Falling like the Stars

19

Jared

I’m staying in a hotel tonight. After seeing Jensen, I stopped back at the shelter to see what, if anything was happening with the Alice situation, but I’d lost my status as the boy who had found her, and I was just another new stray, no one wanted to talk to me, and Alice was one of their own, I wasn’t part of their grief. The way they closed their ranks to protect the privacy of their emotions left me feeling too alone, too sad. So I left and came here.

I love staying in hotels. Who wouldn’t?  I realize that for some people, the comfort of their own bed and familiar home is preferable, but lacking that, it’s this, a cot in the shelter, or on the street, so of course this wins, hands down, every time, save for the little bit of guilt associated with treating myself to this, something that’s definitely not an option for all the other homeless people I know. 

When I stay in a hotel like this, I bring pajamas and a change of clothes from my locker at Grand Central Station. Usually when I sleep in the shelter, I just sleep in my clothes. You would definitely get the side-eye from the other residents if you took the time to go into a bathroom stall and change into pajamas. But here, I don’t even need to go into the bathroom. Once I’m in the room, all this space is mine. I change right in the middle of the room and no one sees, no one makes comments, no one laughs and calls me a newbie. 

I slide under the high thread count sheets, and mentally scroll through the residents at the shelter. Now that Alice is gone, I might actually be the oldest resident there. Oldest, as in “spent the most time there,” not oldest in oldest age. Sam Francis is probably the oldest, he might be somewhat over eighty. He’s one of those people that defy the odds, smokes like a chimney, eats nothing but coffee and processed meats, receives absolutely no health care whatsoever, but keeps ticking. Someone should have given him a job and put him to good use a long time ago, but he just stays at the shelter because no one bothers him there. 

He’s only been there four years though, and I started staying at the shelter seven years ago. Most people move on, one way or another. Die. Get work. Reconcile with family. With my head on this ultra soft pillow, my feet warm, belly full, it’s easier to hope. Easier to let my thoughts drift into the realm of possibilities, ways that I might change my life. 

I’m willing to work, but can’t hold a job. Even temp agencies lose my paperwork in the course of a morning. Selling photos, walking dogs is one thing, I can afford a few sets of clothes, shoes, winter boots and a warm winter coat, a meal in a restaurant now and then, but an apartment?  In New York?  That’s a whole different story.

The obvious answer, is of course that Jensen is the solution. That somehow we could get an apartment together, and I’d do whatever I could to contribute, and he could bring me to the urgent care clinic if I needed to go and stay with me and not let the nurses forget I’m there, and make sure the pharmacists fill my damn order so I can get the medicine I need. 

And now I’m crying. I try not to feel sorry for myself, but something about Green Alice’s death and the specter of Hart Island has got me thinking about how I won’t be young forever. I’ve figured out a lot of things, come up with a lot of strategies. Most days, it just feels like normal. I’ve never known anything different. I’m not sure how long I will be able to do it though. So far I’ve been lucky. But what if I start to go crazy as I get older?  What if I get one of the big ones- cancer, diabetes?  I’m going to need help. 

I meant what I said to Jensen earlier today though. What I feel for him is more than all this. I don’t want our relationship to be about how he can help me. I want to love him for him, not what he can do for me.

That’s why it feels so important to find others. What would that be like?  I imagine living in an apartment with two or three other people like me. Every day, you’d wake up to find a bunch of strangers living in your house. And you’d be a stranger to them. But for once, it would be okay. They’d believe you, because they’ve been living it too. Breakfast every morning would be re-introduction time. On the other hand, maybe we would be able to remember each other.

I snuggle down under the heavy, rich blankets, drifting in and out of dreams and imagination, playing through scenarios where I have friends, and lasting relationships and something resembling a normal life. 

When I wake, the city is still dark. I pad over to the window in my bare feet and pajamas and look out over the lights and pre-dawn traffic. Out there somewhere. How to find them?  Jensen says he might have a plan. What could it be?  What would get my attention, for example?  What sort of message would let me know what to do?  

It’s still an hour until Lindy’s diner opens, and another three after that until the museum opens and I can see Jensen. I turn on the shower and get in, letting the hot water beat down on me and continue the daydreams that I had last night. Would there be any way to get scientists to study us?  I laugh, picturing the faces on the scientists who show up each morning to be debriefed by the night shift charged with watching us solid for eight hours so we don’t get forgotten. If you can’t laugh at your own predicaments in life, you might as well cash in your cards, because what’s the point?

I decide to treat myself again, and enjoy the continental breakfast at the hotel rather than go to Lindy’s. In fact, I don’t understand why more homeless people don't take advantage of this. As long as you’re wearing clean clothes and don’t smell too badly, you can walk into nearly any hotel and eat the breakfast. They never check, and gone are the days when someone would even raise an eyebrow at someone eating breakfast in their pajamas and slippers. 

I serve myself fresh fruit, fragrant honeydew and cantaloupe, beautiful flawless strawberries. We get fruit at the shelter, but it’s old and tired, flavorless. Here, I can literally smell the tangy sweetness as I walk to my seat. The dining room is full, so I share a table with two young socialites glued to their twitter accounts. 

“Did you see Gina’s?” one asks the other. Her hair is a bird’s nest of cotton candy pink and blue, as seems to be the fashion now. 

The other, an anorexic drinking black coffee with Splenda, shrugs noncommittally without looking up from her phone. 

“She was at some art party, and some retard is trying to sell his closet. What the f**k?”

This does get the skinny one’s attention. Her dark eyes turn towards her friend. “No, I actually heard about that, I read it on Art Start. He’s not a retard, and you’re not supposes to call them that anyway, even if they are. But anyway, he’s got autism, and it’s not just his closet. There’s speculation it might go for millions at auction. Cecil Palmer was there, and he said Cynthia Cornwallis and Neil Pinna nearly came to blows over it. Oh!  And that actress we hate from West Wing was there. How the hell did Gina get into that party?”

“She’s dating this body artist in the Village,” says Cotton Candy Hair. 

“You mean a tattoo artist,” says her friend, rolling her eyes. 

“No, no, he’s really good. He did that work on…”

But I don’t hear who he did the work on, because I’m out of there. Autistic boy?  Art party?  The chances that it’s not Jensen they are talking about are next to zero, right?  What’s all this about a closet worth millions?  

The museum can’t open soon enough. 

++++++++

Jensen

“You don’t have to do this,” my mother is saying. We’re eating leftovers from the party for breakfast, except my dad, who’s eating aspirin, chewing the tablets as he winces at the acrid taste. He’s always claimed that’s the way to do it for a hangover. 

“Of course he doesn’t,” Dad says. “It’s yours, don’t let them bully you into anything.”

I take a bite of cheesecake, perhaps the ultimate in cheese-related desserts. It’s thick and creamy, and if dad really wanted to cure his hangover, he’d have a slice of this instead. “I want to sell it, but I’m serious about the terms. If I can’t get some sort of guarantee on the terms, I won’t do it. Period. I don’t care if I get five cents or five million.”

“Just out of curiosity, what are your terms?” Mom hands dad an ice pack and a cup of steaming black coffee.

“No private collections,” I say. That’s the most important thing. “It has to be on public display for at least one year.”

“Ego, much?” Dad says. He’s not in a very charitable mood. 

“James,” Mom chides. 

“It’s not because of that,” I say. "It’s a message. I want to help someone, and that won’t happen if they never see it.”

My parents take this statement in stride. Over the years, they’ve learned there’s just some things about me they don’t understand and won’t ever understand. 

“What else?”  Dad takes a sip of his scalding hot coffee and winces some more. 

“That was the hard one,” I say. “The other is that I name it, and the name can’t be changed. Or abbreviated.”

“That seems easy enough,” Mom says. She sits down with a plate of spanikopita, tapenade and shrimp cocktail and pours herself a mimosa. She’s got an iron stomach. 

Dad shrugs, eyes closed underneath the ice pack. “Easy, but if that’s what you want, you gotta let them know. In today’s business, they’ll call it whatever they think will sell.”

