Rappety rap rap. My arms are at my side, and my heart seems to be beating with that same pattern, that same rappety rap rap. For a second, I wonder if I knocked at all or just imagined it, but then I hear rough rustlings of metal and the door is cracked open before me. Michael peeks his head around it, his dark hair spilling to the side.

“Vic! I haven’t seen you in... I mean, how’s it going?”

His voice wavers and he takes a step back, peeling off this barrier between us swiftly as a band-aid on an old wound. I glance behind him, quickly scanning the clutter of his apartment. I notice it looks much dirtier than I remember it. I notice the drawing he did of me no longer is on the wall.

“D’ya want to come in?” he asks, extending his hand into the space which once was ours. I nod and force a smile, stepping forward, despite my impulse to turn and run. I feel like an idiot for being here; I feel I should give him some sort of explanation.

“I was just in the neighborhood,” I lie, looking at cracks in the concrete and half-laughing at my corny use of cliché, “and I wanted to see how you’re doing.” I walk down the hall towards the living room, and I wonder if that’s why I’m really here. I want to believe it is, since I don’t have a valid reason. I feel lost, curious, nervous, displaced. In fact, the entire scenario seems awkward. I stop at the entrance to the living room and stand immobile, listening as he shuts the door and locks it.

“You’ve always been anal about that,” I mutter, thinking about the time he freaked out because I left the door open when I’d gone to check the mail.

“Huh?” I feel him walk and stand beside me, though I don’t have the nerve to look.

“Oh, nothing,” I say, staring at my absence on the wall. The only picture still hanging is a Scotch-taped Polaroid taken when he was in Mexico, that vacation he used to refer to incessantly. “I was just saying it’s been a long time.”

“Yeah, it has. A really long time.”

Then I force myself to look into his eyes, shuddering at the contact with reminders that I shouldn’t have. After all the preparation I’ve done, all my attempts to overcome him, his eyes still entrance me. They’re dark and glossy. Mysterious. Mesmerizing. I don’t want to have to stop looking at them, even though I know they don’t see me the way they once did. It bothers me to think how they see me now, a stranger in this new world of his.

Michael notices that I’m gawking at him and he looks away. “Sorry the place’s such a wreck,” he says in what seems like a polite attempt. “You know I’ve never been the June Cleaver type.”

I observe the landscape of laundry strewn about the room in mounds, the crusty-edged dishes in precarious stacks, and deduce that he’s single. He doesn’t have a live-in-lover, at least – two people couldn’t possibly occupy a space where so much junk is piled up.

“Aw, it’s not too bad,” I say. “Not bad at all, in comparison to mine.”

He continues to avoid eye contact with me, slowly scanning his room as if expecting to find some change in scenery; then scuttling off to the kitchen with his abrupt change of mind.

“D’ya want anything to drink?”

“No thanks. I’m fine,” I answer, not quite certain about the words.

“Really? Not even a glass of juice or anything? I’m so parched, I could just die. ”

Juice. “Well... orange juice doesn’t sound too bad. If you’ve got it, that is,” I say, remembering that he usually keeps a gallon-size container in his fridge.

“Sounds good to me, too,” he calls from the kitchen, his voice bouncing off the linoleum. “So, what’s been going on?”

“Going on? Oh, you know, eating, sleeping, working...all the thrills and chills of life.”

Silence.

“Still working as an English tutor?” he asks.

“Unfortunately. I’m afraid it’ll never end. I expected to find something else by now.”

“Yeah, I remember when you were hired for the job you said you didn’t want it to be permanent.” I hear the refrigerator door shut with a sucking noise; then he returns to the room, a large glass in each hand.

“Here you go,” he says, smiling. “Y’know, you’re welcome to have a seat.”

“Oh. Thanks.” I maneuver myself around the plates and glasses and plop down on the recliner. “I’ve always loved this chair.” I feel a bit comfortable now. I’m comfortable, and I’m glad that I’ve come here. After all the time we invested in one another, there isn’t any reason why we shouldn’t be able to get along. We can still be friends. We can do this.

“I know it’s kind of weird that I showed up here,” I say. “But I like it.”

“Yeah? You do?” He stands with his arms loosely crossed.

“Yeah. It should’ve happened long ago, but I don’t think I was ready yet. I had to get things into perspective.”

“Always a good thing to do.”

“Yeah.”

“That’s all I ever wanted, you know.”

“Yeah, I know. It took me a while, but I’ve got it all together now.”

I notice that I’m nodding my head and I wonder how long I’ve been doing it. Attempt to be cool, I think. You can do this.

“Great,” he says, pushing a pile of papers off the couch. They tumble over one another like sheets in a dryer, only they’re being tossed all over the floor. A few of them land on the dishes beside me, and I make out that they’re new sketches of his. He plops down without even bothering to glance where they’ve landed and nonchalantly sips his orange juice. He still has that charm, that unaffected grace I’ve always loved.

