Terms and Conditions

An hour later, just as I was finally drifting off to sleep, I heard Andrew walk in. I thought maybe he’d brought someone back but detected only a single pair of footsteps. He paused at the door to my bedroom, then abruptly opened it. I lay on my stomach and turned my head to peer at him.

“What happened?” I asked.

“The crowd was disgusting,” Andrew said. “Some loads should be refused.”

“I’m sorry.”

He lingered in the doorframe, half in shadow. “Yeah. So.”

“Good night,” I said.

“You’re just gonna go to sleep?”

“I’m already sleeping.”

“It’s our last night.”

“I know.”

“So.”

Andrew pulled up his T-shirt and crept his fingers under his waistband. He looked at me insanely. I suspected he’d done G.

“Please,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

He stood there for another moment, yanking himself in his shorts. Then he whipped out his hand, charged into the room, and spanked me so hard my eyes instantly welled with tears.

“Jesus!” I said.

“I’m sowwy!” he said. He walked out of the room laughing. “I’m sowwy! I’m sowwy!”

The next day, after we’d landed at JFK, Andrew called an Uber. “I guess you can ride with me,” he said, “if you want.”

For most of the drive we sat in silence as the gray sunbaked cityscape flew by. I hoped not to hear another word from Andrew—I hoped not to see him for at least a week—but as we neared his building he cleared his throat. “Gonna Venmo request you,” he said.

I turned to him. We’d already settled the Airbnb, our meals and drinks, and the coke. “For what?”

“For the flight. I think it was four hundred.”

My eyes must have opened very wide.

“What? That’s cheap.”

“You told me you were covering that.”

He stared at his phone. “I did not say that.”

“You told me you were using points.”

“Yeah, to book them. Why would I pay for you?”

“I didn’t expect you to pay for me,” I said. “I thought the whole purpose of your offer was that you weren’t paying for yourself, either. You were using points. It was free money.”

“Look,” Andrew said, “maybe you don’t understand this because you still use a fucking debit card for everything, but that’s not how points work. They’re not free money. They’re a reflection of money you spent.”

“That you spent. Not me.”

“Do you also not understand how money works?” Andrew said. “Somewhere along the way I spent however much to get those points, and then I spent four hundred dollars’ worth of points on your plane ticket—and I shouldn’t expect you to pay me back?”

“It is free money. When I use my debit card—”

“Oh my God! You actually use a debit card!”

“—I don’t get four hundred dollars’ worth of points. And if I did, and if I spent those points on my friend—my friend—I would not expect to be reimbursed.”

“Buddy,” Andrew said. We were now in front of his building. He smiled as he stared me down. He was blond, blue-eyed, and meticulously clean-shaven. He took fiber pills, finasteride, zinc supplements, creatine, growth hormone, and testosterone boosters. He went regularly for Botox injections, lymphatic drainage massages, and asshole bleaching. He’d slept with five hundred people. He’d cochaired a fundraiser for Kamala Harris. I shrank in my seat and looked back at him in terror. “I am going to Venmo request you for four hundred dollars, and you are going to pay it.” He got out, shut the door, and put his face to the window. “Hope you had a great fucking trip.”

When I got home I saw that he’d sent a request for $418.77 along with a note that read Due ASAP. I showered, cooked, jacked off, watched YouTube, literally anything to avoid looking at my phone. When I finally did, at midnight, I saw that he’d sent a reminder, and when I woke up the next day I saw that he’d sent another.

I ignored them. Over the next few days Andrew texted me a single question mark, then another, then a third. He called and left me voicemails that I never listened to. He emailed me a PDF of the terms and conditions associated with his credit card rewards program. I deleted the email from my inbox and then from my trash.

I felt more alive than I had in months. It wasn’t about the money. Four hundred dollars mattered more to me than it did to Andrew but it didn’t matter enough to explain my intransigence. As I sat at work and pinged my colleagues and scurried to the break room for my fifth espresso, I felt that it was irreducibly about everything, that I’d been forced at last to come to terms with my life—with the decisions I’d made, the people I’d surrounded myself with, the person I’d let myself become. For once in my life I felt that I was right.

I called Geoff, the lawyer, the smartest person in our group and the one I felt closest to. I told him about the booking conversation, the trip, the Uber ride from the airport.

“This is a very interesting dilemma,” he said. “I have a meeting in one minute.”

“Don’t you see where I’m coming from?”

“I think you may have a case. At the very least you may not owe him the full four hundred.”

“What do you mean? I don’t owe him anything.”