“What do you want to call it?” mom asks. 

“I’m not one hundred percent sure,” I say, and I look out the window. I just want to enjoy my cheesecake. My mother makes really, really good cheesecake. I’m pretty sure my plan is going to work, and unlike my father, I drank water and cranberry juice at the party last night and went to bed before three in the morning, so I’m feeling pretty good. Plus, I get to see Jared again today. I feel good enough about the plan that I can tell him about it. Right now, I just get to bask in my secrets. It feels pretty good. 

Mom’s phone dings, and she gives it a casual glance. “Nancy says our party got mentioned in the NYSD.”

Dad rolls his eyes, even though they’re closed. NYSD stands for New York Social Diary, and he pretends it’s beneath him to care about things like that, but he’s really secretly proud. Proud of mom, really. 

“Trent Castoway wrote about it on his blog too. It’s gotten quite the buzz. Nice press for Jensen’s art.”  

This is just what I wanted. Getting the message out there. I need to name it, and fast. But I want Jared to help with that. I glance at the clock. One hour until the museum opens. 

On the subway, the woman next to me is eating a sausage, egg and cheese biscuit from McDonald’s and I don’t even care. The bar on the turnstile to get out of the subway got stuck, and I had to touch it with my hands, and I didn’t even care. When I got to the museum, I was seventeen minutes early, which is not only an odd number, but a sharp prime number as well, and I especially didn’t care, because Jared was there waiting for me on the stairs, his shaggy hair spilling over her face, cheeks flushed, out of breath. He’s looking decidedly on the higher end of the medium-handsome scale. 

“You’re wearing the same clothes you were yesterday,” I say when he notices me. He shrugs. “I only have three different t-shirts. Usually, no one notices.”

“I want to tell you about the plan,” I say. 

“Stage three?” He asks, and then reaches out behind my neck and pulls me close. “Can I kiss you first?” he asks, and all thoughts of stage three promptly vanish. 

He’s so close, and smells like the lemongrass ginger hand lotion that they use at the Hilton hotels. His lips are soft and warm and I never understood why people want to do this; press their lips together. I still don’t understand, but I’ve joined the ranks of people who want to. I hold him close, one hand on the small of his back after the kiss is over. “That was really, really nice,” I say. 

“Tell me about your closet,” he answers. 

++++++++

Jared

It’s such a beautiful day in New York that I convince Jensen to walk in Central Park with me instead of going into the museum. 

“I have to text my mom and let her know,” he says. “And then she’s going to send me about five million texts asking me if I’m okay, because Central Park is not part of my schedule, and it usually takes something on the scale of a sewer main breaking in the museum to change my schedule.”

“I’m flattered, then,” I say. “On par with a sewer main.”  

“You should be,” he says, completely deadpan. “You’re the first new door I’ve opened in a long, long time. It doesn’t matter to me if we’re at the museum or a bus station, I just want to find out what’s inside.”

“Speaking of doors…” I prompt. “Your closet? What the heck is that all about?”

“How did you know about that?” he says. He is suddenly on alert, eyes sharp, glittering bright. But in a nice way. 

I explain about the girls at the hotel and the tweets. I leave out the word retard. As I tell him about what happened, his smile grows wider and wider until I have to kiss him again because he’s so beautiful. 

“Perfect,” he says at last. At first I think he’s talking about the kiss, but when I look at him, his eyes are far away, calculating, like they were yesterday when we were talking about stage three. “It’s already showing it could work, if you heard about it.”

“What?” I ask. He’s doing that thing again where he kind of forgets that I don’t know everything that he knows. 

“If we were going to get a message out to people who might be like you, it needed to be something huge, something that got out in the news and all kinds of people would be talking about it. It already reached one person like you: you.”

“Wait, wait, you’re going too fast.”  I take his hand and pull him down onto a park bench. We can sit here and watch the carriages go by and maybe if we stop moving forward down the path, he can slow down his explanation of what the heck is going on. 

“Take a deep breath, and start from the beginning. What message?  What does this have to do with your closet?”

Jensen does what I say. He takes a deep breath, and pulls his cell phone out of his satchel. “Okay,” he says. “Ever since I was little, I drew on the walls inside my closet. My parents pulled all the shelves and stuff out of the closet in my room, and gave me art supplies. Whenever I needed to be alone, to get away from noise and irritations, I’d go in there and draw. Over the years, I’ve gotten quite a bit better. But that’s not the point of it. The point of it is that you can see my abilities develop over the years, top to bottom, as I grew and could reach higher and higher on the canvas. Plus, if you want insight into a person’s mind, what better way to study them than by looking at the art they create?  Anyone who’s interested in what was going on in this autistic head of mine would give anything to get a peek inside this closet, right?”

I nod, although I’m not quite putting this together with what this has to do with stage three. 

“So, over the years, I’ve had several offers for it.”

I frown. “For your closet?  How can someone buy your closet?”  

“There are more unusual canvases. Think of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. You’ve seen the hieroglyphics, and the mosaics, how about the ceiling that’s on my schedule? If someone wants the walls of my closet, they’ll find a way.”

“So, you’ve found someone to buy your closet?” I’m beginning to wonder if maybe this is all just a delusion of some sort. 

“Not yet, and anyway, that’s still not the point. If someone just buys the closet, who cares?  That doesn’t do anything to help you. Anyway, I never thought about selling it before, because it wasn’t done. It didn’t mean anything. But the day before yesterday, I added this piece to it, and all of a sudden, it was done. It somehow all came together.”

He shows me the picture on his phone, and I gasp. It had seemed crazy before, this idea of someone buying a closet as a piece of art, but once I see it, I understand. It’s crazy beautiful. It’s the sort of thing where your eyes want to go everywhere at once and everywhere you look you see something intriguing. The whole picture all together, as well as each minute detail make you want to just keep looking and looking. It’s a staggering amount of work. 

“How long…?” I ask, but my words trail off as I zoom in and out on different parts of the picture. 

“Fifteen or so years,” he says. He sounds like there’s a smile in his voice, like he’s waiting for me to see some sort of surprise, to “get” something I haven’t gotten yet. 

And that’s when I see it. The sketch he made of my eyes, at the very pinnacle of the piece. He’s right. Somehow, it ties it all together in a way that feels satisfying and complete. More than that…

“Did it stay?” I ask. “Did people see it? Is it still there?” All thoughts of Stage Three have left my head. This was something we had planned on doing “someday,” to see if he drew me if the drawing would be permanent, not like my notes or photos of me. 

He nods. “Yes. Three days later now and I brought my mother in to talk about it this morning, and it’s still there, she still sees it, she remembers commenting on the sketch the first time she saw it.” He puts the phone away. “Anyway, this is all just a vehicle for Stage Three. We knew that if we wanted to get a message out, we would need a wide scatter, something that everyone would see, because by definition we can’t target any particular person. It had to be something that the average person on the street would see or hear about.

“From the beginning, I thought that maybe my parent’s connections could help us out, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized it had to be something that we did, because we can’t count on anyone else to believe us or understand what we’re doing and why. I was still trying to figure out something that we could do on a big scale when I finished the closet, and all of a sudden, I knew I had something that could get people talking. All I needed to do was to make sure that they were talking about the message I wanted to get out.”

“I still don’t understand.” I scan the picture for this “message” of his. If I can’t understand it, what hope is there that anyone else will understand, people who don’t know him?  People who aren’t aware that a message is being directed at them?

“We have to name it,” he says. “The title has to be the message. Instructions.” 

It’s slowly coming to me, I’m kind of getting it. But I’m thinking of all the paintings I know, and nothing comes to mind that sounds like instructions. “What did you have in mind?” I ask.

“We need a who, what and where,” he says. ‘The who is people like you. The what is what we want them to do: gather somewhere we can find them, and the where is that place.”

“That sounds like an… interesting title.” I say dubiously. It’s no Starry Night. 