I’m eager to step into his world again. “What have you been working on?” I ask, positioning the glass between my legs and leaning over the arm of the chair. I pick up one of the pieces before he has a chance to answer. It’s a pastel drawing of a devil whispering in an angel’s ear. The angel’s eyes are wide with consternation and one of his hands is covering his mouth. “Promises, Promises” is written across the top of the page in a crimson scrawl resembling gashed flesh. I look at the letters and think of how we used to listen to that song late at night while he sat on the couch the way he is now, and a series of mental pictures begins to flash before me: the stiff-backed pose Michael had me model for my portrait, the time we made love and Michael knocked over a cup filled with paint-polluted water and stained the wad of clothes beside us. My vision is clouded with Michael, Michael, Michael.

“This is excellent,” I say, putting the piece back on the floor and picking up a charcoal study he did of hands. I reposition myself and a little bit of the orange juice spills on my crotch, but I choose to ignore it.

“Thanks.” He seems unaffected. I wonder if his apathy is real or a facade. I wonder if he misses me, if he ever wakes up in the middle of the night and resists urges, impulses to call me, the way that I do with him.

I delicately place the charcoal drawing on an open patch of his floor and tell him that I wish he’d take better care of his works. “After all,” I say, “they’re fantastic.”

He shrugs. “That doesn’t really matter to me. The important thing is that I release everything, get it out. Once I deal with those emotions, I don’t need them anymore. They’re taken care of, you know? And that’s what’s important to me, not the product.”

Not the product. I take a sip of juice and feel it slide down my throat, recognizing this explanation he has given me many times in the past. This time, I finally hear what he tried to tell me long ago. The important thing for him is the sense of a release, not the product. Not the product. Not. The. Product.

I don’t feel very comfortable here after all. In the span of a few seconds, he’s disturbed the past as I knew it, stolen the truth as I thought it was, reduced over two years of our life to rubbish. I never expected to find him tenaciously clinging to memories of the time we spent together, but I also didn’t think his emotions were based solely on immediacy: what’s comfortable today, what eliminates his worries, his tension. As I sit here in the apartment once again, I can’t help but notice the path of pictures on the floor, and I realize that they and I are the same: products he no longer needs, things of which he had rid himself.

Michael picks up the remote control from the arm of the couch and flicks on the t.v. Some typical program is on, and it’s typically annoying: an overweight comedienne vulgarly pushing around her size and bitching about how much she hates the resurgence of paper-thin models. She claims they looked disgusting twenty years ago, so they definitely don’t need to be updated now. “I mean, could you seriously date someone who only eats, like, three pieces of lettuce a day?” she asks the audience. Michael laughs, and I stare at him in disbelief. He’s hunched over with his head rested on his hand, gawking as if the program is fascinating or something.

Yeah, sure. There’s no way that he could find this garbage entertaining. I know he doesn’t care about the show; he just doesn’t want to have to think about new topics, about what he should say to me next. It’s not as if I’m quite into the art of conversation either, though. I think about my portrait instead, wondering if he would give it to me.

“Um, Michael, whatever happened to that...” I begin, gazing at all the white space on his wall, but then I stop. It doesn’t seem to matter to me anymore. Blank is how I feel: blank about taking the effort to ask the question, blank about being in his apartment, blank about an old period of my life.

He doesn’t look away from the t.v. “Happened to what?”

I pause, frantically thinking about a way to complete my sentence. “Old neighbor of ours, the crazy lady who thought that you and I stole her cat?”

“She’s still around, I guess. I haven’t seen her in a while, haven’t thought to pay attention. Who cares, anyway?” He yawns and stretches his arms.

Oh please, I think, you don’t have to do the whole I’m-so-bored-with-this-conversation bullshit. I’ll be gone soon enough. In fact, I’m surprised that I haven’t left yet. I don’t know what I’m waiting on.

“I think I’m gonna get something to eat,” he announces. “Want anything? I have some ice cream sandwiches and stuff.”

“No thanks. I’m fine,” I say, and I realize that I am. It dawns on me that this is why I came here: to feel fine, to wean myself of him once and for all. I may have been another product, I think, looking at him, but I don’t need you anymore. I don’t need to be fed by your attention or your ice cream bars. I don’t need to try and re-live the past. I don’t need you, Michael.

He stands up, heads back into the kitchen, and begins shifting things about in his icebox. I wish that I could voice my thoughts. I know it’s over; I can feel the distance, the stretch of space between us, and it doesn’t seem to be a big deal.

“Mmm mmm. Hey, I forgot about these ice cubes I made out of Coke the other day. Cool, huh? You want any?”

“Coca-Cola ice cubes?” I push myself out of the recliner. “No, I’m not in the mood for anything sweet, really.”

“Okay. Your loss,“ he says, forcing a friendly laugh. It disgusts me. I can’t bear being in his presence another instant.

I walk over to the lone photograph of him in Mexico, rip it down, and head for the exit. No, your loss, I think, fumbling with the lock. I can hear him snapping ice cubes from their plastic tray and dropping them into a glass with a clink, clink, clink, clink as I storm down the stairs of the complex without bothering to close his door behind me or take one last look back at the place.

I step onto the pavement outside and begin briskly walking in the early summer evening. “Okay, that’s it,” I say, working my way through pedestrians a bit slower than I. “I’ve done it.”

The heat of August is oppressive, but I feel strong now, free. My feet keep moving and I impulsively toss the sweaty photo of Michael over my shoulder, pleased to finally experience a release, to rid myself of an unneeded product.