“It depends on his rewards program,” Geoff said. “He may be getting double or triple points on certain purchases, in which case a sum that would normally convert to, say, three hundred dollars’ worth of points would convert to four. He may have gotten bonus points if he upgraded his card. But the math isn’t so simple. Your dilemma is irresolvable. Who’s to say which points—at which conversion value, reflective of money spent or reflective of a bonus—he really used?”

“What are you talking about?” I said. “Andrew is being selfish.”

“That’s a different line of argumentation. And it won’t work on him.”

“So you’re telling me I should pay him?”

“I’m not telling you anything,” Geoff said. In the background I could hear a glass door opening, people talking softly, the smooth sounds of high capital being circulated on high floors. “Which credit card does he use?”

I remembered from the PDF. “Delta SkyMiles Gold.”

Geoff burst out laughing and hung up.

I looked at the darkened screen of my phone. I thought about calling Conor, but he and Andrew had been friends since college and I knew he would feel duty-bound to take his side. I thought about calling Kyle, but he professed to hate “drama” and I knew he would only say we should make peace before our winter trip to Puerto Vallarta. I thought about calling Peter, but I knew he would be useless. He’d tell me to pray on it and invite me to Mass.

Because I was officially ignoring Andrew, because I was unwilling to see him, our friends had to arrange hangouts with delicacy. Rather than excluding either of us from full-group outings, they opted to splinter into rotating duos and trios. One weekend I went with Conor and Kyle to Basement and the next weekend they went with Andrew. One week I had dinner with Geoff and Peter and the next week it was Andrew’s turn. No one ever brought up the conflict to me but I could feel it in their silences and their stares. We knew this couldn’t go on forever.

One Sunday Geoff invited me to a group brunch. He told me not to worry: Andrew was in California for work.

We sat outside at a restaurant in Hell’s Kitchen, and if I turned to my left I could see Andrew’s building, one of those hastily assembled glass monoliths that the city’s housing crisis had made more complicated to hate.

We caught each other up on our lives. Kyle had executed a deal at work that would net him a $150,000 bonus. Conor had gone to Wrecked, blacked out for several hours, and returned to consciousness on his knees. Peter had bought the apartment next to his after its previous occupant killed himself. Geoff had slept with a trans man.

“Was it any different?” Kyle asked.

“I don’t know,” Geoff said. “I fucked him in the ass.”

The four of them then fell silent and turned to me.

“Look,” Geoff said. “Andrew should have been clearer when he booked the flights. We grant you that. But he’s not backing down, and unless you pay him we’re looking at a permanent rift.”

There was a bee flying around in the potted flowers behind me and I hunched to avoid it. I’d never been stung, not once in my life, and I worried that I was allergic. Every time I saw one I envisioned my death: the constriction of my throat, the onset of panic, the world narrowing and darkening to blackness.

“Why should I back down?” I said. “Why not him?”

“You know Andrew,” Conor said.

The bee buzzed by my ear and I twisted away from it. “And you guys think you know me! You think I’m weak. You think I’m a beta.”

“It’s four hundred dollars,” Kyle said. “You don’t have four hundred dollars in savings?”

I had $25,000 in savings. “I have nothing,” I said.

“I can lend it to you,” Geoff said. “And unlike Andrew I won’t charge interest.”

The bee landed near my hand and I shot up from the table. “He’s charging me interest?”

“Sit the fuck down,” Geoff said. “It’s a bee.”

I did as told, but my fright, my tipsiness, and my indignation had unleashed something.

“Listen to yourselves,” I said. “You’ve completely lost sight of anything that matters. What about kindness? What about generosity? I’m glad I’m a beta! At least I’m still fucking human.”

Geoff, Kyle, and Conor stared at me blankly from behind their sunglasses, and for relief I turned to Peter. I suspected he wasn’t long for our group. He was dressed in one of his strange getups—drab cotton Henley, loose linen pants—and on the table in front of him was the dumbphone he’d recently taken to using. He believed that we lived in an irreparably fallen world and that retreating from it was the only way to attain grace. He believed that everyone’s lives, and the lives of gay men in particular, had become hollowed out by cynicism, consumerism, and hedonism and that if we continued on in this way we would forever be denied transcendence.

The rest of our group disagreed. They believed transcendence lay not in spurning vices but in embracing them freely, completely, outrageously, that sin at a certain depth and duration and degree became a perverse kind of holiness, that the more they snorted and swallowed and drank, the more they earned and the more they spent, the more cruelties they sustained and the more they dealt, the more legs they pried open and the more violations they endured, the more nights they went to sleep tweaking, aching, and vomiting and the more mornings they woke up thrashing, crying, and wondering, the closer they got to the gleaming telos of human life.

