I live in a ground floor studio with an adjacent bathroom which is a perfect size for sitting on the toilet while showering my feet, my toes warmly spattered as I groan and the tube case of muscle inside me contracts like a powerful worm’s. That is a visceral, real world experience. A few strides past my gaming setup and at the other end is a molded kitchenette, and a large window where I like to sit at night when the kill streaks get too much—I sit there and massage my scorched eyes and breathe and let the moonlight lather me. Sometimes I look out of the window.
     It looks out over a set of train tracks, and, beyond that, a link fence and then the neatly wooded edge of a golf course. From my window I have a clear view of a small artificial hill, it’s like a velvety green breast, gently sloping up to a little ridge line and then dropping roundly down into what I’m pretty sure is called a fairway. Under the stars, the little hill, with its clipped and polished bushes, looks like a stage set where two lovers would meet in secret. Shakespeare style. I like to imagine them when I am resting on warm evenings by the window, a soothing scene after hours of spraying and mayhem. The princess appears first, hurrying up the slope holding her skirts and then waiting anxiously, twisting and turning about herself. Then the prince clambers up heavily from the fairway, unseen, until she turns and bumps into him. They clasp hands. They kiss.
     On weekend afternoons, parties of well-fed men in polos and visors appear on the crest of the rise. They gesture down the fairway and confer like admirals on a quarterdeck.
     I can tell that for the ungainly ones, which is three out of every four, that pre-swing conference at the top of the hill is really what they came for. They drop to their knees to test the wind with some flung grass, rise and flip their club upwards so it becomes a cane for them to rest a hand on as they consider the fairway. They turn to offer a remark to the group. These boys work up a real stew of male pride and togetherness on that hill. The breeze carries a whiff of it over the tracks to my window. Eventually though, almost regretfully, they each have to step forward, settle themselves with a wiggle of those ample hips, and swing. I don’t know a good shot from a bad one, but they always look deflated as they follow the arc, like they whacked away a pleasant notion.

§

When I first viewed the room the letting agent—a short woman maybe mid-forties with a quick step and big piled sprayed hair, who kept cutting off my questions by going “exactly, eg-xactly”—told me the tracks almost never get trains, I was sure she was lying but I was so overwhelmed by her, her red-candy smile and scent, like a bath of vodka-soaked Skittles, that I just grinned and signed but only one train it is, late once a midweek evening, four dark, scarred carriages lit within by sickly yellow light, thunking by very slowly, unhurried through neighborhoods, like it’s in a surly mood, like it wants a problem.
     This train, it makes my bones glow. I like to hang from my window and watch it lumber by and imagine a horror movie. The train is always empty but one night a man might be sitting alone in the last carriage, alone because he chose to be alone, but also left alone, because people sense the danger in him, maybe he’s an escapee from a prison hospital, and he’ll lift up his head and bloodshot eyes as the train runs by and stare through my window and into my eyes and he’ll notice me, which is the worst thing a guy like that can do, is notice you. I love it because I'm in my nook. I like to be all cozied up with just one little toe sticking out the blanket to catch that
ghostly breeze. I bet the train driver has neck prickles, sitting there alone in the cabin, thinking of all those empty carriages rattling behind him, but he has to keep his eyes forward on the dark curving track, a track only he ever sees, late on a weekday night, and he fights the urge to glance back and make sure those carriages really are empty.
     The letting agent told me she was a little jealous, actually, the way they had done up the place, and said watch out because she might put in an application herself and gave me a powdery wink. We could live here together I thought. I bet she’d have a dresser with a thousand little
glass bottles and a bed that poofed powder when I fell flat onto it after work, into her bangled arms.
     She collected me at the front desk and showed me three rooms in three buildings in an hour and drove me to each and had a car full of mess and a surprise booster chair in the back and just like, swept a bunch of files off the passenger seat for me while keeping up her chatter, never pausing, and it must have been six scented car hangers in there to sweeten the odor, enough to make me woozy, head lolling against the seat belt as the car zipped out the garage to another apartment building with a lobby where her heels went off like gunshots as I stumbled after her in a fog.
     She nattered nonstop, taking corners at full speed, and neither of us were listening, I was too busy imagining all the places she marches in those heels, down a school hallway maybe, ready to cuss out the coach who benched her kid, that lucky kid bonded to a mother who'll never stop lackering tan and slapping fruit roll ups down legs to wax them off clean to gird herself ready to beat her way forward. It made me so hard, how little she was even thinking about me while she chatted and joked. That was almost a year ago and I jerk off about that car ride all the time still.