“Exactly. That will be part of what makes it work. If I named it Untitled, or Therapy Sketch, no one would care or notice. But with a title that’s a message like we have in mind, people will be going crazy to figure it out. It will create buzz. Which is what I was doing last night, by the way. I haven’t even sold the painting yet, and people are already talking about it. If it goes to auction, that will be in the news. I’m pretty sure with Neil Pinna and Cynthia Cornwallis interested in it, we can broker a deal with Southeby’s or Christie’s. So what are we going to call it?”

I turn this strange idea of his over in my head. It’s no less crazy than sky writing, and it sounds like something that we could actually pull off. “You mean like… If You Are a Person that No One Can Remember, Meet on the Stairs of the Met Sunday, August Twelfth?” Even I know how stupid that sounds, but Jensen sounds so confident, so sure of his idea, that I have to at least try to get what the heck he’s talking about.

“You’re limiting it too much. Why only once?  Why not name a permanent place?  And just say that you made the meeting place the Met… that’s too broad. Lots of people are on the stairs of the Met every Sunday. You’d never know who was there for you. Which, I suppose,” he’s thinking out loud now, “Is going to be a problem wherever we make the meeting place, but we can at least narrow down the real estate. 

He’s quiet for a moment, his eyes thinking and distant. “How about, If No One Can Remember You, Meet Here?”

“What do you mean, here?” I ask. I’m trying to think of how I would react if I heard about a painting named that. 

“At the painting,” he answers. “That’s half the point. The painting is not only the message, but also the beacon, the homing point. It won’t be like a message in the newspaper or tweet that gets re-tweeted. Those would only be effective for a one-shot, and then they’d disappear. But with a painting called that, it will stay. At least for a little while. I want establish public display for at least one year as stipulation of the sale.”

I close my eyes and shut out the park. I let the noises of the couples walking by, the cooing of the pigeons at our feet, the clip-clop of the carriage horse’s hooves fade into the background, and I try to imagine how I would react if I heard about a art work named If No One Can Remember You, Meet Here. There is no doubt. I’d be there every day. I’d make myself a t-shirt that said No One Can Remember Me, and I would be a god-damned groupie for that piece of art. I’d go every day. I laugh, because I realize that no one, except Jensen would realize that I was going every day. And maybe, just maybe, someday someone would approach me…

“I love it,” I say, opening my eyes. “It’s a brilliant plan.”

“It might not work,” he says. “But like I said, we can just think of it as the first thing we try.”

“It’s a pretty amazing first try,” I say. 

“The key will be to keep it in the public eye. It’s practically a performance piece, if you think about it.”

I’m on board now, rolling along with him. “The thing is, if it was just your painting, it might only catch the attention of people in the art world. But the title. If I heard that in passing on the subway, I would full body tackle the person who said those words and ask them what they were talking about.”

“Exactly,” he answers. We might not reach everybody, but we have no idea how common you are. What if you are a lot more common than we know?  You all would be like invisible people, living among us undetected. We’d. Never. Know. Let’s limit our numbers to just New York City. Let’s say that only a tenth of the people in the city hear about the painting. There’s close to nine million people living in New York City, so that would be nine hundred thousand people hearing about the painting. 

“Let’s say that people like you are one in a million, which is totally arbitrary, you could be one in a billion. Or one in forty two thousand. We have no way of knowing, so as long as we’re day dreaming, we’ll go with one in a million. That would mean that if nine hundred thousand people hear about the painting, there would be a ninety percent chance that one of them was someone like you. What do you think the odds are that if someone like you heard about this painting, they would go to the painting?”

“One hundred percent,” I say. “No doubt in my mind.”  

“Okay, but that’s assuming that when we say someone like you, we mean someone who has the intellectual and physical means of understanding what it means and getting to the painting. Little kids or insane individuals, we have to count them out.”

I realize that I could not have found a better person to do this with me. Forget about the ridiculous luck involved with finding someone who happens to have a closet that’s in hot demand in the art world, but who else would have thought this through so thoroughly?  Who would show that he gets it, right down to those little details. 

“Let’s say that only one third of the people like you would have the means to act on the message if they heard of it. That brings us down to a thirty percent chance of it working.”

“And by working, you mean one person, going to visit the painting at least once?”

“Yes.”

“Okay,” I say. “That would mean that I would have to be there, looking for them, every day, all day.”

“Have you got something better to do?” he asks. “Wait. I mean something more important to do. Because if it were me, this would be the most important thing in my life.”

My heart sinks a little bit. I do have other things to do. Like he says, nothing more important, but there are things I need to do to survive. Right now, for instance, I should be taking photos or walking dogs, or seeing if I can find a place to wash dishes at for an hour or so through the lunch rush. I can’t stand in an art gallery all day, every day.

“It’s like an investment though,” he says, reading my thoughts. “Imagine the payout. And I’ll help.”  He takes my hand, thumb rubbing the center of my palm. “I wonder…”

I let him think it though, whatever he’s wondering. A beautiful team of grey percherons clops by, the couple in the seat oblivious to the entire world around them. Some days, I go down to the flower market and buy tens of bunches of fresh blooms then make them into bouquets to sell to these couples. You’re supposed to have a license, which is something I can’t do, but the cops do little more than shoo me away any time they catch me. I don’t care, they catch me several times a day and never know what a repeat offender I am. The weather is supposed to be really nice for all of today, maybe I can still make it down to the market and get a discount on some of the seconds. 

“I wonder,” he says at last, bringing my thoughts back to the present. “If you’re the only one I would be able to remember. I mean, if we met more people like you. Is this something that works only for you?  Or would I be able to remember anybody like you?”

“I was kind of wondering something myself,” I say. I’m a little nervous to bring this up, because I don’t know yet what things he’s sensitive about. “I wonder if it’s your… if it’s because of the way…”

“Because I have autism?” he asks. Matter of fact, as if he was saying is it because my eyes are green? No big deal.

“Yeah,” I say. “I’m sorry, that was a dumb idea.”  

“Not really. It’s the exact same thing I was asking you. Both of us have ways we’re different. But your thing is actually something we could test. Easily, today. I know other people with autism. We could—”

“Maybe not today,” I interrupt. I feel so good, sitting here today with him, and we have the huge, huge secret, just the two of us, and we’re going to try and pull this amazing magic trick together, and I like that. I don’t want to share this day or this feeling or this project with anyone else, at least not for now. There will be time to expand this team, but it can wait.

“If we find someone else who can remember you,” he says, "they might not necessarily be able to help, depending on their degree of autism. And the memory thing, that’s not universal. In fact, there’s pretty much not anything about autism that’s universal, not even within one person. Some days I’m more ‘autistic’ than others.” 

I have noticed that today, he’s doing really well. He’s off schedule, and he appears perfectly calm and unruffled. And even if he wasn’t, I don’t care. I’m the last person on earth who would push someone away because they were a little different. “If there is someone else who can remember me,” I say, “That doesn’t change anything about us,” I say.

“I know.”

“Do you think if I was normal, and we met, that we still would have… been interested?” I ask.

“Are you kidding me?  You knew there were two Carmencitas. I knew then that you were the only boy for me.” 

I take his hand, and for that moment, we’re like any other couple in the park. In love. 

++++++++

Jensen

I’ve already mentioned how my internal clock is very accurate. I also have a lot of different tallies running in my head all the time. The number of times my mother has lost her reading glasses. The number of times my father has watched Shawshank Redemption, the number of times I have dreamt about flying. 

The number of times Jared has met my parents is a little harder to pin down. For one thing, there’s a different number for the number of times he’s met my father, met my mother, or met both of them at the same time. For another, it’s hard to tell if we should count each time he’s at my house as one “meeting,” or if I should count the number of times I’ve had to introduce him to my mother and father. 

Tonight is just ridiculous, and if it weren’t for the fact that Jared finds it amusing, I would find it extremely stressful. Also, we are playing Memory, which I am extremely good at, and has very simple rules, so that helps too. 

I think it’s good for me, having Jared to keep me steady during all these very unusual situations. I can tolerate stuff now that just months ago would have been impossible to cope with. I don’t just mean uncomfortable for me, I mean impossible.

