right, I\u2019ll probably end up as a character in one of your stories.\u201d You curled just a hint of a smile, enough to make your one shining dimple pop out.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2026I suppose so,\u201d he said. You liked how he seemed to be suddenly breathless.<\/p>\n \u201cSo I guess you\u2019re here for research then,\u201d you said.<\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2026you can call it that.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cSo, let\u2019s say you\u2019re really writing this story. And I am a character in it. What would you name him?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhat\u2019s your name?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cAllan.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cAllan is a good name for a character that\u2019s a bartender,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd what does Allan the bartender do in your story?\u201d<\/p>\n He looked straight at you all of a sudden. You could catch a glimmer in his eyes that weren\u2019t there before, it couldn\u2019t be drowned out by the stray brightness of a laser beam, or a nearby glowstick being sliced through the air by a dancer in frenzy. And then, in a pace that was deliberate, he said: \u201cAllan... Let\u2019s make him a character with a past. Let\u2019s say, he\u2019s running away from something. Let\u2019s say he\u2019s from some big city somewhere. St. Paul, maybe. Des Moines, perhaps. Let\u2019s just say Chicago. It\u2019s far enough. And big enough. And familiar enough to most people\u2014\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cGo on.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cLet\u2019s say he settles in a small place\u2014like where we are now\u2014where no one he knows can find him. Or so he thinks.\u201d<\/p>\n Something about all this bothered you, but just a little. You had taught yourself well about putting the world in proper compartments, to see everything with stoic regard, to watch out for fools who carried their hearts on their sleeves. This was just one of those stupid things. You knew people had always found you cold in the ordinary unfurling of your days and nights. They didn\u2019t know you were even colder in your regard for the slightest thing: you did not give a damn for anyone or anything.<\/p>\n Still, you went on with your bartenderly motions, you proceeded to make this man his drink\u2014a strawberry soda, no ice\u2014and you pushed the tall glass across the bar towards him. You prodded him: \u201cGo on.\u201d<\/p>\n He gave you his $3, and he took his drink, and slowly sipped from it. He went on: \u201cLet\u2019s say Allan befriends this guy in the bar he\u2019s working in, the guy looked a little lost, and so he takes him into a kind conversation, opens him up, makes him feel comfortable in the middle of all that dance music, all that noise and spectacle.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhat\u2019s the other guy\u2019s name?\u201d you asked.<\/p>\n \u201cTony.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cTony\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYes, Tony.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhat happens next to Allan and Tony?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cTony does not drink.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhat did he come to the bar for then?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cPerhaps he was bored. And it was a Saturday night. And the rest of the town was dead for the weekend. The only signs of life were in the bars.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cAnd then?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201c\u2026They talk.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cOver the music?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt can happen. They talk.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cAnd that\u2019s it?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cTony takes him back to his hotel, just across downtown, near Wicker Park.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cAnd?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThey have sex in his room.\u201d<\/p>\n It was you who were flushing now. Still, you couldn\u2019t resist wanting to know what could happen next, to this fictional bartender and his fictional friend. You felt your insides shift, already too invested in wanting to know the rest of the story, whatever it was. You didn\u2019t understand why.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd then?\u201d you asked. You were trying too hard to sound nonchalant.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd then the next morning, they go to Cedar Rapids.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s 25 miles away,\u201d you said, as if that mattered.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a good autumn day. The drive up Cedar Rapids would be something.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cBut what\u2019s in Cedar Rapids?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s a good Filipino restaurant in Cedar Rapids.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cTony is Filipino?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI suppose he is.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cSo they\u2019re going to Cedar Rapids to eat in a Filipino restaurant?