The Sleepover
by Dan J. Vice
Last Thursday, late in the afternoon, an old friend I hadn’t spoken to in fifteen years showed up at my door and said some men were after him. I don’t know how he found my address or who gave him access to the building. Between the outside world and me, at all times, there is a high gate, a surveilled parking lot, a lobby door with a keypad, an elevator and a stairwell, both requiring keys, and four floors of ascension. Yet here he was, standing in the doorway, saying nothing more than “Hey” as he walked into the apartment.
He sounded unafraid but in a rush, like we had a long agenda and needed to get started. He moved briskly through the open living room, over the new gray area rug without taking off his shoes, and stopped at the east wall made entirely of windows. He looked down into the parking lot, then back at me, and gestured that I should hurry over.
“Hello,” I said when I got there.
“They’re after me,” he said, pointing.
Vacating a parked car below were two men, both in hats and long coats. It looked like they were each holding something in their right hand, but it was very hard to make out from this height. They ran toward the parking lot gate, then stopped and scratched their heads, like confused criminals in a Superman comic. “Who are they?” I asked him.
“That’s who I’m talking about,” he said.
“I gathered,” I said. “Are those guns?”
“Can I stay here for a little while?” he said.
“Are they coming up here?” I said.
“How could they get up here?”
“You got up here.”
He laughed. “You’re right.” He seemed to visibly relax. He walked away from the windows and flopped down on the suede couch. He looked around for the first time—the wall-mounted TV, the gas fireplace, the kitchen island and pendant lights and reclaimed wood stools. “You really love gray,” he said.
I looked around for his suitcase or a duffel bag, checked the outer hallway, and then, finding nothing, closed and locked the door. “Neutrals are in,” I said. “They don’t date.”
“And this is your pop of color,” he said, gesturing to the wall opposite the fireplace, to the painting that stretches out there, over six and a half feet wide: the heads and shoulders of three men in suits, radioactive in smeared neon blue, green, and purple. Their mouths are open wide, through which you can see the illuminated bursts of paint behind them. They look mildly disgruntled to be caught in an atomic blast. “Why did you go for this?” he asked.
“I like it,” I said. “It’s all cool colors. I guess it’s a portrait of the ’80s businessman, like a satire of work. When I look at it, I think about how silly capitalism is.”
“It looks like a commercial for fruit snacks,” he said. “Or T-shirts we wore in middle school, like a bootleg Bart Simpson where the colors were all off. Lots of pink and green. Remember? We wore those shirts down to our knees, and we were all bones. What did you pay for that?”
Somewhere in the central nervous system of the building I thought I could hear a sudden change in air pressure, the whoosh of an elevator car.
“How long were you planning to stay?” I said.
“I’m housebroken, and I don’t eat much,” he said.
In the back of the pantry I found an old bottle of ten-dollar gin, which I no longer drink but he still did. I made him gin and juice and poured myself some 12-year-old Glenfiddich. I preheated the oven and turned on the fireplace, and we sipped our drinks while the winter sky darkened. I roasted root vegetables and made polenta. I told him that no, I didn’t have any Bagel Bites, and admitted that yes, I was a vegetarian now. I heard metallic echoes that could have been trash cans on the street below, or cranes on a construction site blocks away, or footsteps running up four flights of stairs.
We sat in the living room and ate dinner at the coffee table, speaking only in dialogue from The Simpsons, like we used to do. I hadn’t seen it in over a decade, but every joke he quoted reminded me of a joke to quote. We laughed hard and ate and drank some more. I asked him nothing about his life and offered nothing about mine.
“Let’s watch a couple,” he said after I’d cleared the plates. So we put on episodes from when we were in high school, and recited lines along with them. Bart got a driver’s license. Homer fought with George Bush. Lisa became a vegetarian. The neon businessmen on my wall gaped at us. Eventually I brought some blankets for the living room couch and left him there, still watching. I brushed and flossed my teeth, rinsed my mouth, trimmed my eyebrows, cleansed my face, took my blood pressure medication, laid out running clothes for the morning, answered emails, set my alarm, checked my meeting schedule for the next day, turned off the lamp, put on my sleep mask, and fell asleep.
I woke at 3:30 to a tremendous racket—fists on the front door, the chain lock rattling, the deadbolt clanking against its plate. The floor seemed to be shaking with every blow. There might have been the faintest muffle of voices from the hallway, but the soundproofing in my building is top-notch, one of the things we pay for. The pounding grew harder. There was a rip of splintering wood. The violence of the noise was incredible. I got out of bed, locked my bedroom door, returned to the bed, checked my email, and went back to sleep.
Dan J. Vice lives in Indianapolis with his wife, their son, and two cats, fat and thin. He teaches at the University of Indianapolis and could really go for some coffee.