“Oh!” my father exclaims when he re-enters the living room. “We have a visitor!”  

The expression of confusion that passes over my mother’s face is very brief, fleeting. “Yes, this is Jared, a friend of Jensen’s. He came in while you were… while you were in the office.”

Father extends his hand. “Very nice to meet you Jared.” He scans the game in front of us. “Mind if I join in?”  

Now, here’s the really weird thing. Father had been playing with us before he had to take a call in his office, and had found three matches. Now those six tiles are back on the table face down. I’ve been watching as carefully as I can all night, and I’ve never seen it happening, but somehow it does. A few times already. I can remember exactly where those tiles are, they’re in the same place they were before, but no one else can, not even Jared. But that might just because the three of them are dreadfully bad at this game. 

That’s not the point though. The point is that there is a literal physical change in reality. Just like when Jared says his room in his mother’s home had changed after his mother forgot him. Not remembering him is one thing, people forget stuff all the time. But this is something else altogether. 

I’ve thought about this a lot, and it doesn’t make any sense. Nothing about Jared makes any sense, including why I can remember him when no one else can. You might think this would really mess me up. It doesn’t. I understand a very limited amount of things in the world. Close your eyes. Picture a blue butterfly landing on a leaf. Where in your physical brain is the “screen” where that picture is displayed?  This is something I don’t understand. I can see the picture, but what’s the canvas?  I don’t understand that, but I don’t let it drive me crazy. 

So, this was one of our tests. What happens when one person stays with Jared while another one leaves and comes back. The answer is that the person who leaves forgets him, and the person who stays remembers only about five minutes back. Mother has forgotten about when Jared arrived and everyone was introduced. She’s forgotten that my father was there. And of course, my father doesn’t remember it either. 

It is kind of driving me crazy having to answer the same questions over and over though. This isn’t a fair thought, but it makes me feel like my parents are stupid. I know they’re not. 

“Since you’re just coming in, why don’t you go first?” my mother tells my father.

Father turns over a grasshopper and a strawberry. 

“So,” he says as he turns them back over. “What did I miss?  How do you know Jensen?”

I notice that mother turns her head to listen too, as if she hadn’t heard the answer before either. 

“At the museum.” I say.

“At La Carmencita,” Jared says. “I saw Jensen sketching it, and before I knew it, I knew more about the painting and the model than I ever wanted to know.”  

My parents laugh. 

“I work at the museum, and Jensen still teaches me things every day.”

It goes on like this. Somehow, Jared tells things a different way each time, but always tells the truth. Maybe that’s why he doesn’t get bored or upset about it. I think about this happening to him every day, all day, having to say the same things to the same people over and over again. He is amazing. 

I’ve never wished that I didn’t have autism. I’m fortunate to be on the “high functioning” end of the spectrum. I’m relatively intelligent, and I’ve worked hard to practice the skills that come naturally to neurotypical people. But I’ll never be able to do it like Jared does, and a little bit of me wishes that some of that would get on me, kind of the way that at first I was worried that his weirdness would get on me. 

Huh. Think of that. It did, and I survived. Now, I never want to be without it. I reach under the table and take Jared’s hand. He squeezes it gently, and I smile. 

The look on my mother’s face is priceless. I could sell it to the MARA 3D facial expressions people, because it’s not in their app. It’s three expressions combined- “surprise,” “joy,” and “trying to hide your surprise and joy.”

Jared

“The ceiling is smooth,” I say, lying back on the hard wood floor of Jensen’s closet. He’s sitting, arms hugging his knees. He says he’s had people in here before, but it still seems like he’s nervous about me being in here. He taps on the floor with his fingers on his left side, away from me. Maybe he thinks I don’t notice, so I pretend I don’t. 

Jensen glances up. “I know,” he says. 

“You could draw up there.”

Now he looks up for longer, really looking this time. “I never thought about it. I think… I think I’ve never been relaxed enough in here to lay down and look at the ceiling like that.”

“Try it,” I say. 

Jensen looks almost scared for a moment, his eyes taking a quick trip to wherever he goes when he needs to be in his own head for a while. The difference is amazing really; one minute, he’s Jensen, with these amazing, smiling eyes, the next minute, he’s a shell. But it’s only a fleeting moment this time, and he lays down stiffly with his head on my stomach. I card my fingers through his hair, and feel him relax against me. 

He laughs quietly. “I could be the autistic Michelangelo.” And then, even quieter, “If we were really, really quiet, my parents would forget you’re here, and you could stay.”

“Would you… would you want that?” I ask. I’m not really sure exactly what I’m asking. When he says “stay here,” does he mean just like this, his head resting on me, looking up at his ceiling, or does he mean… like what someone else would mean if they wanted you to spend the night. 

His voice takes on an uncharacteristic huskiness when he answers. “I’m not sure what I would like. I’m not sure what would be too much.” He reaches back and slides his hand under my neck. “But I know I don’t want you to leave. Can we just try and see?” 

He tugs slightly and pulls my face to his. I kiss him for an answer, and push it, just a little, exploring to see if he’ll let me taste his mouth. He stiffens at first, almost pulls back, but then opens up to me. 

Since I started kissing Jensen, I’ve thought a lot about kissing, because that’s one of the things Jensen makes me do- think about things in a way I never have before. And it’s weird. Why do people kiss?  Why does pushing our mouths together mean anything?  So you would think that kissing Jensen would be a little awkward, because all of a sudden I’m thinking about lips and tongues and it should be kind of gross, really, but it’s not. All the feeling that’s supposed to be there sort of trumps the logical, cognitive part of this. It’s like… I want to be so close with him, and this is a way to be that; closer than you can be with any other person. 

When he opens up his mouth to me, it’s him saying, yeah, me too. 

I’m not sure I’ve ever been this physically close to another person before. As he slides around onto his side next to me, we line up, hip to hip, and he feels thin but not fragile, warm and for me, so real. Like, every other person I’ve ever met is here and gone, and they might as well be figments of my imagination. But I can see each of the freckles that spatter the skin over his nose, and I pick one out, and I know that tomorrow I can look and still find the same one.

His lips are soft and gentle, and he closes his eyes when he kisses, his golden lashes resting on his cheeks. But that’s not what makes it so good. It’s just that it’s him. 

I’ve slept on the ground before. It doesn’t bother me. But Jensen gets uncomfortable. We move to the bed. He settles back down with his head in the crook of my shoulder looking up at the ceiling, the soft spikes of his hair tickling my neck. 

“There’s no cure for autism,” he says. 

“I know.”

“So it’s weird that I think I can do this, that I don’t need my closet any more, because I am always going to need something.”

“You don’t have to. You can always back out. Everyone would understand.”

“No, that’s not what I mean. I really think I can do it. What I mean is… I’m always going to need something, but now, it doesn’t need to be that.” He gestures toward the closet. When his hand comes back down, it finds mine, and his fingers wind through mine and he brings our hands to his chest. 

“Jensen, I might not always—”

“It’s time for me to go to sleep now,” he says, standing up. “I gave us one extra hour past the time I normally go to sleep. It’s up.”

“Do you want me to—”  I freeze, mid-stand. He’s taking off his shirt. His ribs show like a delicate ladder through his pale skin. When his shirt clears his head, he sees me staring. 

“I can’t sleep with a shirt on. It gets tangled on me.” 

I imagine laying next to him, my hands on his skin. I’m not sure I can do it. Because as much as kissing him is the best thing in the world, it’s all I can do to be content with that. Just because it’s all new to both of us, doesn’t mean I’m made of steel. 

He steps close to me then. “Please stay,” he says, and although he’s not looking at me, he’s looking somewhere about four feet behind and to the left of me, I feel as if he still see right into the heart of me. Sees how scared I am, lets me know without words that it will be okay. 

It will. Somehow, with him, it will all be okay. 

++++++++

Jensen

Patience is not one of my strong points. I literally do not understand why when someone says they will check something and call you back, that they do not check that thing and call you back. Hang up the phone, make another call, look up something on the internet, dial the phone again. That does not take a week. Or two weeks. 

