You Suck: A Love Story

aura, more of a life force. So far they’d only seen healthy red and pink ones-not what she was looking for.
    “What’s that noise, like running water?” Tommy asked.
    “That’s the sewers running under the street. All that stuff will fade after a while-you’ll still hear it, but you won’t notice it unless you focus.”
    “It’s like a thousand people are talking in my head.” He looked around at the few pedestrians who were out on the street.
    “Televisions and radios, too,” Jody said. “Try to focus on one thing, let the rest fall back.”
    Tommy stopped, looked up at an apartment window four floors up. “There’s a guy up there having phone sex.”
    “Figures you’d zero in on that,” Jody said. She focused on the window. Yes, she could hear the guy panting and giving instructions to someone on the phone. Evidently he felt the caller was a dirty little slut and therefore needed to apply varieties of hot salsa to her body. Jody tried to hear the voice on the other end of the phone, but it was too faint-the guy must have been wearing a headset.
    “What a freak,” Tommy said.
    “Shhhh,” Jody said. “Tommy, close your eyes and listen. Forget the salsa guy. Don’t look.”
    Tommy closed his eyes and stood in the middle of the sidewalk. “What?”
    Jody leaned against a “No Parking” sign and smiled. “What’s just to the right of you?”
    “How do I know? I was looking up.”
    “I know. Focus. Listen. Two feet from your right hand, what is it?”
    “This is dumb.”
    “Just listen. Listen to the shape of the sound coming from your right.”
    “Okay.” Tommy squinted, showing he was concentrating.
    A couple of androgynous students dressed in black with severe hair, probably from the Academy of Art on the next block, walked by and barely gave them a look until Tommy said, “I can hear a box. A rectangle.”
    “Acid noob,” said one of the students, who sounded like it might be a guy.
    “I remember my first trip,” said the other, who was probably a girl. “I wandered into the men’s room at the Metreon and thought I was in a Marcel Duchamp installation.”
    Jody waited for them to pass then asked, “Yes, a rectangle, solid, hollow, what?” She was a little giddy now, bouncing on the balls of her feet. This was better than buying shoes.
    “It’s hollow.” Tommy tilted his head. “It’s a newspaper machine.” He opened his eyes, looked at the newspaper box, then at Jody, his face lit up like a toddler who has just discovered chocolate for the first time.
    She ran into his arms and kissed him. “I have so much to show you.”
    “Why didn’t you tell me?” Tommy asked.
    “How could I? Do you have words for what you’re hearing? For what you’re seeing?”
    Tommy let her go and looked around, took a deep breath through his nose, as if checking the bouquet of a wine. “No. I don’t know how to say these things.”
    “See, that’s why I had to share this with you.”
    Tommy nodded, but looked a little forlorn. “This part is good. But the other part…”
    “What other part?”
    “The foul, dead, blood-drinking part. I’m still starving.”
    “Don’t whine, Tommy. Nobody likes a whiner.”
    “Hungry,” he said.
    She knew how he felt, she was feeling some of it herself, but she didn’t know how to solve the feeding problem. Tommy had always been her go-to blood guy; now they were going to have to hunt. She could do it, she had done it, but she didn’t want to do it. “Come on, we’ll figure this out. Don’t pout. Let’s go watch people onMarket Street. You’ll like it.” She took his hand and dragged him up the street toward Market, where rivers of tourists, shoppers, and freaks were flowing up and down the streets and sidewalks. Rivers of blood.
    E veryone smells like whiz and feet,” Tommy said, standing on the sidewalk in front of a Walgreens drugstore. It was still early in the evening and the convention crowd from the hotels was flowing down the sidewalks like a great migrating herd, looking for dinner or a watering hole. Out on the edges, hustlers, homeless, and hangers-on worked their angles, playing the secret path of eye contact to the pocket, while the herd defended itself by paying rapt attention to their companions, their cell phones, or a spot on the sidewalk twelve feet ahead.
    “Feet and pee,” Tommy continued.
    “You get used to it,” Jody said.
    “Is there a clean pair of underwear anywhere on this street?” Tommy shouted.