Many-Bodied Problem

It is sometimes said by my lovers at the ends of our eras that I am heartless, but the truth is it is possible to forget me like anybody who hasn't done anything important, and I haven't. I am barely a notably precise shape. Most people who have seen the inadequate movements of the contents of my mind don't miss me. There are ways I can be an obtrusive nobody, of course. I am aware there is too much nervy, flitting energy in my movement, a tightness in gait that ramifies in the optical impression of a frightened bird in a half-trot unless I am so thoroughly worn out my body collapses on some surface in noodle-y exhaustion. The other cocktail waitresses notice I don't even know how to complain properly.

Mostly, I work at what Amanda advised, which is not thinking too much, and now that I am trying to think less, Winslow and I are more or less compatible. Winslow contributes a joint. I contribute an open-minded attitude toward debasement. We get high on a walk—high on a Schedule 1, Amanda would say—or else he comes right over and tries to screw me on the roommate's bed, surrounded by Tricia's still-boxed action figures. He understands me to be a little dopey, and I don't correct him.

It is enough to remember that for a short time, I was a young woman who did things my mother didn't know about. I was twenty-three or twenty-four or twenty-five, and I spent most waking hours doing quantum chemistry research at a subpar graduate level. I was attracted to chemistry as an entire system to catalog what is real. Yet that I was an excellent student had been a problem since, according to both my advisor and natural law, excellent student work qualifies as comparative idiocy to visionary genius, and I experienced mounting failures of confidence before succumbing to a series of minor breakdowns in which I rolled myself into a hot, shaking ball and babbled questions regarding whether the sensation in my body meant I was about to die.

My mother still doesn't know I dropped out, but then, what would it mean to know that something you never understood no longer organizes another mind? Once, I tried to explain the many-body problem, that in a quantum system the repeated interactions of particles create entanglements such that exact calculations are impossible and approximations must be used. She got bored somewhere in the middle, and now I have a job at a bar by the park where people off the working clock sit under laundry lines of decorative panties. I am told I was only hired for my emphatic breasts.

____

For the better part of an hour, we make incremental gestures on each other, then, when it is time for Winslow to go home, we walk a friendly breadth apart, hug a chaste co-worker-ly hug, and I watch the jaunty sloth of his middle-aged body clomp down into the train station back to Dutchess County. There is something moving in how he allows his whole weight to fall onto a step at a time with artless gravity. Around the street, people's walking feet kick flattened fast food cardboard and plastic water bottles, labels skinned off, moving waste through the city like competing ideas.

Because it is Tuesday, for the rest of the evening, I approach wobbly cocktail tables with trays of diluted, fruit-flavored shots in tall, narrow beakers and try to sell two-for-seven specials until I come up with something better than chemistry to do, or something I am better at than chemistry, and perhaps there isn't a difference. Someone opens the door to the bar, lets a bunch of weather in, and within a beer, waddles over. A piece of debris clings to one long eyebrow hair. His jacket is lumpy. He tells me he will leave an enormous tip if I sit to chat with him.

"I prefer talking to waitresses," he...