Now, when nothing remains to remind me of Chris on the small plot of land we intermittently cohabited, I can recover scarcely more from memory. I see the stark grounds of St. Albans, the national cathedral looming over us like a threat at 3 a.m. in the cold. I see a brown field in Manassas where regiments of men once depleted their human stock. Though I see the unadorned crucifix hung out of affectation or despair on oxblood walls that I have since demolished with my own hands, he has removed himself, leaving an absence more substantial than his physical person. Always now, when I try to recover Chris from the scant testament to our shared past, associations I don’t understand form an obstruction.
         Yesterday scalding water pelted me from above, behind, and each side. I imagined the faded scars on my forearms blistering and separating from me in unbroken cursive forms. I will send him messages on the parts of me I have disavowed, I thought. Surely were I so brutalized by acts of penitence he would receive me. I pressed my eyes shut against the white tile and the light infiltrating through the glass brick, causing the grid of mortar to burn into the inside of my eyelids and draw nearer. Still I couldn’t summon the smell of his breath or the lightness of his limbs when in sleep they lay across mine, could not even recall his likeness. He has infected me with his austerity, annihilating the sensory evidence of our contact, consuming even the memory of sense. He is equal parts ascetic and vampire. Of course he’s dying.

Some weekdays I sleep in on a king-sized mattress so firm I wrap the comforter completely around my body to create a cushion. Light pours over the white washed brick and the pale pine boards, obliterating the hard surfaces of things. Staring into the whiteness, I try to construct a whole from small pieces I remember in the way I remember facts gleaned from a text, but not experienced.
         I remember, for example, his lightness. When we watched the reenactors man the artillery he folded both arms in front of me with his hands clasped and I felt I could step forward and free myself, as though the smallest units of his bone and meat and blood would disperse with the slightest disturbance. He was averse to sustenance because he believed food would divert him, I don’t know from what. In solidarity, when I was with him, I fasted too. 
         It seems to me he was tall; I remember stretching through the arches of my feet to wrap my arms fully around his shoulders. Perhaps not so tall as Richard, but long-limbed and dexterous, with toes so long he once wove his through mine as he slept. His hair, eyes and skin were as fair as a child’s. I felt surprise and faint embarrassment when his unshaven chin brushed against my brow, when I first saw a few dark hairs winding over his collar bone under his tie, loosened after sixteen hours underneath fluorescent bulbs that cast his face in chiaroscuro of purple and white.

Like Chris, I am an attorney, my reward for enduring the solitude and sensory privation of the institution that granted me my degree, the purging of my already compromised mental reserves to accommodate a litany of rules I vomited out during a sixteen hour inquisition and immediately after forgot, the attrition of my moral character. At one time, abstractions such as injustice and oppression offended me. Then one autumn when I should have been finding work no rain fell for over three months and the soil of the mall grew so dry I choked on the dirt that became airborne when I walked. The ground froze prematurely and the air thinned of moisture and oxygen. Just before the advisory issued emptying the streets save the homeless and others in business suits and respirators dashing for their cars, dour delegations from law firms in D.C. and New York and a few from Chicago and L.A. descended on the school. My suited classmates supplicated themselves, apparently unaffected by the dry storm that ripped the last leaves from the trees and rendered the city’s open spaces wasted brown tracts as devoid of life as the surface of Mars. By January the light was scant and literal. I carved words into my arms to remind myself of other things: “cerulean,” on my right forearm with a skill that was almost calligraphic and “azure” on my left in a child’s inept scrawl. As though outside myself, I witnessed the transformation that occurred from prospective officer of the court to actual ward of the State.
         When I returned to law school after a year’s leave I’d developed an appreciation for things concrete. I took courses in evidence, advanced civil procedure, the criminal code. Complexity did not deter me, so long as the rules were knowable. I avoided class, but studied the texts with a discipline that was more consuming than commitment or interest. More than once I became aware of narrow crevices radiating upwards from a glaring white chasm. The bland offerings of my refrigerator would cover in mold; I’d sleep past three in the afternoon; my eyes would tear endlessly without reason. I put my faith in rules and each time averted the institution. I graduated, passed the bar exam, and shortly after happened on an employer willing to overlook my embarrassing disability, to wit, the Federal government.
         In addition to my profession, Chris shares with me my illness. He has gone farther with the former, and I with the latter, but neither of us is finished yet.