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cFor lunch, yes.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cAnd then?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cAllan would fall in love,\u201d he said quickly, and with such certainty.<\/p>\n \u201cOh, come on,\u201d you scoffed. \u201cWhat about Tony?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cTony will break his heart.\u201d<\/p>\n You could slice the thick pause that came after that.<\/p>\n \u201cWell, that\u2019s something,\u201d you finally muttered.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s something, isn\u2019t it.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s something.\u201d<\/p>\n He smiled, and downed the rest of his drink. Then he reached across the bar to shake your hand. The skin of his hand felt smooth for you, and his fingers were long and steady. His grip felt both strong and tender.<\/p>\n \u201cMy name\u2019s Henry, by the way,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n \u201cHenry,\u201d you repeated.<\/p>\n And so it was that you found yourself in Cedar Rapids the next morning, Henry lying perfectly still beside you in the bed of your small and garish-looking hotel room in South Ridge Drive. The thermostat had gone mad in the middle of the night, and now it was balmy hot. You woke up to sweat and the receding shadows of unrecollected nightmares. \u201cHenry, it\u2019s almost noon,\u201d you said. You were groggy and your breathing was all wrong. \u201cHenry, wake up. Let\u2019s have lunch at that Filipino restaurant you were telling me about.\u201d<\/p>\n You nudged him to make him wake.<\/p>\n But your fingers touched cold, cold skin, and he was very, very still.<\/p>\n \u201cSo, is Henry dead then? How did that happen?\u201d The questions come to you quick like bullets, and you turn towards the direction of the inquiring voice. It is the girl. You will find out later on that her name is Yvette, and what you remember most about her is her strawberry blonde hair cut into a bob. On good days, she can probably pass off as beautiful\u2014but there is a blandness to her that fuzzes out the details of her face. Does she have blue eyes, for example, or are they olive green? Is her nose stubby or thin? Everything else about her will register to you later in hazy recollection, in that kind of surprising recall that effortless after-thought brings: the way she wears her daisy dukes, for example. This is what you remember most next about her. This and her strawberry hair. Yvette wears her daisy dukes in great discomfort, much too aware perhaps that she is showing too much skin. She does not seem like the type to show skin.<\/p>\n Revise that: Yvette wears her daisy dukes like a person forced into a fad, and she fidgets like mad. You like the sound of that word, fidgets<\/em>.<\/p>\n But you don\u2019t give a damn about the girl, more or less. Still, it gives you some amusement: girls in daisy dukes<\/em>. Iowa City is full of girls who wear daisy dukes, especially in the summer. But you have come to wear flannel shirts, too, like the rest of the boys, and you realize how blending into the landscape can be accomplished without really trying, only with the right kind of sartorial choices.<\/p>\n How easy it is to pretend to be a native in a city where everybody is from somewhere else but not here.<\/p>\n You think about that because the afternoon began with you in a reading haunch on the steps west of the Old Capitol at the center of the town\u2019s university campus, its dome bleeding gold into the clear blue sky.<\/p>\n Later, you hear sounds near you, and you find her sitting on the same landing as you, just a few feet away but close. She lost in her iPod shuffle, and you lost in the ream of papers you call a story. The story is giving you problems, and her coming has struck as an intrusion. You want the space to yourself, in that spot on the steps, looking out onto West Iowa Avenue, which leads into the rest of the city you have never been to.<\/p>\n Later, she says hi, and you say a polite hello.<\/p>\n Later, she makes small talk and then, in the relentless march of how these things go, she admits she\u2019s really from Portland and now lives in small flat in Cedar Rapids north of the city, with two other roommates, all of them coeds. She is studying Psychology, and the other two are in Biology and Dance. She does not know why she is studying Psychology.<\/p>\n \u201cCedar Rapid\u2019s 25 miles away,\u201d you manage to say. \u201cIsn\u2019t that a little too far for school?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI know<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cCan\u2019t you guys find some place nearer the university?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI suppose I should, but I like driving my car. Driving clears my head.\u201d<\/p>\n Later, she comes to know that you are from Chicago. Later, she knows you are writing a story about never having been to Cedar Rapids, which she finds interesting. She says her name is Yvette. You don\u2019t volunteer your name, you don\u2019t even think about it.<\/p>\n \u201cSo you\u2019re one of those Iowa writers?\u201d she smiles at you.<\/p>\n \u201cI guess so,\u201d you say.<\/p>\n \u201cYou know, you kinda look familiar.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI do some bartending on the side, around town,\u201d you say.