John had been lying on the narrow bed for three hours, fully dressed except for his shoes, watching the ceiling fan make its labored rotations. The blades were coated with dust that had accumulated into small gray caterpillars along the edges, and with each pass they threatened to release their burden into the thick air of the room. He'd meant to clean them when he first moved in four months ago, had even brought a stepladder up from the antique shop below, but the intention had dissolved like so many others, leaving only the ladder propped against the wall as evidence of a different version of himself, one who cared about such things.
The room was sparse in the way of temporary accommodations that have begun to calcify into permanence—a few books stacked on the windowsill, a coffee cup from three days ago leaving a ring on the nightstand, his laptop closed on the single chair. Through the open window came the sounds of Dublin at night: the occasional car crossing the Bridge of Tigers, its tires humming on the metal grating, the splash of something in the water that could have been a fish or debris or someone throwing stones, and beneath it all the steady breathing of the Guadalupe as it moved toward the Gulf, carrying whatever the day had deposited into its current.
His phone lay on his chest, rising and falling with his breath. He'd been scrolling through nothing—news he wouldn't remember, videos that played silently, comments from strangers about things that didn't matter—when her name appeared at the top of his screen. Mariela. The notification banner showed only the first few words: "Are you awake? I keep thinking about..."
He held the phone above his face, thumb hovering over the message. They'd been doing this for four months now, these late-night exchanges that started with innocent questions and moved through predictable stages toward something neither of them could quite name. He knew her patterns: she would text him after her daughters were asleep, usually between eleven and midnight, always with something that seemed casual but contained an invitation to go deeper. He knew she was probably in her bed in Boynton Beach, the air conditioning set too cold the way she liked it, wearing one of those oversized t-shirts she'd described to him once, her hair still damp from the shower she always took before bed.
John's phone illuminated the dark room. He opened the message: "Are you awake? I keep thinking about the poet," she wrote. "The one who makes you believe in broken syntax."
He typed slowly, deliberately: "What are you wearing?"
"Still dressed. Jeans. That blue shirt you said makes me look like a fisherman that reads Cusk."
"Sexy. Take it off."
"Yes, sir."
"Slowly. I want to know you're thinking about it."
He set the phone on his chest and unbuttoned his own shirt, aware of the theatrical nature of the gesture, the way even alone he was performing for her across the miles. The fan above continued its rotations, pushing the humid air around the room without cooling it.
"Done," she typed.
"Liar. You're still wearing your jeans."
He stood, stepped out of his own, folded them over the chair with his laptop.
"Tell me about the book. The one you've been reading. You said yesterday there was a passage that made you think of me. The Portuguese one."
He reached for the worn paperback on the nightstand, its pages swollen with humidity and marked with coffee stains. It wasn't actually Portuguese—he'd told her that as a kind of test, to see if she was listening. It was something he'd found in the antique shop downstairs, published by a press that had gone defunct in the eighties, author unknown.
"Read it to me," she wrote. "But first tell me what you're doing with your other hand."
"Holding the book."
"I spent the entire faculty meeting thinking about your mouth."
He wanted to tell her he'd been thinking about her too, but not her mouth exactly—more the way she held her phone when she talked, pressed between her shoulder and ear while her hands did other things, how that gesture contained an entire way of being in the world, efficient and distracted and somehow more present because of the division of attention.
"The passage," he said, and began typing it out, slowly, letting her wait: "The municipal fountains had been turned off for three weeks, their basins collecting cigarette ends and palm fronds, the bronze figures at their centers beginning to show verdigris where the water no longer ran. He walked past them each morning on his way to nowhere in particular, and each morning he noticed how their silence had become architectural, how the absence of water had revealed the true nature of the sculptures—not classical figures drawing water from some mythological source but actors frozen in the midst of forgetting their lines."
"That's you," she wrote immediately. "The walking to nowhere in particular."
He scrolled through the phone with one hand, finding the photo she'd sent last week—her in that green dress at the conference, looking away from the camera, laughing at something outside the frame. He continued typing the passage with his thumb:
"The old fisherman—for that's what the locals called him though he hadn't fished in twenty years—had developed a theory about the tourists. They moved, he claimed, like schools of fish, following invisible currents through the historic district, pooling in predictable eddies outside the ice cream shop, the cathedral, the fort. You could map their movements, predict where they'd gather at any hour. But what interested him more were the ones who broke from the school, who wandered into the residential streets where laundry hung between buildings and cats dozed on warm hoods of cars. These were the dangerous ones, he said, though he never explained what danger they posed or to whom."