It takes three weeks for the Farrin house to get back to me and assign me an agent, and another week for that agent to return my calls, even though they know that Neil and Cynthia are both interested in this piece. Even though I’m already getting calls at the house for interviews and guest blogs. 

My mom reads the contract and gives her stamp of approval after suggesting a few changes. 

My dad starts bringing me around to more and more of his meetings, so I can start to learn the business better. 

Jared keeps his ear to the ground, seeing how often he sees or hears reference to the painting in everyday life. It’s not often. Actually, I feel like the times that he does are sort of cheating, because he hangs around art galleries more than the average person in New York. That first morning, with the two girls in the hotel, that was just amazing luck, and a fluke, it seems. 

I’m feeling more and more hopeful that the auction will be a big enough deal to make the mainstream news though. I’ve heard people talking millions, and it’s funny because that’s so exciting to me, not because of the money, but because the more it goes for, the bigger news it will be. 

I wake up one morning in late August to find my mother dancing around in the kitchen, singing under her breath, which I find absolutely unbearable. Hearing people sing who can’t really sing is like fingernails on a chalkboard to me, except no one keeps the fingernails on the chalkboard sound going on and on and on. Also, you can be reasonably sure that if you are in a room without a chalkboard, no one is going to surprise you with that sound. Not so with my mother and singing. She might start singing anytime, anywhere, no matter how many times I’ve told her how completely painful it is. I only think she “gets” it at a very superficial level, because if she knew how the sound of it shredded up the inside of my head, she wouldn’t do this to me.

When she turns and sees me, she stops singing immediately, but I think only because you can’t sing and smile that big at the same time. 

“You’re listed!” she says, and holds her arms out wide for a hug, which I dutifully give. She ruffles my hair, which I also hate, but not as much as the singing, so I don’t say anything. 

“Can I have a swiss cheese omelet for breakfast?” I ask. She looks a little deflated. It’s not that I am not excited, but I still have to eat. 

“Aren’t you excited?” She asks, rummaging around in the fridge for eggs and cheese. 

I get out the bread and work on picking the millet seeds out of two pieces. “Of course I am excited. When’s the auction?”

“Two months,” she says. 

“That doesn’t tell me when the auction is,” I argue. “Two months exactly from today?  October nineteenth?”

She sighs. “No, October twenty-eighth.”

“That’s more than two months.”

“I know, I know.” She waves her hand impatiently in my direction. “But I haven’t told you the best part.”

The best part to my mother could be anything. It could be that it’s the same day as someone’s birthday. It could be that the reserve price is an even number, which, I admit, would be pretty cool. A love of even numbers is something my mother and I share, and she totally gets. It could be that the contractors have finally scheduled a day to come in and remodel my closet and I’ll be able to go back to sleeping in my room instead of the guest room, because I won’t have to be freaked out of my mind by that gaping maw of a hole that used to be my closet walls. Who knows.

“Yes?” I prompt her.

“Evening. Auction.”  MARA 3D facial expression:  bursting with joy. Pride. A couple of similar things mixed in. I feel my face doing the same thing, but probably for different reasons. 

An Evening Auction is a big, big, deal. You need tickets for an Evening Auction, you need to dress in formal wear. Items at evening auction seldom go for less than six figures. 

“I’ll need two tickets,” I say. 

“How can you be so calm at a time li—” she stops whisking the eggs. “Two tickets?” she asks. She’s staring at me like I just said the most unbelievable thing ever. More unbelievable than my first piece of art going up at an evening auction. Come on, mom, some perspective. Seriously. I get it, I don’t have many friends that she knows about. Okay, I don’t have any friends that she knows about. But still. 

I can’t say “I need one for my friend Jared,” because that will start a whole new round of questions, and also, I can’t attach the ticket to Jared in any way, or she’ll forget. In the past month, Jared and I have found out a few things about the limits of his disability, which is what we call it now. If I leave it at, “I need two tickets,” Mom will get me two tickets but if I say the ticket is for Jared, as in the specific person, she will forget to get an extra ticket. It’s very, very weird. 

“Yes,” I say, and leave it at that. My parents are pretty good about letting me have my own reasons for things, and knowing when I am not going to talk about it. 

“Okaaaaay,” she says. “Aren’t you going to ask me the reserve price?  The estimate?” 

“What is the reserve price and the estimate?” I ask obediently. 

“One point two million, reserve. Six to eight million, estimate.”

She finally gets the reaction she was looking for from me. The numbers she has just quoted are unheard of. Impossible. This is news. This means interviews and interest beyond the art community. This means coverage beyond the market in New York City. It widens the net. Every single additional person who hears about this increases our chances of finding someone. 

I look at her. Make eye contact, which I know is like the most rewarding thing I can do for her. Her eyes are shining, which I normally consider to be a frightening idiom, like picturing beams of light coming out of someone’s eye sockets, but in this case, I can see what people mean by that phrase. They’re not really shining with light, they are shining with feeling. Beams of feelings are coming out of her eyes. I kind of like it. 

She opens her arms for a hug, and I go to her. I squeeze her really tight and lift her off the ground. She laughs, and then rests her head on my shoulder. I’m so proud of you,” she says. 

“I know.”

Jared is waiting on the front steps of our brownstone when I leave the house. Sometimes, he sleeps over, which is a lot easier to do than it would be with a normal boy. After I introduce him to my parents, and get over the initial adjustment that they always have finding out that I like a boy, we only need to be quiet, out of their sight for a little while before they forget about him. 

Most of the time though, he still sleeps at the shelter, or one of the hotels. I miss him so much overnight. I feel like my life hits some sort of pause button when we’re apart. My excitement about the listing doesn’t feel complete yet, because he doesn’t know. 

“What are you all glowing about?” he asks when I come down the stairs. 

Normally I would call him on a phrase like that, but today, I get it. I saw it with my mom, and I imagine I must look kind of the same way. 

“You’re going to need a tuxedo,” I tell him. 

++++++++

Jared

Finding something to wear turns out to be a lot harder than I thought it would be. 

He doesn’t care at all what I wear, and medium-handsome is definitely good enough for him, but I am nervous about this. From his parents’ point of view, they’ll be meeting me for the first time. If I were his parents and some guy showed up for the first time in an ill-fitting knock-off tux on the night their son is about to make his first million at age eighteen, I’d definitely have my suspicions. Jensen’s parents are wonderful people, and I love them, but you could hardly blame them for feeling that way. 

I want to look comfortable and natural. I want to feel comfortable and natural. I want Jensen and I to look like we’ve been together for longer than just a few hours, and not like I’m playing a part in a cheap rental. And anyway, I don’t think I could do a rental anyway. Those places want to take measurements and give you a suit when they’ve got it made. No way would that work out for me. 

So I troll through consignment shops and vintage clothes stores and try and find a balance between something that looks good, something I don’t have to steal, and something that Jensen won’t have to pay for. 

I don’t stop looking until Jensen says, “wow” when I come out of the fitting room one day. For my part, I know it’s shallow, but I can’t wait to see him in a tux. He’s already dazzlingly handsome, the thought of him dressed up and looking fancy to boot has me weak in the knees. But for my own part, I’ve tried on too many bad suits, ill fitting suits, stinky suits, that I’m just hoping not to be laughed at. His reaction catches me off guard.

“That’s an amazing suit,” he says. “It fits perfect.” That had been his big hang up. The suit had to fit perfect, and he’d rejected several for “fit” issues that I couldn’t detect. Be doesn’t know the best part yet though. It has a secret I know he’ll love. 

“Look,” I say, and flash him the inside of the coat. It’s lined with a dark burgundy crushed velvet. He doesn’t look. He feels. He runs the back of his hand over the lush fabric. His eyes close. I knew he’d love it. I’ve seen how just the touch of something soft can help de-escalate his anxiety, how much he loves stroking the short fur on his Siamese cats’ noses. 

“This feels like you, sleeping over,” he says. “Comforting. Secret.”  