§

     At the check-in center, Mr Alvarez asks me how I’m doing, and I tell him about the huge chicken breast that came in their weekly fresh-living meal kit and slithered out of the packet onto my counter and sat there like a boob implant. I slid it straight in the trash, but through the night it
must have warmed up or something because in the morning I walked into my kitchenette for a bowl of Frosties, and I retched, fully retched and fell forward onto my knees like a sick old hag from the plague era. Would it be possible, I asked him, for the meal kits to contain one or two uncursed items, some foods that don’t sizzle my wits?
     “You know what, Cal?” he said, leaning back in his chair and smiling at me. “You know what I see here? I see opportunity.” He spun my chart around and patted the “Goals” section. He read aloud: “‘I will shake up my routine. Why don't you take a trip to your local butchers and
pick something out for yourself? I'll write you a ticket. I recall you are a little bit of a carnivore?”
     I’d only said that because he told me that his sister is a vegan. In fact, raw meat disgusts and frightens me, and surely looks no different than human flesh? He scribbles me the ticket. He is burly and bearded, with dark hair sprouting from his chest, his knuckles, his face, along his Popeye forearms, probably in a horrific way across his back, everywhere except his smooth
head. As he scribbles the ticket, I imagine a time-lapse of his hair shuffling from atop his skull down to his cheeks and chin. He gives me the ticket and tells me to call him if I ever feel myself getting wound up. We both know that I am always wound up.

§

     The next morning, fat-bitch rain is slapping on my kitchenette window. It hammers the golf course into a mist. I stay in bed, happy to have a reason, and do my usual thing. I roll over and crack my laptop from the side—before I’ve even put my lenses in, so my face is almost in
the crease. First thing, I check my usual sites, like a fisherman sculling about a calm harbor before breakfast, checking his nets. There’s always a little something. This morning—a Nigerian man dressed as an Assassin’s Creed character scales a sheer wall in seconds, then parkours over the flat roofs of a dusty African city. A fat Swedish goth dude whittles an Iron Maiden skull out of the tip of a lead pencil.
     I put on my glasses, wrap a robe, and heat five breaded chicken fingers, shaking them halfway through so they don’t stick and burn onto the tray. Outside the window, the rain is falling in such close ranks that the wind blows shapes through it. I stare into it and perceive a bear, then a submarine, then Alexander the Great.
     When it stops at noon and leaves everywhere dripping and sunny, I go to the butchers, because if I don't I won't get signed off, and there are other things in those meal kits, besides cursed food items, like the Gummy Bear snack packs, and besides the meal kits there is the rent, so truly I need Mr Alvarez’s signature and am a slave to his whims.
     At the storefront, I stand and stare at grand hanging curtains of ribs and high racks of split cow femurs. I see a sign advertising a haggis stuffing workshop.
     The second I walk in, the assistant is ignoring me. The head butcher is busy at the back of the store where he’s giving a demonstration to a group of couples in snapbacks and summer dresses. The assistant has his head buried in the glass meat-display counter, and he's really right in there.
     I wait, and eventually he drags his face clear of the gleaming, stinking counter and he’s smiling. You know I can vibe people out quick, I can run a vibing thumb over their bass strings, see how it sounds, it’s how I know that Mr Alvarez, for all his “look who it is, it’s my man!” actually loathes me, and it's clear to me that this assistant is a meat pervert, he likes it raw, the
slithery pink kind that you absolutely should cook through, whenever he can get away with it he doesn't wear gloves.
     “Can I help you?”
     I clear my throat.
     “I'd like some wings”
     “How many?”
     “...Eight”
     “Eight pounds?”
     I give a quick nod. I meant eight wings. What is eight pounds? The assistant pulls a plastic bag from the roll and theatrically flicks air into it. He is going to show me.
     Eight pounds means more wings than you can imagine, and a personal financial catastrophe. As I heave my sack from the counter onto my shoulder, I glance to the back of the store and see the head butcher holding up a sheep stomach, holding it up high, sharp pink membrane with lines of jiggly white trim, and shakes it like an empty rucksack. He speaks and
the crowd nods. A guy darts his hand into the air and asks a question at the same time and the butcher shrugs, jams his hand inside the stomach, you can see his forearm tense as he grips something and yanks, and flips the whole stomach fully inside out, this side repulsive, webbed with veins and purple blisters, and shakes it again, and the stomach screams in pain, and all the
meats along the counter scream, the chickens, the sirloins, the lamb chops with their fatty tails curled around themselves like nesting dogs, and the attendees squeal with excitement, one girl digs her fingers into the white cheese of her boyfriend’s arm. I get out of there.
     My uncle worked on a pig farm. Once a week he slung a pig up on a chain and butchered it. He would cut out a chop for himself and cook it at home. Just a clean chop, some potatoes. That was enough for him. But for the haggis crowd? No, sorry, not even close. Not long enough. Or—not slow enough. They are too in debt. Too sleep-deprived. Give them access to a pig
carcass and they will terrorize it, nose to tail. They will have friends over and stuff and fry the feet. They will stew the snout, teasing it low, for hours, and groan with pleasure when it falls apart. They will simmer the blood and the fat into a Tex-Mex jelly and scoop it with chips, and take photos of themselves laughing while they do it, and post those photos all over the internet. It’s the anxiety. Who can bear renting? Who can just give it away like that, every month? I rent, but it's not my money and I don’t even see it, which bothers me in a different way.
     The bag splits on 8th street, and as I crouch and gather them a passerby says to his girlfriend, “Now that's a lot of wings.” Why do I feel ashamed? People are allowed different amounts of things. I wrap my arms around the split bag and carry it under my chin, making for home and cursing Mr Alvarez.

