The game consisted of a single question: If you had to fall in love with (by which Paul meant have sex with) one person in this elevator, who would it be? He played the elevator game in every class he ever took, on the bus, in straight bars, in subway cars, in waiting rooms, free clinics, the line at a movie theater, dinner out with a group of friends-of-friends. He sometimes played the elevator game with Jane, a silent communion of eyebrows and squints or—more likely—a fast-talking, low-murmured loop around the bar, marking targets. Jane was his favorite companion for this; she didn’t judge. Most of his life he had played alone.

The country-punk counter girl smiled at him. He left more messages on more answering machines, leaving the payphone number for callbacks. He’d used up all his numbers and all his dimes and now he’d have to guard the payphone against other customers. Paul smarted at this unfairness of apartment hunting: you needed an apartment with a phone to get an apartment with a phone, like you needed a job to get a job, or money to get money. But worse—you needed a phone to get a job, so you actually needed an apartment to get a phone to get a job, so the apartment was first, but you needed a job to get the apartment. Paul felt an incisive critique of capitalism coming on and ordered an expensive latte as a distraction.

Paul stared at Diane, remembered the day he’d met her in the Michigan kitchen, tried to hold onto whatever first invited this compulsion to stare, tried to understand, to puzzle her out, to possess through figuring out, to maintain, to plumb, to ensnare and study. What kind of creature was she, dark and earth-smelling, a rustic, topsoil-encrusted fingernails and all. The musk of her armpits at night, her red lips the texture of rose petals, the hard muscle of her arms, the occasional gray hair he’d find, her eyelashes like tarantulas’ legs, she was Zeus’s own sweet cow and his tender cupbearer at once, placid slow expanses of skin and what Paul knew to be called big-boned. She was bigger than him-as-Polly or him-as-Paul, a few inches taller and wider. Her shoulders were broader than his. You’ll stretch it! he thought helplessly when she’d borrowed his shirt that morning, but no, better, he’d sacrifice his shirts for her. He’d wear the stretched-out shirt thinking Diane’s body was here and I am now inside the space she left, I fit myself inside her shape.

I’m good enough to get the once-over in the bar at The Restaurant, I see them thinking my

smallness is appealing, my ass and face are cute enough, I see them thinking that short haircut

might be sexy. I’m always in a backless cocktail dress and heels, I’m flat chested and a tad

muscular so they ask me if I’m a dancer and say Call me sometime, let’s have a drink. It took

me a while to understand you’re supposed to work that for your money but you can let the

willingness fall right off your face when you turn around. It took me a while to understand that of

course men fling their entreaties out in swarms, like schools of sperm, hoping one will stick.

We can’t have pets in my apartment so we put together a jigsaw puzzle of a Saint Bernard on the floor in the hall. You name him Barry, after the legendary Alpine rescue dog. You buy a bag of dog food with your own money and leave bowls of food and water next to him. I hear you apologize to him once when you accidentally step on his tail.

            You tell me you have decided you are not going to have children when you grow up. You are going to live in an RV, which you call a house car. You will have two dogs and it will just be the three of you, traveling everywhere with the windows down. You tell me Barry will be too old to go with you. You whisper so his feelings aren’t hurt. You ask me if I will take care of him when you leave home and I say I will.

The fifth or sixth sous-chef I worked with was griping at Florida John one night over some mess that had gone down earlier in the evening, when I walked up to restock some plates. Why can’t you be like this one? said the sous-chef, putting his hand on my shoulder. Don’t matter what happens out there, she’s ice. What’s your secret? he asked. Enlighten this motherfucker.

            Accept that shit is all fucked up and roll with it, I said. Don’t bitch. Just adapt. Nothing is going to go right and everything is going to be hard.

            Jesus, Confucius, said the sous-chef.

            Jilly took her head out of the oven mainly because it was hot and the gas did not work independently of the pilot light. Stupid new technology. And preferring her head whole and her new auburn sew-in weave unsinged, and having no chloroform in the house, she conceded that she would not go out like a poet. But she updated her status, just the same:

                    A final peace out

                    before I end it all.

              Treat your life like bread,

                  no edge too small

                          to butter.

            Jilly was not a poet or even an aspiring one. She just liked varying her posts as much as possible.

Copyright © by Nafissa Thompson-Spires. From Heads of the Colored People: Stories by Nafissa Thompson-Spires. Published by 37 Ink/Atria Books, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Printed by permission.

            The nuances of these and other things Emily, Fatima’s best friend since second grade, just couldn’t understand, no matter how earnestly she tried or how many questions she asked, like why they couldn’t share shampoo when she slept over, or “What does ‘For us, by us’ even mean,” and why Fatima’s top lip was darker than her bottom one.

            The thing about the brown top lip and the pink lower one, Fatima had pieced together after what she learned from Violet and what she had learned at school, was that you could either read them as two souls trying to merge into a better self, or you could conceal them under makeup and talk with whichever lip was convenient for the occasion. At school and with Emily, she talked with her pink lip, and with Violet, she talked with her brown one, and that created tension only if she thought too much about it.