We bring the suit to the dry cleaners. Jensen fills out the slip, which has become our habit—I can get so many more things accomplished if he just fills out the paperwork. We even have a license for selling flowers in central park now. He also pays for an extra month of storage. It’s not like I can cram the suit into my locker at Grand Central Station, and he definitely can’t hide it under his bed. 

“I got invited to Good Morning America,” Jensen says as we walk towards the west side. I have class this afternoon at City University, something that Jensen literally cannot comprehend. 

“Are you going to do it?” I ask. You would think this would be a no-brainer, publicity and all that, but Jensen’s agent Patrick says there’s a risk of over-exposure in these last few weeks. He says part of the appeal of this piece is the novelty of it, and if Jensen wears out that novelty too soon, it could lower the price. 

It’s a risk for us, because we don’t care about the price as much as we do about the publicity, but in the end, Patrick convinced Jensen that if the painting achieves a high enough price, we can have all the publicity that we want afterwards. It also works out better that way, because then we’ll know where it’s going, and the message will be that much clearer. 

“No,” Jensen says. “Good Morning, America was definitely on Patrick’s ‘no’ list. But I am allowed to accept the dinner invitation from Sophia Coppola.”

I privately think that Patrick is a snob of the highest order, but he does apply a certain logic to his decisions. Anything likely to give out too much information, to erode the mystique surrounding Jensen and his art is a no-go. Anything that gets people talking and spreading rumors, that’s all good. 

I wait to see if I’m invited as well, but I’m actually hoping not. The suit completely used up all of the money I had stashed away for emergencies. I cannot afford to buy any more clothes, and I am not showing up for a dinner party at Sophia Coppola’s penthouse wearing cargo pants and a t-shirt. Although, who knows. Maybe that would increase Jensen’s je ne sais quoi. 

Jensen kisses me goodbye on the steps of the Math Building. Kissing him is my absolute favorite thing. Next to talking to him. And walking with him. And watching him sketch. Or everything. They’re all tied for my favorite thing in the world. I have it pretty bad, in case you haven’t noticed. 

“Kevin after class?” he asks. 

“Sure thing.”

Kevin is a boy who lives on the same block as Jensen and his parents. He also has autism, although it’s a little more pronounced than what Jensen is dealing with. We visited him yesterday and played Halo the Awakening for two hours straight, but it was hard to judge if he remembered me or not after I left the room for several minutes. He didn’t react much when Jensen first introduced me to him, and it was pretty much the same when I came back into the room. Today we’re going to try and get his attention away from the game, and see. 

When I take my seat, the girl next to me gives me a look, the same sort of look people get on their face when they step in gum. “Are you just starting the class now?” she asks. “The final exam is next week.” 

After spending the morning with Jensen, I realize how incredibly, incredibly lucky I am. What if I meet some other people like myself, or other people who can remember me, and they are all like this girl?  Or worse?  Because they could be a lot worse. Look at me, going to school and volunteering at the homeless shelter where I sometimes live, when I could be robbing banks or murdering people and getting away scot-free. 

Or the people I meet could be complete psychopaths. Seriously, sometimes I wonder why I am not. 

I’m completely lost in class today. I made it a bit farther than last time, but it looks like I’ll be taking the class again next semester. Jensen says that even if If No One Can Remember You, Meet Here gets sold in October, it probably won’t be on display until sometime next year, so I’ll still be free this fall to take classes. Plus, Jensen will be in school as well, so I’ll need to find some different things to fill my time than what I’ve been doing this summer, which is art, Jensen, art, art and some more Jensen. 

I’m going to audit another photography class, because I think with Jensen’s help that I can do a little better selling prints to galleries. He showed some of my work to his father, and he said he’d let Jensen bring my portfolio around to some of his contacts, when Jensen explained that it was for a “friend who was too socially anxious” to do it themselves. Jensen’s parents are expert at accommodations.

When I step out into the evening light after class, I don’t see Jensen anywhere, which is unusual. He’s extremely punctual. If he says five pm, he means five pm, and he gets pretty agitated when other people are late, or not where they said they would be. 

I wait.

And wait. 

And I wait until panic starts to squeeze my chest. 

And he doesn’t come. 

++++++++ 

Jensen

I press my head tight into the corner of my room so I don’t need to see the gaping maw of my closet. It doesn’t help though, because I can hear the space. I can hear how the echoes and creaks of the house sound hollow and open, even after my mother closes the door, so I knock my forehead against the wall to keep the sound out. 

I’m not sure what I was thinking, giving up the coping mechanism that worked so well for me for fifteen years. I should have at least had a plan for what I would do instead. Now I’m flailing around in all this space, and there’s nothing to catch onto. My father is on the phone with the contractors, but they won’t be here for at least another day, and even then, it will take them several hours, if not more than a day to fix it, and while that’s happening there will be that grinding noise of the power tools and microscopic dust everywhere that you can’t even get up with the HEPA filter vacuum. 

“Jen?” Mom says, quiet. “Jen, I want to help. Maybe I didn’t listen to what you were saying you needed. Let’s work through this together, okay?”

I knock my head against the wall. It helps. It’s something I can control. It’s something bad, but I can stop it when I’m ready, unlike ninety nine percent of the other things in my life. My mother knows. She waits. She’s patient, and that helps too, because it’s something I can count on. 

My father comes in the room behind us. I can’t see him, because my eyes are squeezed tight and my face is still in the corner, but I can hear him. I can hear how the echoes of his feet on the wood floor are different than they would be if the raw bones of my closet weren’t showing.  It makes all the nerves in my back shiver and clench. 

He opens my closet door and throws something soft onto the ground. Pillows?  He closes the door, and then I listen very carefully, because it’s difficult to tell what he’s doing. I stop my knocking and just press my head very tightly into the corner. 

“Hey, that’s good Jen,” my mother says. “Do you want to see what we’re doing?”

My body feels so tense and tight, I am not sure I can turn around. I don’t say anything. 

“I’m putting down sound dampeners,” my father says. 

I hear the doors close, and then another soft sound. 

“Nothing bad is happening right now,” my mother says. “You can do this. It’s not scary to turn around and walk out of the room.”

Of course it’s not scary. She tries very hard, but she just doesn’t get it. It’s not that it’s scary, it’s that there’s just too much of everything. It’s like there’s this huge wall of differentness and uncertainty pushing on me, crushing me. But the reassuring sound of her voice, if not her words, loosen me up enough so that I can realize that if I turn around, I can see what’s going on, and that will at least reduce some of the uncertainty.

I turn and press my back tightly against the wall. I grit my teeth really, really hard. I see that my father has put a blanket down on the floor where the closet door meets the floor. He’s right. It does help, a little. I take an experimental deep breath.

“You can sleep in the guest room for now,” my mother says.

“When you calm down, we can talk about the auction,” my father says. 

The thing is, it’s not about the auction, and it’s not really about the closet. What started this is that I got lost. Worse than getting lost, I lost track of some time. I think.  I was walking on the Upper West Side, when all of a sudden, I realized I had no idea where I was going, or why I was there. Which was extremely upsetting to me, as my internal clock is usually extremely accurate. It didn’t take me very long to get back on track, but I came home feeling really overwhelmed and agitated, and as soon as I opened up the front door, I could tell the difference. The whole house sounded different, and my normally safe haven was gone, and if I don’t have a home base where I can go and contain everything, then it’s like I’m adrift in the whole universe with no boundaries. 

There’s a reading nook in the guest room, a little alcove with overstuffed chairs and soft lighting and I decide to camp out there for a while. I curl in a ball in one of the chairs. This whole thing had been like a chain reaction, uncertainties adding up on top of each other, until everything in me crashed down at once. But now I’ve got a few things to steady myself on. My mother’s voice. The walls of my house knitting themselves around me into a whole again, or at least as much of a whole as they can be with my closet gone. My father, maybe not always doing and saying the exactly right thing, but trying. The velvety feel of the suede throw pillows my mother hands me.

“Jen, what set this o—”

She’s interrupted by a knock at the door. It’s so quiet and tentative, I almost don’t hear it. I know my mother doesn’t, until she sees me looking in the direction of the sound. 