“You’re destroying our friend group over four hundred dollars,” Kyle said, “and we’re the ones who’ve lost sight of what matters?”

“Andrew is going through a hard time,” Conor said. “His mom died of cancer.”

“That was two years ago,” I said.

“You sound like a sociopath.”

“The fact that his mom died,” I said, “doesn’t make him more right.”

“And the fact that you’re poorer than us,” Geoff said, “doesn’t make you more worthy.”

After we left the restaurant I walked for a few blocks with Peter. When we arrived at my subway stop he turned to me. He’d let his curls grow out and he looked angelic. He’d quit alcohol and his skin was radiant.

“I see myself in you,” he said. “You’re getting to the place I got to—right before I chose a new path.”

I held up my hand. “Please.”

“I’m here for you. That’s all I’m saying. I want to help you, however I can.”

“Then maybe you can send Andrew four hundred dollars,” I said. “Because I’ll go to my grave before I do it.”

“That would be a material solution to a spiritual problem,” Peter said.

“Fuck off,” I said and descended the stairs to the piss-smelling world underneath.

Weeks passed. The leaves changed. Andrew informed me via text that the sum I owed him had been accruing interest at an annual rate of 12.5 percent and now stood at $427.07. I saw the rest of the group less and less frequently. I looked at job listings in other cities. I looked at old pictures of myself in which I sat squished on ratty sofas between my old girl friends, a Cranium board on the coffee table in front of us, my eyes bright and unsuspecting. On the first Friday of October Geoff called me.

“We’re all going to Andrew’s tonight,” he said, “and you’re coming. Maybe you’ll hug and make up, maybe you’ll never see each other again. Either way, something needs to happen.”

I told Geoff I’d think about it. I drank a bottle of wine. At nine that night I knocked on the door to Andrew’s apartment.

Conor let me in. Geoff, Kyle, and Peter nodded to me from the sofas. Across the room, Andrew stood by his glass bar cart opening a bottle of Hendrick’s. He stared at me under the dim lights. He’d gotten a spray tan. He was grinning.

“What would you like to drink?” he asked.

“I’ll have whatever you’re having,” I said.

“I’m sure.”

He offered me a gin-and-soda. Even after I’d accepted the glass he held on to it.

“Thank you,” I said.

“You’re welcome,” he said.

The music coming from the speakers was high-energy EDM, all deep bass lines and sawtooth waves devoid of lyrics or analog instrumentation or any human element whatsoever. It was shirtless music, molly music, and most of us had probably first heard it at circuit parties. But now we listened to it all the time: on the subway, at the gym, alone in our apartments, on flights back home to visit our dying loved ones.

For a while the six of us talked aimlessly, as if circling a drain. Geoff wanted to go to the Eagle. Conor wanted to order ketamine. Kyle wanted to know if we had any suggestions for who could fill the spare bedroom in our house in Puerto Vallarta. Peter told the group he’d decided to stop using the internet completely. Andrew and I mostly occupied ourselves with drinking. Every time he took a gulp he looked at me over his glass.

When a silence fell Geoff opened his hands. “All six of us,” he said. “Feels good.”

“I think we can finally put this behind us,” Conor said. “Right?”

Between the wine I’d had at my apartment and the drinks I’d put away since arriving I was now entirely drunk. “What choice do we have?”

“You could pay me,” Andrew said.

Geoff put his hand on Andrew’s shoulder. “Stubborn. You guys are stubborn.”

“Never,” I said to Andrew.

“Admit that you were wrong,” he said.

“Never.”

“Apologize to me.”

“Never.”

Kyle put up his hands. “Guys.”

“Admit that you’re poor,” Andrew said.

I felt a smile come to my lips. I felt a tingling in my groin. “I’m poor,” I said.

“Admit that you’re weak.”

“I’m weak,” I said.

The others shifted uncomfortably, their eyes darting between us, but I felt strangely calm, almost relieved. Andrew and I might as well have been alone in the room.

“Admit that you dress terribly,” he said.

“I dress terribly,” I said.

“You have love handles. And forehead wrinkles. And a receding hairline.”

“All true.”

“You’re a six at best.”

“I’m a six at best.”

“Your job is shitty. Your apartment is shitty.”

“Everything about my life is shitty,” I said.