I met Chris sometime during the last of the three years I worked reviewing appeals filed by the purportedly aged, blind, disabled and destitute and preparing recommendations for a magistrate I never saw. No penalty attached to the lunch breaks I took of two and three hours, when I walked the scary strip of New York Avenue to the deserted groves of the arboretum, or past solitary men fishing off Hayne’s Point, or into unsafe quarters of Northwest, such as the block of T Street where a builder’s plan for an orderly succession of similar rowhouses behind fenced yards of identical dimensions had succumb to dereliction and the unchecked aggression of growing things. I remember the affinity I felt as I stood before a yard where a fig tree spread its branches the full width; vines from the potted tomatoes overran their cages and spiraled through the bars of the iron gate; a cannabis plant thrived. Everywhere tendrils of vinca wound their way through the shade and upwards, the pull of the sun greater than that of gravity. My memory has rendered still the burgeoning disarray of the small yard, so always I remember the yard in a state of incipience, and not decay.
         The memory of Chris’s yard seems older now and more credible than the odd memories of him that occasionally resurface, such as of how still he once stood when I passed him standing barefoot in his yard, looking into the sky, flexing and extending his long toes. When I turned he was staring at me with eyes as pale and remote as Antarctica.
         Suffice it say we met, several years ago in July at a time when I practiced as a bureaucrat in a government agency and he was a partner in the Washington office of a prominent New York firm. One late Sunday afternoon we fell asleep together on his living room couch after getting high. We’d only started seeing each other with some regularity when we went to see a reenactment of the battle of Manassas. Neither of us had eaten in more than a day and I remember the agitation in his stomach as he held me from behind and we faced the men advancing over the field. In the end the men left standing retreated from each other, leaving behind their dead and wounded.
         “What do you think happens to us after we’re dead?” he asked. Medics administered morphine to men seeming to die. I thought of the cross I’d seen on his wall and pondered a way of broaching my indifference toward the afterlife, my ambivalence toward pursuing even the current life to a natural conclusion. When he continued before I could answer he revealed a faith as bereft of comfort as my nihilism.
         “I wish I believed we return to this life over and over to perfect ourselves, but I think we’ll become one with Christ or something else that sucks just as badly.”
         Soon, I was spending the night with him in his house for weeks at a time. After sex he would stretch himself over me like a sheet, sometimes falling asleep with me completely contained by his long limbs and frame. Each time I awoke during the night he was so close I drew my breath from the air he exhaled. I wondered then if I slept with him every night I’d grow accustomed to his nearness and join in his deep slumber.

