I didn’t remember falling asleep, nor did I think I ever would, but when I woke up, I was pressed against the ceiling of Mimi’s apartment like a damn spider. I was looking down at her creaky, humming ribcage taking in the breaths of thin sleep, which I could see because the bedsheets had half-come-up with me to the ceiling, also in suspended gravity. It felt like there was a gelatinous snake slithering around in my skull, transferring my hangover headache from left eye to frontal lobe, and all the way back to the temporal lobe before coming back around to the right. Not in any of my dreary, wasted Saturday mornings (easily in the hundreds now) had the roof thing happen to me. I knew that staying up here was not an option. If I didn’t eat and drink a lot of stuff really fast, I was going to be down all day: I figured out in college that if you get nourishment ASAP you bounce back from a hangover quicker. The faster you got back to your life, the faster you stopped thinking about the void at the back of your soul, et cetera.
The ceiling thing turned out to be an easier fix than I expected. The sheets had a strange, semi-turgid quality about them that kept me in the air, which meant I could climb down them like a rope in gym class. At some point in the process of getting back on gravity’s good side I pissed off sleeping Mimi, and as soon as I was back in bed, she made a cute little nnph sound and rolled over, dragging the sheets off me. Yesterday wasn’t the first time we’d had sex, but it was the first time I’d slept over. It was usually about here when my trysts would go sour. I’d usually pick some idiosyncrasy in my not-girlfriend and decide it was insufferable. At that point I’d break it off and find another person to fuck for a while. I felt bad about this one, though, because I don’t think I realized that my behavior towards Mimi had been super bigoted (in addition to the usual use-women-for-sex bigotry) until I failed to fall asleep. At 3 A.M. I started realizing that it was horrible that I had taken the transgender Mimi to a Celtics game as a date and talked super boy-shit to her and made a big deal out of the whole “you’re the only girl I know who’s read Infinite Jest” thing and thought the whole time we were having sex about how bizarre it was to be in a girl’s room with the knowledge that its occupant had grown up in a boy’s room. Worst of all, I knew cutting and running would only amplify the guilt, and that was what I did that morning, too not-drunk for empathy.
I was a Masshole stereotype – I took comfort in this when I saw all my other Masshole friends living better, happier lives than I did – so I had a fixation only Dunkin’ would crave. Mimi’s neighborhood was a little too gay and too Cambridge for there to be a Dunkin’ right at the door when I walked out, but the closest one was half a mile away. I was lucky it was in the direction of the T, too, which was where I’d have to go anyway in order to make my fated appointment with my new bed, calling me, whispering to my hangover, willing me to surrender.
My new bed was too big. My new apartment was too big, too, and the walls were too stark to put up the framed Pulp Fiction poster or the uninspiring pond landscape I’d pulled out of a thrift store. The whole blank place demanded that its decorator had a vision, which I did not, and so it was still undecorated except for the collection of nine fine whiskey bottles that Arthur had given me over the years, one for each of my birthdays from nineteen to twenty-seven. It felt wrong to put anything else up on the walls that wasn’t a gift from Arthur, since he’d given me the recommendation for the apartment and the job that let me pay for it when he took over the ol’ family consulting business. I was the last of our friend group to get brought into the company, which I assume is probably because I was going to be such a terrible employee that he could only explain my position to his dad if his dad was deceased and therefore unable to say much. I was well-liked by everyone at the office but myself, having deceived them all that the mish-mashed collection of vices I called a personality made me “good with people” and “fun to be around.” Another thing the void and I liked to laugh about when it was pulling the youth out of me.
Anyway, I made the half-mile trek through the mystical, timeless trance that all gayborhoods have (who has the energy for full goth makeup at 10 A.M.?) and found myself in the promised Dunkin’. I put in my order for a $5 meal deal, the king of all fast food breakfasts: freeze-packed and fried hash browns, a paste-like bacon egg and cheese on a bagel whose first ingredient was microplastics, and the pièce de résistance, a medium iced coffee with cream and sugar. When I grabbed the bag with the food, I thanked the lady, who was not goth, and she said that I was in luck, because they just got the call, and that the bag I was holding was the last $5 meal deal any Dunkin’ would ever sell.
I balked. Two other employees took down the $5 meal deal part of the menu before my eyes. Like nothing of note had happened, they trotted in a new sign right in the $5 meal deal’s promised place that declared the new world order. The new meal deal had the hash browns and coffee still, but with the bacon egg and cheese switched to the shitty, sandpapery wake-up wrap, and it was $6, which was bullshit because the wake-up wrap was cheaper than the eggwich when you compared the a la carte prices. I said as much to the beautiful woman at the Dunkin’ counter, who had this magnetic quality to the shape of her cheekbones (I thought to myself Anthony, control yourself, in my Nonna’s voice). The lady said that corporate had made the call, and that I should be thankful to have made it just under the wire.
I stormed out of the Dunkin’ and stood on the platform waiting for the Red Line, eager to be taken from the light of a dazzling mid-April morning into the dark of the tunnels. The automatic Apple holiday calendar alert reminded me it was Easter Sunday. I scrolled while I held the last cup and the last bag. There was a satisfying weight to all of it, although the ice in the coffee meant that it was a little cold in my hands. I was sipping the liquid part and was desperate to sit down on the train and get started on the food.