Copyright © by Nafissa Thompson-Spires. From Heads of the Colored People: Stories by Nafissa Thompson-Spires. Published by 37 Ink/Atria Books, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Printed by permission.

            When Alma first started at the hospital, some of the nurses taught her to pray for the children according to severity. A level one meant pray that the child would be well; level two meant pray for decreased pain. Alma was slow to understand level three—praying that the children would die, that mercy and grace would shorten their suffering—but she had come around to it a few months into her job, when the boy with the shattered face was wheeled in. His mother’s eyes convinced Alma that sometimes you suffered more the longer you lived.

Copyright © by Nafissa Thompson-Spires. From Heads of the Colored People: Stories by Nafissa Thompson-Spires. Published by 37 Ink/Atria Books, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Printed by permission.

I pictured in my mind the house at the bottom of the hill, a dark house I had not set foot inside for many years, a house as large and spacious as a medieval fortress, with enough square footage for at least one or two more Catholic families. It was not a cheaply built house, as my adoptive father liked to say. It did not come cheaply built. My parents are somewhat rich, but, like most Midwesterners, they are the cheapest people I have ever known. Despite their lack of financial stress, they are extravagant in their cheapness, their discount-hunting, their coupon-scissoring, their manuals on how to save. It was important, they said, to think about the catastrophic future, to always have a backup account filled with hundreds of thousands of dollars. To think about it too much depressed me. My entire existence was infected by this cheapness, this so-called frugality. Of course, it would be wrong not to acknowledge that these values of cheapness or frugality were what allowed once-orphans like myself and my now-dead adoptive brother to grow up, and to thrive even, in the comfort and security of the not cheaply built house. But there would be no more thriving for us, as one of us was dead.

I hadn’t expected to have such a visceral reaction to his door, only a few hours ago I thought I would rip it open. I surprised myself; I shuddered as I walked past, and went downstairs and into the living room and kitchen, where I looked around. I noted that some knickknacks from my memory were missing, and that they had been replaced with new knickknacks, but the overall arrangement of the house had stayed the same. Old knickknacks had not been removed without being replaced with fresh, new knickknacks. The wicker replaced the leather, I said to no one.

            What I needed to do was gather clues like some kind of gigantic clue-collecting agent and then put them into an overarching single theory-idea and perhaps this would answer the question of what led my adoptive brother to take his own life. Was I crying? One might have asked me, but no one was there.

I stared at his photo; he didn’t even look that

Korean, he looked Chinese, and every time

we went to a Chinese restaurant, the waitress

would ask if he was Chinese, but I would

never be asked, because it was very obvious

to everyone that I was Korean or possibly

Tibetan. Growing up, we both admitted to one

another that we wanted to be white. As little

children we were told that if we prayed to

Jesus Christ, if we spoke to Jesus Christ as if

he were our friend, if we told him the deepest

desires in our hearts, he would answer our

prayers and grant us our wishes, as long as

we believed in him with a pure abiding faith.

            I want to be white, he said to me once.

            I want to be white, too, I said to him.

Sometimes at night I pray to God that I

will wake up and be white, he said.

            I too have spent nights in prayer to our

lord Jesus Christ that I would become white, I

said.

So I came home. To Pittsburgh. My parents were there, and my sister was there, married with children now, and certainly after Paris that wasn’t for me. I’ve always loved Pittsburgh, especially when it looked its worst. I’ve written about that, of course: Pittsburgh before they cleaned it up. Now it’s this immaculate city, all finance and technology, but back then you could die just from taking a breath on the street. The air was black and steaming with smog—“hell with the lid off” they used to say—and there was the clanging of trains, and the great mills, a very dramatic place, and maybe had I stayed and got lucky I might have been the Balzac of Pittsburgh. But I had to escape my family. I had to go to New York.

Do you have it with you?

I bent down to unzip my backpack. When I’d pulled it out and handed it to her the officer began turning the pages of my second passport slowly, by the edges, like you handle a postcard whose ink isn’t yet dry.

When do you use this?

Very rarely.

But under what circumstances?

Whenever I enter or leave Iraq.

And does that give you an advantage?

What sort of an advantage?

You tell me.

If you had two passports, I said evenly, wouldn’t you use your British one whenever entering or leaving the UK?

Of course, she said. That’s the law. But I don’t know what the law is in Iraq, now do I?

I didn’t mean to, but I smiled. And faintly, she flinched. Then, still holding my second passport—which is to say the only passport I had left—she nodded slowly, comprehendingly, tapped it lightly once on her knee, and stood up and walked away.

In the night, she awoke three times. The first time, he was lying on his back, while beyond him the skyline was still glittering and the top of the Empire State Building was floodlit in red and gold.

The second time, he was on his side, facing away from her. Alice’s head hurt, so she got up and went to the bathroom to look for an aspirin. Someone had turned the Empire State Building off.

The third time she woke up, he had his arms around her from behind and was holding on to her tightly.

The fourth time, it was morning. Their faces were close, almost touching, and his eyes were already open, staring into hers.

“This,” he said grimly, “was a very bad idea.”