"I want to break from the school," Mariela wrote.
"You are dangerous. You make me describe everything. The way the wood floor creaks near the window. The pattern the streetlight makes through the blinds. The fact that I can hear someone playing a guitar badly three houses over."
"I'm touching myself."
He set the phone down, stared at the ceiling fan. Picked it up again.
"Tell me."
"Slowly. The way you'd do it. Starting at my throat, that spot below my ear you found that time in Miami. Remember? We had twenty minutes between sessions and you pressed me against the door of that supply closet and—"
"I remember."
"Your hands are larger than mine. I'm using both to imitate one of yours."
The guitar player had stopped. The silence felt intentional, orchestrated. He could hear his own breathing, could imagine hers three hundred miles south, in that bedroom she'd described with its white walls and single piece of art—a paint-by-numbers of a boat that might have been sinking or might have been rising from the water, she could never decide.
"Now I'm at my collarbone," she wrote. "That hollow where you said you wanted to pour wine and drink it. The body as text, skin remembering touch like pages remember words."
He remembered the conference where they'd met four months ago, her presentation on absence in contemporary fiction, how she'd argued that what wasn't written was more important than what was, how negative space shaped narrative. He'd approached her afterward, disagreed with her conclusions. They'd argued through dinner, through drinks, through the walk back to the hotel where they'd stood in the lobby for another hour, still arguing, until she'd said, "This is foreplay, isn't it?"
"Keep reading," she wrote. "From the book. But slowly. I want to time this right."
He found another passage, this one from deeper in the book where the prose became denser, more interior:
"The woman who cleaned the municipal building had been dead for three days before anyone noticed. This wasn't cruelty so much as routine—she cleaned at night, slept during the day, existed in the margins of other people's schedules. When they found her, she was sitting at a desk in the records room, head resting on an open ledger from 1947, the year of her birth, though this was coincidence rather than design. She'd been reading about property transfers, about who had owned what before the tourist economy transformed everything. The detective—young, ambitious, given to metaphor—said she'd died examining the bones of the city. But the old fisherman, when he heard this, corrected him: 'She died examining the death certificates."
"Christ," Mariela wrote. "Why is that erotic? I'm so close."
"Say something about the relationship between desire and distance. Use the word 'liminal' at least once."
He laughed, alone in his room, aware of how the sound would seem to anyone passing in the hall—a man laughing at his phone in the dark, that particular madness of the connected age.
"Desire," he typed, "requires distance the way fire requires oxygen. Too much and it extinguishes. Too little and it suffocates. We exist in this liminal space, neither together nor apart, suspended in what the Portuguese call saudade—the presence of absence, the absence of presence."
"More."
"The body remembers everything the mind forgets. Your body, three hundred miles south, remembers my hands. My hands remember the exact temperature of your skin at different times of day—cooler in the morning, warmest at three in the afternoon, that specific heat you radiate when you're trying not to laugh at something inappropriate."
"I'm going to—"
"I know."
"How do you know?"
"Your typing changes. Shorter sentences. No punctuation."
"god"
"Breathe."
"i am"
There was a pause. He imagined her in that bed, under that painting of the ambiguous boat, the air conditioning too cold, the sheets twisted. The phone would be beside her on the pillow, screen glowing in the dark. She'd be still for a moment, that particular stillness that follows release, before the world rushes back in.
"Read me more. Something different. That part you mentioned about the coffee prophet."
He flipped through the book, looking for the section he'd marked with a torn receipt from Tres:
"The morning regular they called the Prophet—though his prophecies were limited to coffee temperatures and the probability of rain—had developed a creation myth for the town. In the beginning, he claimed, there was only water and wealthy retirees. Then God, in his infinite humor, created the tourist, and saw that it was profitable. On the second day, He created the coffee shop, that the tourist might have somewhere to check their email and complain about the wifi. On the third day, He created the historic district, though history itself wouldn't be invented until the fifth day, requiring some retroactive adjustments. On the fourth day, He created the ghost tour, though the ghosts—being union—refused to work until the sixth day. On the fifth day, as mentioned, He created history, mostly by taking existing buildings and adding plaques. On the sixth day, He created the bed and breakfast, and saw that it was good, or at least expensive. On the seventh day, He rested, but only after creating the brunch special."
"Every choice is a sentence. Every routine is a paragraph, but most people have terrible editors."
He typed: "Tell me about your day."