In one way I am still near Chris. For almost five years I have walked past the building that houses his law firm every morning on my way from the Metro to my place of employment. He once invited me to meet him in his office after work. In the lobby, marble and brass intersected at right angles; artificial lighting bathed the atrium in taupe; the plants were vertical and did not flower. More than an hour passed before Chris retrieved me from the stiff leather couch in the waiting area where I’d been thumbing the glossy pages and imbecilism of finance journals and contemplating the aesthetic of prosperity unmediated by taste.
         We left his office after ten that night and walked for miles without direction past where solitary rowhouses on decaying lots and the she-men of Scott’s Circle gave way to the imposing façades of sovereignty along embassy row. As we walked he held his arms so tightly around me that I pried his fingers apart so I could breathe. Still he seemed to press closer, as if he could permeate the layers of wool and human matter, meld and redistribute the burdens of each of our being. When we reached St. Albans we rested against stone structures that seemed without depth against the night sky. He curled his shoulders and head into my lap. 
         “I’m not well,” he confided.
         Then several months passed and I didn’t see him. I knew his work took him to such places as Bangkok and Tashkent and Istanbul, where he took Ecstasy and shot dope and imprudently smoked hashish. More than once he called me at home during the work day weeks after he’d returned to let me know he was about to leave and would call me when he got back but didn’t. 
         The days were very short when the first fine fault lines appeared, the beginning of a process that, unchecked, would sunder me from the world of rational thought. In my grief I painted my bedroom the color telecast by my computer when I turned it on in the morning and insipid clouds drifting across the sky-colored screen implied a benign universe. To distract myself I interviewed with a law firm that solicited me with slick references to my marketability and expertise. I’ve grown to enjoy such things as major appliances engineered in Germany exclusively from stainless steel and kitchen knives made by a manufacturer of surgical instruments. At the time, I gave no thought to the change in my material circumstances the new job would bring. I accepted the offer to be closer to Chris.
         Late that February the rangy hedge outside my front door exploded with yellow blooms. Shortly after Chris resurfaced, saying only he’d been traveling, and perhaps at times sick, and at other times busy. Hollows in his cheeks and the foreign hue of his mouth corroborated the sickness. The rest I didn’t question. 
         I began staying with him again when he asked me and when I was able, because I had also become busy. In retrospect, I can see that Chris’s separation from me was a process that began on the forgotten first day we met. I saw him infrequently that spring, though his intensity compensated for the absences of weeks and longer. I thought he’d displaced his appetite for food onto a hunger for sex and alcohol and sleep, until even his interest in these waned. Still I would awaken to his hand clutching my thigh, his peaceful breath belying the strength of his grasp, or his mouth pressed into my collarbone.
         The last night I stayed with him was in June. He mixed strong drinks in large glasses in the kitchen he’d painted the color of a polluted night sky while I took certain liberties in the adjacent room. I ran my fingers over the titles of his dusty law books, occasionally removing a tome to shake it for relics I hoped to find tucked between the pages. I lifted from their altars each of the religious icons from other faiths, replacing them on different shelves, sometimes facing inwards. My fingers trailed over the photo album I’d never before noticed, though I’d spent many mornings while he slept quietly surveying the contents of his closets, cabinets and shelves. I remember the anticipation as I struggled to free the album from where it was tightly wedged between a locked metal file and a volume with ornate calligraphic characters of a far Eastern alphabet on its spine. I caught only a fleeting glimpse of a single picture on the first page of a middle-aged couple and a small boy outside a dismal yard before Chris called to me. I remember a couple standing closely but not touching in the left foreground outside a fence, behind which partially buried columns stood at odd angles in a yard of unkempt grass. To the right was the corner of the stone church and a boy who stood so far away he almost escaped the edge of the picture. He’d crammed his hands into the pockets of his windbreaker and his face receded into the shadows of a giant hood.
         The following morning I disengaged myself from his arm and the knee he’d slid between my thighs, dressed, ate a piece of dry toast. When I left he’d not yet awoken. 
         I had no word from him for several months and he didn’t return the calls I made to his house and his work. One day I returned home from work to find that the ivy that had crept up the chain link fence around my front yard had finally torn it down. That was the day he left me a message on my answering machine, saying he’d requested a transfer to his firm’s Taiwan office, his request had been granted, and he’d be gone when I heard his message.