“I’ve got it,” my father says from somewhere else in the house. I listen to his footsteps. They’re still different, but more contained. I can tolerate it until the contractors put up new walls in the closet. 

Father speaks to someone in the doorway, a quiet boy’s voice.   

“What set this off?  How can we help this not happen again?” my mom asks. 

“I got lost,” I say. 

She wrinkles her brow. “But you made it home, no harm done, right?”

“Home wasn’t the same home as it was the last time I needed it.”

She nods. “I’m sorry honey. You seemed so sure.”

The funny thing is, I can’t even imagine what would have enticed me to sell. Certainly not the money. Cynthia and Neil have been offering me money for years, and that’s never tempted me before. Something. Something just made me think it was done and I didn’t need it any longer. 

My father comes in with a cup of tea for me, and a Xanax. 

“It doesn’t matter about selling it, that part’s fine,” I say. “Just, we need to fix the space where it was.”

“We are,” they say in unison. 

“I just spoke with Barry Carlson on the phone, and offered him a bonus to come tomorrow rather than waiting for Monday.”

“Do you want to stay in a hotel until it’s done?” my mother asks. 

I consider. It’s possible for unexpected things to happen at a hotel, but usually, they are very much the same all the time. If we stay at The Mark like we sometimes do, we might even be able to get our usual suite, which would be very good, since a) I am very familiar with it, and b) you can see the Metropolitan Museum of Art from the balcony. 

“Yes.”

“I’ll call,” my father says. 

Just as he’s leaving the guest room, there’s a knock on the door. He frowns. “Were you expecting anyone?” he asks my mother. 

“No,” she says to his back as he turns to go get the door. To me, she asks, “Anything special you want me to pack for you?” 

I don’t answer for a moment, I’m listening to my father speak to someone at the door. A boy’s voice, quiet. “Now is not a good time,” I hear my father say. “I’m sorry.” Then he shuts the door. 

“Who was that?” my mother calls over her shoulder. 

“I’m not sure," my father says, as he comes back into the room. “A young man who says he’s friends with Jensen, but I didn’t recognize him. Were you expecting anyone?” he asks me. 

“No.”

“I told him it wasn’t a good time. It may have been someone trying to get an interview.”

“I can pack my own things,” I say. It’s getting easier to breathe, to feel like I’m not falling. We have a plan, so that’s fine. I can do this. I try not to think about a stranger at the door. I know my limits, and worrying about him will only set me back from how far I’ve come in the last few moments. 

School will start in a few days, and that will be a big relief. I don’t enjoy school, exactly, but the structure of the day, always knowing what I’m going to do next is good for me, even if it’s math or composition or something. And at the end of the day, I have private studies for art history. Thinking about returning to my school schedule helps too. I head for my room to pack. Probably the Xanax didn’t hurt either. 

Behind me, I hear my mother heave a big sigh of relief. 

“Pack for two days,” my father says. “If it ends up being longer than that, I’ll come back and grab a few extra things.”  His voice is muffled for this last bit, as he has come up behind my mother and pulled her in close, resting his face on her cheek. 

I stand in the doorway of my room, looking at the closet, with the tartan wool blanket my father put along the bottom of the doors. So weird how something that has always been such a grounding influence on me has turned into such an uncertainty. I wonder how I will cope with the blank walls. I decide that it’s the act of doing art, not the art itself that helped me, so fine. I’ll do some more once the new walls are in. I have no idea why I thought I was done. 

There’s a knock on the door. I doubt my parents have heard it, as they are now on the upper floor where their bedroom suite is. I feel more or less leveled out, so I head down to the ground floor to get the door. 

I look through the peephole, and there’s a boy there. His face is a perfect MARA 3d facial expression: worry. There are tight lines around his blue-brown eyes, and his thick, shaggy hair is falling into his face despite his nervous attempt to tuck it behind one ear. He looks like a person who’s dog got hit by a car, or who’s little sister has run off and not come back. 

When I open the door, all the worry vanishes for a second, and his facial expression changes rapidly from worried to MARA 3d facial expression: recognition, blended with MARA 3d facial expression: relief and MARA 3d facial expression: happiness.

“Can I help you?” I ask, taking a step back because all that stuff on his face is directed at me and it feels like a giant wave of feelings just smacks into me. 

And just like that, as fast as it came, the smile and relief is gone. Rapidly replaced by MARA 3d facial expression: trying not to cry. Which is definitely one of my least favorite expressions to be faced with. 

“Je—” It sounds for a second like he’s going to say my name, but he snaps his jaw shut and looks to the side, which is a huge relief for me. “I’m sorry,” he says, his voice tight, and another clue that he is trying not to cry. 

“I must have the wrong address.”  And then he turns and walks away. 

++++++++

Jared

There’s a certain big rock in Central Park I like to sit at when I need to think. But it’s night, so that’s out. That’s also the reason I had to go to Jensen’s house instead of following our plan, which was to meet at The Storm if we ever couldn’t find each other. The museum closed hours ago.

I can’t believe I let my guard down like that. I can’t believe I let myself believe that it was finally over. At least, partially. I thought that those few precious weeks with Jensen meant that it was going to last forever and I stopped telling myself that it was only a dream. 

I had been prepared to knock on that door all night long, or as long as it took for his father to remember that there had been a boy at the door who wanted to check if Jensen was alright. I was ready to wait until Jensen figured out it was me, and come answer the door himself. I was ready to accept whatever reason he gave for not showing up. I was not ready for him not to know me. 

There’s a massive hole torn through me. I keep seeing his face, completely blank of any hint of recognition. I keep seeing his eyes slide right past me.  I keep seeing my mother’s face, looking down at me when I was only a preschooler, and denying having ever seen me. 

There’s an all-night diner in Hell’s Kitchen, where you can get a plate of empanadas for less than three bucks any time of day. It’s about a half hour walk from here, so I turn that way. I’m all but completely broke, having spent all my money on that stupid suit. What had I been thinking?  Jensen has the dry cleaning slip, so there’s no way I’ll get it back, even for the small amount of money I could resell it for. I imagine the slip itself might already be gone, mysteriously dissolved from reality along with Jensen’s memories of me. 

The waitress who greets me is only half paying attention to me, she’s got a couple girlfriends sitting at the counter, and that’s always a bad sign for me. But there’s an empty seat front and center, so it might not go too badly. I order the dessert empanadas and a cup of black coffee. 

So what next?  I’m not ready to give up, not yet. As painful as that was, I can’t help but still hold out some hope. Maybe my “curse” is fading off, but not gone?  Maybe if I am patient, it will go back to how it was with him. If he’s forgotten me, he’s probably also forgotten the plan and the Storm, but I know his schedule. If I can get up the courage to face the prospect of having my heart shredded again and again, I can keep trying. This can’t all have been for nothing.

The empanadas are just what I needed. Well, except for needing a single person in the whole world to remember me so I can at least pretend to have a sort of normal life, that would be good too. But in terms of food that strengthens your will to live, these empanadas cannot be beat. Crisp and greasy on the outside, rich and chocolatey with slices of banana and a hint of cinnamon on the inside. I let the hot coffee slide down my throat and cleanse my palate for another bite, and another, until I’m dismayed to look down at my plate and find it’s all gone.

I have a plan now. I need to follow the auction, I need to keep trying with Jensen. That’s all I can do, and that’s all I will do. 

The next morning is Cronut morning. In case you have been living under a culinary rock, which to be fair, I practically have—eating at cheap diners and the homeless shelter like I do—a cronut is a cross between a croissant and a donut. It’s croissant dough shaped and fried like a donut, filled with pastry cream, and glazed. I’ve had one, they are heaven and hell in piece of wax paper.