"I woke at five. Not on purpose—the cat had caught something, was making that particular sound they make when they want you to witness their triumph. It was a lizard, still alive, missing its tail. I released it onto the neighbor's lawn, which might have been cruel—giving it freedom in a damaged state. Made coffee. Sat on the porch in my underwear because it was still dark and the neighbors couldn't see. Thought about you. Not sexually. Well, not entirely. More about how you described those people in the coffee shop, the ones who sit alone but aren't lonely. Drove to work listening to that podcast about the woman who disappeared, except she hadn't disappeared, she'd just decided to stop answering her phone. Taught three classes about books I no longer believe in. Had lunch alone in my car, windows down, watching the maintenance staff smoke behind the humanities building. They've created this whole secret society back there, with chairs made from overturned buckets and a coffee can for ashes. Thought about you again, sexually this time, definitely sexually, because one of the maintenance guys had your way of standing, that lean against nothing, like you're holding yourself up through pure skepticism. Came home. Made dinner for the girls—pasta again, they won't eat anything else. Helped with homework that seemed designed to crush curiosity rather than encourage it. Put them to bed. Showered. Texted you. Came. Now I'm lying here wondering if this is happiness."
"Approximation is all we ever get."
"Read me more. Until I fall asleep."
He turned pages, looking for something softer, something that might carry her toward dreams:
"The night clerk at the marina had kept a journal for thirty years, the same entry every day: wind direction, tide height, number of boats in the harbor. He'd never varied the format, never added personal observation. His wife had left him after year ten, his son had died in year fifteen, the hurricane had destroyed his house in year twenty, but the entries remained identical in structure—wind, tide, boats. When asked why he didn't record anything else, he said everything else was already recorded in what changed and what didn't. The wind from the northeast on the day his wife left. The unusually low tide when his son didn't come home. The empty harbor before the storm. 'The personal is just patterns,' he said, 'and patterns are just the universe breathing.'"
"Still awake?" he typed.
No response. He imagined her fallen into sleep mid-sentence, the phone still glowing beside her, that painting of the boat watching over her like an ambiguous guardian. He kept typing anyway, knowing she'd read it in the morning:
"The tourists evacuated first, then the residents, until only the oldtimers remained, the ones who'd survived other floods, other apocalypses. They discussed whether drowning was a bad way to go. The consensus was no—there were worse things than being swallowed by something larger than yourself. The coffee was still hot when the water reached the door, and this, they agreed, was what mattered—that and the fact that someone had remembered to leave a tip."
He set the phone aside, lay back on the narrow bed. The fan continued its rotations. Somewhere, that bad guitarist had started up again, working through the same three chords like a meditation or a madness. Through the window, the lights of the Bridge of Tigers stretched across the water, connecting nothing to nothing, or everything to everything, depending on your perspective.
His phone lit up. Mariela, one more message:
"I love this. Tell me something I don't know about you."
He considered the question, the way it assumed there were clean divisions between the known and unknown, as if the self could be inventoried like the contents of a room. What she didn't know: that he'd been fired, not quit, from his last job. That the forty-three pages on his laptop were the same paragraph written over and over with minor variations, a kind of madness disguised as manuscript. That he'd been living on credit cards for three months. That sometimes he sat in Tres not to write but to delay returning to this room where the walls seemed to breathe with a particular kind of failure.
"I've been reading the same book for six months," he typed instead. "Not rereading. Reading. Sometimes I get to page fifty, sometimes page two hundred, but I always start over. It's like I'm looking for something I missed, except I don't know what I'm looking for."
He flipped through the book:
"The woman who claimed to be writing the definitive history of the town had been at it for twelve years. Her house had become an archive of meaningless significance—receipts from stores that no longer existed, photographs of people no one could identify, maps of streets that had been renamed so many times their original purposes were forgotten. She'd developed a theory that history was actually a form of hoarding, that historians were just people who couldn't throw anything away and had developed elaborate justifications for their compulsion. When she died, they found seventeen thousand pages of notes, none of which contained a single conclusion. The executor, a nephew from Orlando, threw it all away except for one photograph: a man standing in front of what might have been the ocean or might have been the sky, the horizon line having been lost to either over-exposure or water damage, creating a world where up and down had ceased to matter."
"Jesus," Mariela wrote. "That's my academic career. I've been thinking about quitting. Moving somewhere where nobody grades anything or measures anything or outcomes anything."
"Where?"
"Wherever you are," and then, "Do something for me."
"What?"
"Go to your window. Tell me what you see."
He stood, walked to the window, the floor boards announcing each step. The view was limited—the alley behind the antique shop, a section of the seawall, the smallest visible portion of the harbor where a single boat's mast light blinked in what seemed like code but was probably just wind.