<\/p>\n \u201cStudio 13,\u201d she says in a quick deadpan. \u201cI\u2019ve seen you there. But I remember you with your shirt off.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a living.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI want to read it,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n \u201cRead what?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYour Cedar Rapids story. I live there, I\u2019ll tell you if you got some details wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWell, you can\u2019t. It\u2019s not finished yet.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIs that it?\u201d She points to the papers in your hands.<\/p>\n \u201cUmm, yes.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cRead it to me.\u201d<\/p>\n You shrug, and for whatever it\u2019s worth and for whatever motivation compels you to obey, you begin reading. \u201cYou have never been to Cedar Rapids\u2026,\u201d you begin.<\/p>\n She sits close to you as you read. The words tumble out, you make mental notes about possible revisions, and soon it is late in the afternoon, almost evening. The Midwestern sky hovers between purple and orange, with three jet streams crisscrossing each other in the late summer glow.<\/p>\n Then you come to the abrupt end. This is where we have come in.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t know,\u201d you finally tell her. Her question digs deep into your head\u2014what exactly happened to Henry? Is he dead? Or just cold? What does it all mean? You turn to her, and you ask, \u201cBut does it work so far?\u201d<\/p>\n She takes her time answering. \u201cIt\u2019s something. But now I want to see what goes on in Cedar Rapids. It\u2019s got a bit of a film noirish feel to it for some reason.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t know what happens next. I don\u2019t know what exactly happens in Cedar Rapids.\u201d<\/p>\n She looks at you, and her face betrays amusement at your expense\u2014as if to her you have just unwittingly played the fool, or she has seen the dark secrets of your tricks. You don\u2019t mind. You tell yourself there is no use for caring.<\/p>\n \u201cWhy are you writing this story anyway?\u201d she asks.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t know. I\u2026I\u2026,\u201d you pause, thinking this through. \u201cIt just came to me one day. I just felt like I needed to write this out, to write about this guy\u2014to find out what happens to him.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYou don\u2019t yet know what happens to him? Or Henry?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI just follow wherever they lead me.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s a strange way of writing a story,\u201d she says, shaking her head slowly. \u201cI always thought writers played God with their characters.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThey get obstinate sometimes. They want certain unexpected things all of a sudden.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYour characters?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYeah. Some of them. Like suddenly, in the middle of a sentence you\u2019re writing\u2014a description, a narration\u2014they turn to you, and they say things like, \u2018I want blue eyes,\u2019 which is crazy because they\u2019re Asian. Or they say, \u2018Make me rich, I want a Victorian house in San Francisco, in Inner Sunset.\u2019 Or \u2018I want to work in a gay bar.\u2019 Or \u2018I\u2019m a transvestite.\u2019 Things like that. Most of the time, what they demand registers something for me. A kind of truth? I don\u2019t know what it is.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cAnd of course you obey them.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cMost of the time.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cKill Henry,\u201d she says, smiling.<\/p>\n \u201cBut why?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t know.\u201d<\/p>\n You don\u2019t say anything.<\/p>\n You don\u2019t tell her either that there have been other versions of the same scene.<\/p>\n She looks around, and then she stands up. \u201cIt\u2019s getting late. I need to get back home\u2014and it\u2019s a long drive.\u201d<\/p>\n You nod. You stand up as well, and you gather your things.<\/p>\n \u201cListen,\u201d she says. \u201cEmail me the rest of the story when you\u2019re done with it, if you can. If you want to, I mean. I\u2019d like to know what happens next.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cSure,\u201d you say, shrugging, non-committal.<\/p>\n She looks into her bag, pilfers through it haphazardly, and then pulls out a poorly-designed calling card straight off a college dorm inkjet printer. It has balloons and roses. Her name is rendered in stylish cursive, printed in hot pink. \u201cThat\u2019s me,\u201d she smiles at you. \u201cI never got your name though.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s Allan.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cOh,\u201d she says, and then she frowns a little, on her face that fleeting look of dawning. Then she smiles again. \u201cWell, see you around then, Allan.\u201d She turns to go, descending the stairs with some bounce. When she reaches the bottom, she turns to face you and asks, \u201cAre you sure you\u2019ll be all right?\u201d<\/p>\n
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