§

     At home I shake the strength back into my numb arms and then sit at my laptop and cloak myself. A lady yelps and squirms as she is dragged from a supermarket by two security guards and a salesperson. The salesperson is flitting around the edges, hardly helping. At the entrance the lady wrenches free and kicks over a life size Pillsbury Doughboy and screams fuck you, but
the Doughboy is heavy-bottomed and bobs back upright, so she swings at it with a fist, but misses and spins to the ground. The dude filming circles her and she stares wildly into the camera and you can see her realize that she’s about to go viral, she’s going up. An Asian-looking woman sits on the earth floor of a bamboo hut and carves a rose into a watermelon, then a fox,
then Jimmy Hendrix and smiles a gaptoothed smile. A twelve-year-old boy plays a sonata on a flute but the flute is a hollowed-out carrot. Three black men group fuck the most beautiful blonde girl I’ve ever seen.

     With the headset on, I don’t hear much, but I feel the train coming every time because it’s on such a low vibration. I feel it tonight, and I rush to the window. If I lean out, past the scrub that has begun to grow up over the window frame, I can see into the tunnel that it emerges from.
     As the rumble gets louder, the dark bricks in the wall of the tunnel slowly turn light, then golden. It takes its time, like heavy treads up the basement stairs, or a door knob that turns slowly, and you’re glued in a trap, it’ll bring the animal out, the wild tearing animal, but if you chose to be
there, chose to linger in that deadly spot, well then that is a type of pleasure.

§

     Mr Alvarez wants us to make a bucket list. He goes first, so he can model the behavior for me. He takes a breath, exhales and holds his arms out wide, like he’s really about to get something off his chest.
     “I want to visit Niagara Falls.”
     I don't believe that this is what he truly wants. I go.
     “I want to roll around with my letting agent in the back of her dirty car. I want to sit in her booster seat while she jerks me off in her heels.”
     Mr Alvarez smiles, to show that I can't ruffle him. “How about something you have control over?”
     I think for a little while.
     “There is an empty train that runs past my window every night. I want to ride it."
     That night in my flat, I sit at my desk and cloak myself. I vault Mr Alvarez's laughable security system and take a personal tour. He watches tours of impossible villas in the Alps and houses on stilts in warm, shallow seas. He scrolls again and again through the profile pictures of
a little girl with his last name who lives out in California and drops encouraging messages under every single one. He watches RV promo tour videos for one, two hours at a time and then, the finale of almost every evening, the same Latino pornstar, Eleanor Smucharouso. She is older, not
my type, and does lengthy, theatrical intros, like a Latin soap opera with anal at the end.
     These older guys, sure, they’re online now but they’re still in the lobby, or they got through and now they’re tapping their way along the edges with a blind man’s stick, dimly aware that they are circling vast depths.
     Still, for now, that is Mr Alvarez's bucket list. He wants to live in an RV in the woods with Eleanor Smucharouso, with a table that slides between the wall joists and fuck all day. It sounds better than Niagara Falls, and it makes me like him a little bit. I wonder what my letting agent does online. What do beautiful women do online? Check their DMs. Make dinner
reservations. What else? I couldn't tell you.

§

     I cook a tray of wings. I cook them until the juices run clear, and then keep going until the juice is gone and the fat has cooked onto the tray into copper-tinted glass, so it’s clean dry meat and crispy skin, no tendons or red streaks on the bone. Then I eat them, with a lot of bottled
sauce.

§

     Mr Alvarez leans forward, onto his elbows. He arches one overgrown eyebrow.

     “Tell me I don’t come through for you. I spoke to the transport office. The train you see is the 2515, you’re seeing the driver take it to the depot on the west side. It’s his last run of the night. He says you can ride along.”
He leans back and points a ruler at me, teasingly: “I can’t take the ride for you, though. That’s on you.”
     There is stuff to say here, about Mr Alvarez jamming his stubby hairy fingers into my private shit but I won’t say it, I don’t feel like it. I don’t really feel either like saying that he may well have just won himself a shadow protector for life. I won’t say that it takes a real man to caress another man’s deformities, and everything else is fake bullshit. But I’ll say this—Eleanor
Smucharouso has one hell of a fan.

§

     I’m there, on the platform, and the driver doesn’t treat me like a freak or a burden like I fretted about. He is gentle, so gentle that I wonder if he thinks he’s in a Make-A-Wish kind of deal. Well, maybe he is. He asks if I want to ride in the cabin but I stick in the back carriage,
alone.
     When we hit the tunnel, I unzip my duffel and wriggle into the hospital gown. I hold a ketchup sachet in each fist, push them up against my eyeballs and squeeze until they pop. And as we lumber into the moonlight, with the golf course ticking past behind me, I slowly raise my head and leer with all my heart, leer into my open window and my brightly lit kitchenette, leer at
the scrub that I see now isn’t just below my window like I’d thought, it’s crawling up the sides and over the top like a rotten crow’s nest ready to choke shut, and I leer at my own self hanging out the window trying to get a lick of magic, trying to get struck by cold lighting, and my whole body shivers. Tell me that’s not candy. Oh hell, you wouldn’t even know.