"An alley. Wet from rain that must have happened while we were talking. One streetlight, the old kind with the orange sodium glow. A dumpster with its lid open. A cat on the seawall—tabby, I think, hard to tell from here. It's watching something in the water. Patient. Like it has all night. Once I saw a man climb out of the harbor, fully dressed in a business suit. He walked down the alley, dripping, dignified, like this was his normal commute."
"You're making that up."
He returned to the bed, lay back down, the mattress accepting his weight. He found the section he'd been avoiding:
"The theory of love he'd developed was simple: it was a form of agreeable mental illness, a folie à deux that society had decided to celebrate rather than treat. The symptoms were consistent—obsessive thoughts, sleep disruption, appetite changes, alternating euphoria and despair. He'd been in love three times, or thought he had, though in retrospect he realized these were just different stages of the same infection. The first time, at nineteen, had been acute—fever-bright and hallucinatory. The second, at thirty-one, had been chronic—a low-grade condition he'd learned to live with, like a back that never quite stopped aching. The third time, at forty-five, had been something else entirely—not illness but metamorphosis, his entire cellular structure rearranging itself to accommodate another person's presence. This was the one that had nearly killed him when it ended."
"Which one are we?" she asked.
"The fourth kind. Love at a distance. Love that exists in language."
"im touching myself agai"
"I know."
"How?"
"You stop fixing typos."
"its strange how well you know me"
"Tell me."
"what"
"What you're thinking about."
"your hands that morning in miami when you held my wrists above my head how you said my name like it was a question you were trying to answer"
"Mariela."
"yes like that"
"I want to send you more from the book," he typed.
"send it im close but not that close"
"The fisherman's second theory concerned the nature of water itself. Not metaphorically—he was done with metaphor—but literally. Water, he claimed, remembered everything it touched. Every boat hull, every swimmer, every storm. The harbor was thus a kind of liquid library, its memories mixing and merging with each tide. This was why, he insisted, you could sometimes taste other oceans in the local water—Arctic cold in August, tropical warmth in January. The tourists thought the harbor was just water, but the locals knew better. They knew which sections held which memories, where the water remembered the slavers' ships, where it remembered the hurricanes, where it remembered the suicides. The swimming beach, for instance, was where the water remembered joy—generations of children learning to swim, lovers meeting in darkness, baptisms both official and improvised. But near the old pier, the water remembered only departures—soldiers who didn't return, families fleeing inland during storms, boats that went out and never came back.
"He'd mapped these memories, or claimed to, in a chart no one else could read. The city council had once hired an oceanographer to examine his claims. The scientist had spent three days taking samples, measuring temperatures, analyzing chemical compositions. His conclusion was that water was just water, that memory was a function of brain tissue not H2O. But the fisherman had simply smiled and said, 'You tested the wrong water. You have to test it at the moment of remembering, not before, not after. The moment when the past and present touch. But that requires knowing when that moment is, and you, being from elsewhere, could never know.'
"The oceanographer had returned to the university, filed his report, collected his fee. But three months later he came back, alone, without instruments. He sat with the fisherman on the pier and asked, 'How do you know when the water is remembering?'
"'Same way you know when you're remembering,' the fisherman said. 'Everything hurts a little more.'"
"stop," Mariela wrote. "right there that line everything hurts a little more jesus john"
"Should I stop reading?"
"no keep going but touch yourself i want to know youre feeling this too"
He set the phone down, unbuttoned his jeans. The fan above continued its rotations, and he could hear through the thin walls someone watching television, the canned laughter of a sitcom creating a surreal counterpoint to the moment. He picked up the phone again:
"The fisherman's wife had left him not for another man but for the idea of another life, one that existed somewhere beyond the harbor's reach. She'd moved inland, to a city without water, where she worked in a building with windows that didn't open. She sent him postcards but never letters, images of dry places with brief messages: 'Still breathing.' 'The desert has its own memory.' 'I dream of drowning and wake up happy.' He kept these postcards in a box marked 'Evidence.'
"Years later, she returned for a day. Not to reconcile, just to collect something she'd forgotten—a book, maybe, or a piece of jewelry, the kind of thing that only matters once you no longer have it. They sat on the pier, not their old pier but a new one built after the hurricane, and she asked him if he still believed his theory about water and memory.
"'I've expanded it,' he said. 'Now I believe everything remembers everything. The bench remembers everyone who's sat on it. The air remembers every word spoken into it. We're surrounded by memory, drowning in it, but we've evolved to ignore it because otherwise we'd never be able to move forward.'