Sunday mornings, people line up by the hundreds outside Dominique Ansel’s bakery on Spring Street. I am a professional line waiter there, which is perfectly legal, and a fabulous way to make money. I wait in line, which I mentally divide into fifths. Once I pass the first fifth mark, I hold up a sign offering my spot in line for five dollars. If I make it to the second fifth before selling my spot, I charge ten dollars, and so forth until I get up to the front of the line, where I can charge as much as twenty five dollars, and I’ve never not had a paying customer at that rate, in fact, I have better sales at those high prices in the front of the line than I do for the lower ones in the back. I can make seventy five or one hundred dollars an hour this way, and the lines generally stay long for at least two hours. 

I’m torn this morning because I need the money really badly, but I want to get to the museum, and I want to check the art section news but I am really, really low on money. That damn suit. What can I do though? I have to survive. So I stand in line, straining my ears to hear anyone talking about art, anyone at all. 

But no one is. I tell myself that Jensen not remembering me has nothing to do with the auction, and there’s no reason why the closet piece won’t sell, and I can keep up with that part of the plan at least. So it’s not really that I’m not worried about the auction and Stage Three, I’m worried about Jensen.

Maybe I shouldn’t be. He got along fine without me before we met, and now it’s like we never met. No big deal, right?  But when he came to the door last night, he did look stressed. He looked terrible, in fact, which is really saying something, considering how amazingly handsome he is. Pale and drawn, with blotchy patches of red thrown across his cheeks. 

I feel like if the auction goes as planned, that’s my sign that he’s doing okay. If he withdraws, then something is wrong. It’s so infuriating wanting to know. Wanting to go to him and ask: what happened?  Are you okay? As much as it hurts, I want him to be perfectly fine. 

I only go through the line five times before I quit. I increase my price to forty dollars for the front spot in line, and make it easily all three times, plus two takers at the twenty-dollar position, for a total of one hundred and forty dollars. Enough. 

I pay ten dollars to get into the museum today, which seems to be the magic lowest possible “donation” that doesn’t get an eye-roll and hassle from the gals at the ticket window. My heart is beating painfully hard in my chest, reminding me of the first time I did this, the first time I tested him. Then, my heart beat quick from excitement, now from dread. It’s twenty minutes past eleven o’clock, so I find him at Still Life with a Bottle of Rum. I didn’t even bother looking at The Storm. I’m really just kidding myself here, I knew last night when he opened the door that it was over. 

“You’re a really fabulous artist,” I tell him when I can coax my vocal cords to work. 

“Thank you,” he says, not looking up from his sketch. 

“You look really familiar,” I say, “do I know you?”

“I don’t think so.”

I want so desperately for him to look at me. To meet my eyes. Maybe something would click. 

“Wait. I know. You’re that guy who’s selling his closet.”

“It’s not my closet any longer. It’s a triptych.”

“My name’s Jared,” I say, stepping a little closer, holding out my hand. 

“I don’t really enjoy meeting new people,” Jensen says, “I know that’s probably rude, but I’m happy just to be drawing and not talking.”

He glances up. Maybe to see if I’ve taken offense, or if I’m going to walk away and leave him alone. But he sees me, I know he does.

And nothing. 

++++++++

Jensen

“You look really fabulous,” my mother says, straightening my tie. “It’s a shame you never got around to asking your friend to come with us.”

“What friend?” I ask. I wish she would stop talking. This whole thing is overwhelming as it is. I’m barely holding it together. 

“I don’t know. But remember you asked me to get two tickets?”  

“Did I? I don’t know why I said that.”

“It’s okay. We’ve got enough going on tonight without an extra person along.” 

Mom is the one who looks really amazing. She’s wearing this burgundy velvet dress that reminds me of… something. In my mind, it evokes this weird association, like secrets, and hidden messages. But there’s nothing secret about mom’s dress, and she looks like something really special. Dad can’t keep his hands off her, he keeps touching her waist or her shoulder or stroking her hair. I’m really glad I am not wearing that dress. 

I know a lot of people at the auction.  Of course there’s Cynthia and Neil, and Sophia Coppola, who I met at dinner last month, and a few gallery owners that are friends of my father’s. I see the triptych in the gallery, waiting to be brought in, and I’m relieved to find that I don’t feel any kind of attachment to it. My new closet is working out just fine, although I haven’t done any drawing in it yet, I don’t really know where to begin with that. It will come though.

I stand in front of the triptych, and look at the section at the very top. There are three types of people who are interested in bidding on If No One Can Remember You, Meet Here. 

The first is people who are interested in autism. There’s been a lot of commentary on what this piece can reveal about the autistic mind, including the well-known fact that I’m not embarrassed about my private thoughts and primitive efforts on display for everyone to see. 

Then there are the people for whom the piece has achieved a sort of cult-like status. The odd name, the whispered rumors. Patrick was right to keep me off the mainstream media, it worked perfectly. They say Stephen King will be bidding by telephone tonight. 

Then there are the people who are interested in it as a piece of art. And these people tend to focus on that final addition. The sketch with The Storm and the enigmatic eyes scrawled over it. Critics say that that part really demonstrates my artistic and emotional maturity. Others say that it shows the sort of lightning bolt type inspiration that gives art meaning apart from the physical images. 

The eyes are my favorite part too, although I can’t exactly say why. Looking at them now, I feel burgundy velvet under my fingertips, and I know in my heart that if they had been rendered in color, they would have been blue-brown. They’re the only part of the triptych that I’ll miss. 

The bidding goes too fast, I cannot follow what is happening. I didn’t realize it before but I’m really hoping Neil Pinna wins it. The museum is like my second home, and it would be easy to visit it nearly every day if it were there. A gallery would be harder, but do-able, depending where it is. 

The bidding, which had started at a million, quickly goes up to five, then stalls a bit, and it looks like Charles Seton, a private collector, will win it, before Neil puts in another bid and it starts up again. Six million. Seven. 

I’m not sure what made me say that public display would be a condition of the sale, and my father says that it’s unusual that we were able to get the auction house to agree to that, but I’m glad it worked out that way. If a private collector wins it, I’ll still be able to see it for at least a year, one way or another. I think I will miss it.

Twelve million, six hundred and forty two thousand. The winning bid, a surprise bid from the Museum of Modern Art, which had never publicly expressed interest in the piece before. Okay, okay. That’s good. MoMa is actually a slightly shorter distance from my house. I can visit the triptych any time I want, for as long as they have it on display. 

For some reason, I’m really interested to see the kinds of people who come to look at it. 

Jared

It’s actually not easy for me to access the internet. Most libraries these days require a valid library card if you want to sit down at one of their desktop terminals and browse the web. However, if you have the entire New York Public Library at your disposal, you hardly have need of the internet at all. 

I learn that the Museum of Modern Art is the thirteenth most visited art museum in the world, well below the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which is fourth. Still: three point one million visitors per year. He did it. He really did it. I remember the first day that Jensen told me about stage three, and how he didn’t want to tell me exactly what he had in mind, in case it couldn’t work. It worked better than we ever could have expected, and he’ll never know. At least, I don’t let myself hope.

I visit Jensen nearly every day. Some days, I talk to him, compliment his art, ask if I can share his table in the café. Some days, I just sit on a bench near him and watch him draw. It depends on his mood. I’m not sure how I’ll feel if he ever starts coming here with another boy, but until then, he’s the closest thing I’ve got to a friend, even if he doesn’t know it. 

He doesn’t show any signs of remembering me at all, not even that sort of, hey, don’t I know you feeling that I think everyone gets from time to time, whether it ends up being real or imagined. I think a lot about what that means. Why did it happen at all if it was going to end like this?  Maybe there’s no meaning to it at all, and we’re all just living in a completely random universe and anything can happen without good reason. Maybe there’s a higher power that wanted me to have a taste of happiness, even if just for a little while. Maybe I met Jensen just so that If No One Can Remember You, Meet Here could happen, and if that was destined to happen, maybe there’s a reason. I like to think it’s one or both of those last two options, rather than the first, because if there’s someone directing the works down here, then maybe they have a plan for me and Jensen and this isn’t how it will end. 

So what can I do?  If No One Can Remember You, Meet Here opens today. I go to the Museum of Modern Art, smile at Jensen as I pass by, and wait.