It was a busy morning on the train, so the only seat available was next to a ghoulish-looking guy with a glass eye and a jacket he might have slept in. But I couldn’t wait, so I housed the food. I moaned with the impact of every bite, trying to savor every bit of its now-extinct panacea. When I had gulped down the third hash browns, my hangover vanished completely. I filled with sudden presence, overflowing from my body and pouring out to the whole train car, which was charged with the aroma of bacon fat and sizzling potatoes. My eyes were wide open, my nose was flaring, and every pressure-cell on my skin was pulling in the momentous experience. Every sip of the coffee felt like an antibiotic coursing through my infected musculature, stirring my body to a righteous quiver. The fancy headphones work bought me canceled the rickety racket of the T, and I was in a state of total Cocteau Twins bliss when the shining light of the Easter morning broke through the windows and I saw the skyline.
In the river, in the brief minute of the daylight I caught while shoveling food into my maw, I could see something beyond the city I knew, with the old Citgo sign and the Prudential center and the spike-crowned building. I saw a Boston of the past, a harbor full of galleons and thick with brickwork, and of the future, in a bubbling, reforested shape I could neither understand nor appreciate. I rubbed my eyes and it was gone.
I kept slurping at the ice cubes when the food was gone and there were only dregs left in the coffee. We were approaching Park Street, the transfer station where I could either go up a floor to the Green Line and take that home or go two floors up into the sun on one of the few precious days of spring that God grants us sorry Bostonians to walk around without a jacket on. I thought only of maximizing the amount of coffee I could siphon from the last $5 meal deal I would ever purchase and slothfully resolved to take the Green Line home to my new bed. The doors opened, and the glass-eyed guy and I stood up to exit the train at the same time. We approached the narrow exit door, flooding with people, and bumped each other on the way out. My plastic cup and empty bag of food were thrown from my hand, and I screeched in terror as the trash flew into the tiny gap between the train and the rails below.
The eyes of the people on the platform glared at me as they came and went, and the glass-eyed man took my shoulder and leaned in. Being nice about the whole thing, he said, “Oh my God, I’m so sorry.”
“Knave, what calamity hath thou wrought?” I said, in a tone that didn’t match my Bruins hoodie, “We are lost! All is lost.”
The train we came in on was holding its doors open for me, because I was still standing between the car in which I had seen heaven and the platform that would carry me home to bed. The cyclops gestured for me to step onto the platform and get away from the crowd on the train which was watching me. I followed him, and the train roared out of the station past me. I whipped my head around to see that my $5 meal deal was flying deeper into the tunnel in the air-wake of the train. The cyclops offered to pay for my meal over digital transfer, which I responded to by saying something along the lines of “Every coin in Heaven could not pay for it,” which of course was wrong because the total cost for the $5 meal deal’s component items was something like $10.25. I leapt straight onto the electrified third rail of the Red Line.
I don’t know what saved me from electrocution. I would never attempt it again, but it could have been the rubber soles of the sneakers, legendary in their rarity, my sister had bought me for my twenty-fifth birthday, the shoes I always said I’d need “real adult money to get”. Or the oath I’d made to take some crazy drugs at our next office Christmas party with the beautiful lady from marketing and events. Or it could have been devotion alone. It didn’t matter. I thought nothing, felt nothing, saw nothing, except the glow of the white bag floating down the tunnel, the entrancing rattle of the coffee-infused ice cubes rolling around in the cup. I chased them. The world shook with premonition of trains to come and the memory of trains already gone. I had no time to hesitate.
I could measure my entire adult life in $5 meal deals, track my finest and darkest memories between Dunkin’ bags, all the times Arthur and the boys and I had commiserated in the moments after our adventures, to the meal I’d had on the road home after my dad got his cancer diagnosis, to all the coffees I’d brought to the women I would later find a way to end things with. I ate my way past drinks and disappointments and missed commitments and lost bets and lost friends. Whether you believe in God or in the uncaring world of chemical action, the things floating away from me was what kept my engine going. It could only be there, in the bag, my lost youth, and in the cup, my virtue, and only together would they deliver me to the truth.
Then my phone buzzed in my pocket, and I stood there between the dark tracks of the tunnel, with a text from Arthur about work. He wanted me to recruit a summer intern or two and show them the ropes. A rush of wind surged from behind me, bringing with it visions. Stained-glass sunlight gleamed all around the walls of the tunnel in a kaleidoscopic burst of color. I saw my children dancing with metal dragons. I saw the design for liberation and prosperity. I saw the nude form of a woman, the first I had ever seen into which I didn’t dictate a nonexistent flaw, the first I had ever seen beyond my comprehension. She held the bag in one hand and the cup in the other. Her face was carved from the kaleidoscopic, rainbowing light of the windowed tunnel. She smiled at me. I could not form a word. The wind turned.
I felt the hardened coils of my body loosening and stretching forward into time, the direction in which my mind used to not orient, and when the vision ended, the grails were gone, and I was back in the tunnel. I heard a train approaching the station behind me. I blacked out: when I woke again, a pack of high-vis suits pulled me up from the tracks, and I took one more look down into the dark, where the last good deal in Boston had gone.
By popular demand, a few months later, Dunkin’ reinstated the bagel as part of the meal deal, although it would still cost $6. Mimi and I rejoiced.
— Daniel Strickland is a research biologist and writer originally from Virginia, now based in Boston. He likes funk music and games of all descriptions.