Peter stood from the couch and gathered his jacket. He looked at me briefly—kindly, probingly—and walked out the door without a goodbye.

“Guys,” Kyle said again.

“Admit that you’re jealous of me,” Andrew said.

“I’m jealous of you,” I said.

“You think you’re different, you think you’re special, but you want to be us, and it kills you that you can’t be. Admit that.”

“It kills me,” I said.

Geoff, Conor, and Kyle turned to each other and set down their drinks.

“Admit that you mooch off us.”

“I mooch off you,” I said.

“You drink our booze. You do our coke.”

“And your K. And your G.”

“Admit that you’re a whore.”

“I’m a whore,” I said.

Andrew cocked his head toward the others. “Admit that you got on your knees for them.”

“Jesus,” Geoff said.

“I got on my knees.”

“Admit that you loved it.”

“I drank every last drop.”

Without a word the three of them stood up and left too. At some point the music had stopped. At some point it had become midnight. Out the windows the lights of the city went on forever.

Andrew was silent for a while, and then he spoke. “Admit that you were wrong,” he said.

“Never,” I said.

He stood and went to the bar cart and made himself another drink—his eighth, his tenth, his fifteenth.

“I should go,” I said.

“We’re not done yet,” he said.

I saw my jacket on a chair next to the bar cart and wobbled forward to retrieve it.

Andrew stepped in front of me, intercepting my path. Our faces were inches apart, our chests almost touching. We stood like that, saying nothing. Then he reached up and grabbed the back of my neck.

“Let’s just do it,” he said in a low voice. “Let’s fuck.”

I matched his whisper. “You disgust me,” I said.

We stared at each other. Our lives had no meaning. For a moment I thought maybe we’d reached a place where we could admit this. I thought we could part with our hatred, console each other in our desolation, detach ourselves from the degradations of our era. We could be kind to each other, I thought, however briefly and imperfectly. For a moment this seemed possible. Then he spat in my face.

Out of instinct I shoved him, and out of instinct he shoved me back, and then I shoved him again, this time more forcefully. He fell backward, crashing through the glass bar cart behind him and sending liquor bottles and glittering shards across the floor. We froze in stunned silence. There were cuts all over Andrew’s hands and arms, some shallow and some already leaking. He looked at a gash on his palm and, in his deliriousness, wiped the blood on his cheek. He smiled wildly, then began laughing. He put out his arms and tried to stand, smearing blood on the white new-construction wall and the blond wood new-construction floor. He fell again and got on his hands and knees. He crawled toward me, swinging his arms at my ankles as I shuffled away. I thought about calling 911 but he swung at me again, laughing all the while, and instead I ran out of the apartment and took the staircase twenty-three flights to the lobby.

I never saw any of those people again. Geoff did message me to let me know Andrew was OK (“Thirty stitches,” he said, “if you care”), and Peter did occasionally text me ambiguous well wishes from his dumbphone. But I never heard from Kyle or Conor, and I never heard from Andrew. I spent that winter working and holing up in my apartment, drinking myself to sleep and waking up from nightmares whose details I couldn’t retrieve. I listened to music from my twenties. I made myself read. I tried to believe that after the darkest days of the year had passed, after a season of seclusion and understimulation, a self I recognized would emerge.

On one of the first warm days of spring, I went to the park. I scouted out an unoccupied patch of grass and put down a blanket. All around me groups of friends were gathered in circles on the lawn, passing canned cocktails and bags of flavored popcorn, removing layers and stretching their limbs in the sun. Everyone was happy, healthy, and twenty-six. I caught myself staring but it made no difference. No one was looking my way.

I lay back on the blanket and tried to fall asleep. But then I heard a buzzing and, looking up, saw a bee. It flew at my face, darted around a few times, and then retreated into the air above me, where it hovered insistently, as if it were marking its prey. I felt my body go rigid; a cold sweat formed on my skin. I pulled out my phone and held it in front of me, hoping that by the time I lowered it the bee would be gone.

I checked my various accounts and inboxes, where I had either junk or nothing at all, then opened my camera to take a selfie. I relaxed my features to disguise my wrinkles, I angled my head to obscure my hairline, I turned my face to the sun to mask my exhaustion. I studied myself for a moment, this stranger I happened to be, and sent the picture to the girl friends group chat. I hadn’t spoken to them in months, but maybe they’d look at me and see someone they remembered, someone they’d lost but found again, someone they missed. I waited in vain for reactions. I let the screen go dark. When I put the phone down, the bee was still there.