"'That sounds like mental illness,' she laughed, and for a moment he could taste how the air had tasted when they were twenty-three and newly married, when they thought the harbor was romantic rather than restrictive. But the moment passed, as moments do, and she stood to leave.
"'Take care of yourself,' she said.
"'I take care of the water.'"
"im crying," Mariela wrote. "and coming both is that possible"
"Everything's possible at this hour."
"tell me what youre doing"
"Reading to you."
"with your other hand"
"Remembering Miami."
"specific"
"The way you tasted. Like coffee and mint and something else, something I couldn't identify."
"nervousness i was so nervous"
"Why?"
"because i knew from the moment you disagreed with my presentation i knew we were going to fuck and it was going to ruin everything good in my life"
"Has it?"
"yes beautifully" and then, "john"
"Yes?"
"i need you to do something"
"What?"
"tell me you love me but in the most complicated way possible use subordinate clauses make it almost impossible to follow make it so byzantine that it becomes more true because of its difficulty"
He began typing, one thumb, deliberately slow:
"If love is, as the fisherman suggested, not a feeling but a location, then I love you the way an emigrant loves a country they've never actually visited but have constructed from stories told by others who may themselves have never been there, a country that exists more perfectly in imagination than it ever could in reality, which is not to say it isn't real but rather that its reality transcends the merely physical and exists in that space between what is and what might be, which is of course the only space worth inhabiting, the space where language fails and keeps failing and in its failure says more than success ever could, because to say 'I love you' straight, without qualification or elaboration, would be to reduce something infinite to something finite, would be to pretend that love is simple when in fact it's the most complex system we've developed for mutual destruction and reconstruction, a system by which two people agree to haunt each other's days with absence and presence in equal measure, the way you haunt mine, Mariela, even now, especially now, as you lie in your bed three hundred miles south and I lie in mine and we pretend that what we're doing is just talking when really we're building a bridge out of words, a bridge that we'll never actually cross because the building of it is the point, the constant construction that never completes."
"perfect," she wrote. "now make me come"
"You already did."
"again i want to time it with you"
"Tell me when."
"now the memory of your weight your shoulder against my throat that sound you make not quite a growl more like discovery"
He closed his eyes, let his hand find its rhythm, thought about her thinking about him, that recursive loop of desire that technology made possible, two bodies separated by geography but connected by something that wasn't quite imagination and wasn't quite memory but lived in the space between.
"close," she typed.
"Wait."
"cant"
"Try."
"why"
"Because the delay makes it better."
"torturer"
"Count to ten."
"one two three fuck four five six seven eight nine—"
"Now."
The phone went silent. He finished too, alone but not alone, that particular paradox of modern intimacy. He lay still, listening to the bad guitarist who'd found a fourth chord, then lost it again. His phone lit up:
"our book its better than the one youre reading"
"Different. Not better."
"ours has sex" and a moment later, "john?"
"Yes?"
"thirteen days"
"I know."
"what if it ruins everything meeting in person again what if we've become better as text than as bodies"
"Then we'll text each other from across the room."
"that should be the title of your book now read me to sleep something without fishermen or wives or water"
He turned to his favorite section of the book, the one that popped into his mind throughout the day:
"The town kept existing after everyone had left. This was the surprise—that places could persist without people, that the coffee shops and tourist centers and gift stores maintained their shapes even emptied of purpose. The streets remembered where they went. The buildings remembered how to stand. The harbor remembered its tides. It was as if the town had always been practicing for abandonment, had always known that humans were temporary, that the real life of a place existed in its structures, not its inhabitants. The last entry in the last journal found in the last occupied house read simply: 'The municipal fountains have started flowing again, though no one turned them on. The water remembers its path. We were always just visiting. The water was always home.'"
By the time he finished typing, she'd stopped responding. He typed "Goodnight, Mariela" anyway, knowing she'd see it in the morning, that it would be the first thing she'd read, this small gift of ending that was really a beginning.
John laid awake and alone. He imagined a pirate purchasing oranges at an outdoor market, his good leg bearing the weight while the wooden one swept small arcs across the asphalt. The vendor's child stared openly at the carved appendage, its surface marked with what might have been scrimshaw or merely the accumulated scars of daily use. The costumed man counted exact change with fingers that seemed too delicate for the costume's implied roughness.
He turned off the lamp. In the darkness, the fan's rotations became more audible, a rhythm like breathing or like waves or like the sound of someone reading aloud in another room, the words indistinct but the cadence clear.