After an early frost the ends of a graceless rose cane blackened and receded from the threshold of my front door and the cold invaded me like a pathogen. I bought an ancient Nova from a neighbor so I could drive places, such as to St. Albans, as far as Manassas, and past a hand-rendered ‘for sale’ sign amidst the overgrowth in front of the abandoned rowhouse on T Street. Shortly the sign came down; squatters’ possessions overflowed into the front yard; pieces of wood were dislodged from the side porch to build fires and warm the occupants. On a night I couldn’t drive past because ambulances and firetrucks had blocked traffic the fire chief told me a pyre had been built with the remaining pieces of furniture and the inside of the house was no more than a shell. Within a few weeks the debris had been cleared and I could stand in the yard and see the house’s gutted insides through the window opening. By January, boards appeared over the windows and doors and legal notices counseled against entry.
         One night I determined I would pry open the boards and search for artifacts. A late snow was falling. Soft, wet snowflakes that turned to water when they landed caused the windows of my car to fog over. I double-parked so I could stand amidst the unruly growth that was slowly reclaiming the yard and assess the cracks that had opened in the boards over the windows. I didn’t notice the large man without a jacket who was taking measurements of the side porch, and writing the numbers on his right forearm.
         “Should I buy it?” he asked.
         He took me inside and shone his flashlight along the blackened brick and the holes in the sooty dry wall exposing insulation and wiring like the flesh and guts of a cadaver. Some of the stairs remained but were unsafe to tread on so he walked behind me with an enormous hand around my rib cage and shone the flashlight ahead of us. Several of the exposed beams supporting the peaked roof over the bedroom had been removed, and snow and light from the night sky fell through a hole over where the bed had been. Perhaps Richard found it unduly romantic when, after a friendly conversation about property values and the imminent D.C. revival, I led him by the hand to have sex underneath the snow falling through the collapsed roof, but he offered no objection. He couldn’t have surmised that I acted out of vindictiveness.
         I didn’t expect to see him again. Yet in the days that followed I behaved in ways out of character with my professional demeanor, with my entire life. I ordered an extravagant dessert at a business lunch on the clients’ dole and bought a skirt that had an indecent slit up the side of my leg. I was still at the peak of my giddiness when, before a week had passed, Richard and I had sex in my bed, where he would soon spend all of his nights.
         Immediately after we bought the house on T Street at a foreclosure sale, Richard mastered the plant life, ripped out the trash trees that had seeded in the front yard and grown ten feet in a year, covered over the dirt with bricks so no more trees would take root, and confined the garden to an orderly patch of ornamental grasses, yucca, and other plants with upright aspects. Richard’s plans for the house entailed vigorous destruction, in which I participated, followed by many months of rebuilding, which Richard completed on his own. After I made rubble from the walls Richard converted the bedroom adjacent to ours into a studio for his sculpting. From a sheet of discarded metal he created a porpoise doubled over as if leaping into the warmth of the sun. The long nose, tail, and fin taper with the precision and grace of the arches over space in the houses he designs in his profession as an architect. In this way Richard’s professional life and his life outside his profession form a coherent union that I find foreign yet deeply revere. 
         Richard has a gift for luring the air and light into narrow spaces. We tore out what remained of the second floor on the side of the house that faced the North so Richard could put in windows that span both the levels. In our bedroom he installed an enormous skylight over the bed and panels of glass that stretch from my knees to the top of our high ceilings. I sometimes think the glass will shatter with the force of the southern sun. Our house is white and tan and the colors of wood bleached by the sun. I know it’s very beautiful.
         We eat well when we’re together. The other night after a meal of lamb and baby carrots and a rich Medoc wine that tasted of perfume I lay over Richard on our couch, contentedly sated and obtuse from an excess of consumption. With his right hand he traced the indecipherable scripts on my arms the origin of which he has not asked and I have not told. With his right hand he worked his way under my skirt then digressed with his thumb. He commented that I had grown as firm and round as the earth.

Chris has returned. I’ve seen him twice now outside his firm. Recently I saw him entering his building at 11:30 as I was returning from a meeting. He was drinking from a thermos and though his stubble was fine, I could see he had left it for several days. Just last week he sat on a bench beside a concrete potter that for many years held only the ragged branches of a browning evergreen. Last summer the potter was filled with geraniums so bright they startled my eyes when I emerged from the Metro. The white pansies with purple faces planted there in September all align now in the direction of the sun. As I passed, Chris muttered something to himself that I couldn’t understand though I studied the movement of his lips. When I looked behind me, he’d crossed his ankle over his knee, and I could see the hole that had worn through on the ball of his foot all the way to his threadbare sock. 
         He looked directly at me. He didn’t know who I was. It occurred to me that I could follow him, and he wouldn’t know.
         The new visual evidence of Chris’s person hasn’t recovered my memory of him. Each time the definition of his features registered with the violence of a steel blade to the gut, and dislodged with as little resistance. Though I recount to myself the details I’ve amassed—that he was light, and tall, and his eyes were very pale—when I try to remember him I think instead of the tundra that most people don’t believe exists in this part of the world. 
         In truth, the periods of cold drought ended several winters ago, and even in January the ground no longer freezes. Though the dirt yields under my weight, at times I am aware of the stratum of packed clay soil that stretches downward for miles. At such times I feel closest to Chris. Once when I was walking on the mall I thought he was standing so close that if I moved we would touch. When I turned the sensation receded into an incoherent terrain where violence and the cold lay the earth bare.

Nancy Stade studied English Literature at Columbia College and Trinity College, Dublin. She received her law degree from Columbia Law School, and has practised as an associate chief counsel with the Food and Drug Administration and a junior partner with Hale and Dorr, LLP. Ms. Stade has published short fiction, and is currently working on a novel. She lives in Mexico.