Chapter Text
Pink Noise
the magazine for people who read with one hand
West Hollywood · 1999
Chapter One — Mean As Fuck, Cool As Hell
The manuscript in front of him carried the working title How to Fuck Your Friend and Keep Your Dignity, a name Reggie had come up with in four seconds and Will had called optimistic bordering on medical concern.
By page three, the section called Use Your Mouth Like You Mean It, Mike Wheeler was sitting in front of a black and white photograph of a naked man, trying to decide whether the phrase his dick entered the frame with a certain narrative confidence was a sentence that could be salvaged.
He was fairly sure it couldn't.
He was also certain that no twenty-eight-year-old man should ever have to use the word narrative and the word dick in the same line, unless that man had made a long series of bad decisions one after another, and all of those decisions were now accruing interest.
The manuscript sat on his desk, and it was no longer a manuscript. It was a crime scene, mostly because of the red pen, and because of the person holding the red pen. In the margin of page one, in handwriting so hot it was unfair, someone had written,
too many dicks.
In the margin of page two,
not enough actual sex.
In the margin of page three, where Mike had been quietly proud that his paragraph had rhythm, and imagery, and a very tidy metaphor comparing desire to Los Angeles traffic, an arrow pointed straight at the last sentence. Next to it was a line.
why does this blowjob have a thesis statement.
And below it, smaller, like a vicious postscript:
this man is getting head, not applying to grad school.
Mike read that line. He let it sit in him a while, the way you leave a thing alone after it has just struck you, when you don't yet want to look down and see how deep it went.
At the drafting table by the window, exactly an arm's length away, Will Byers said, without looking up, "That caption's still up there, by the way. The frame one. I can hear you not fixing it."
"I'm fixing it."
"You're staring at it like it owes you money."
"Maybe it does."
"It's a dick, Mike. It doesn't have a pension plan."
Mike looked back at the screen. The caption was still there, narrative confidence, a line he had written with all the confidence of a man drowning while still trying to explain to everyone that the water was an aesthetic choice. He typed a word. Deleted it. Typed it again almost exactly the same.
An arm's length away, Will's pen moved across the paper, small and even. The smell of sweet smoke, of ink, of paper warm under the desk lamp, fell into the air between them. Mike did not want to notice. Mike regretted to inform himself that he was noticing anyway.
Will reached over to turn a page of the manuscript. There was a streak of blue ink on his wrist, his nails cut short, his fingers holding the edge of the paper as if Mike's manuscript were something that needed to be physically restrained.
He skimmed, then stopped.
"Mike."
"No."
"This line." Will tapped the end of his pen on a sentence. "He wanted it more than he had ever wanted sunlight after a long winter. Mike. He's getting head, not returning from war."
"It's interiority."
"It's loneliness."
"It's texture."
"It's a blowjob with seasonal depression, Mike. You put loneliness into oral sex."
Will looked up for the first time. The white t-shirt had gone thin from too much washing, the sleeves rolled to the elbow, one hem come loose from his waistband to show a strip of stomach above the brown leather belt every time he leaned in. Glasses slipped down the bridge of his nose, a clove cigarette burning slowly between two fingers, and that mouth had just said the word blowjob with a calm that should have been against labor law. Mike looked at it half a second too long.
Will saw, of course.
"Who hurt you?"
"That's a rhetorical question and I refuse to engage."
"It wasn't rhetorical."
Mike was too upset to answer back.
He should have had something to say back. He always had something to say back.
He had paid rent, bought coffee, and conned at least three editors into believing that his mouth was a billable skill, but then Will Byers lifted his head, looked at him over those slipped glasses, and the mouth that had just said the word blowjob was still curved a little, as though none of this had any intention of killing him.
Mercifully, Reggie chose that exact moment to save him from what was left of his dignity.
"Who," she said from the desk across the room, a phone in one hand, a cigarette in the other, "sent a file named FINAL_FINAL_ACTUAL_FINAL_DICKSPREAD dot PDF to the printer?"
The whole office went quiet, long enough for a few people in the room to reconsider their career choices.
At the desk by the window, without lifting his head from the drawing, Will Byers slowly raised a hand.
"It was accurate to the layout," he said.
He said it flatly, but the corner of his mouth had moved, barely, just enough to make it worse.
"It was a felony, Byers, against my relationship with the print shop."
"Did they call back?" Will kept his eyes on the page.
"They called back to ask if I was okay."
That did it. Not a laugh, exactly. Will only pressed his lips together and looked down harder at the drawing, like the paper had suddenly become fascinating.
"That's thoughtful."
"Rename the file."
"To what?" Will asked, still too innocent, still not looking up, which was how Mike knew he was enjoying himself.
"To something that doesn't make a sixty-year-old man at the printer think this office needs a priest." Reggie stubbed her cigarette into the ashtray. "And Wheeler, if I see one more metaphor about a lonely dick, I'm confiscating your thesaurus."
"It's thematically justified," Mike said.
"Wheeler, this is not a Morrissey song. We're not paying it to be tragic."
Will made a very small sound through his nose, not quite a laugh, but close enough to make Mike want to pick the caption up and hit himself in the head with it. He turned just in time to see Will bend back over the drawing, his shoulders shaking once, the red pen still resting between two fingers as if it had not just done widespread damage to a man's dignity.
"Stop staring at me and fix your lonely dick, Wheeler," Will said.
"I'm not staring at you. Your desk is in my visual field."
"That's worse."
"It's not worse. It's geography."
"Sure."
Mike turned back to the screen. The caption was still there. The dick still entered the frame with its narrative confidence, entirely unaware that it had just been put on trial by the entire office.
And this, Mike thought, was where he should have been paying attention to the signs.
Three days earlier, he had still been a man with a resume folder under his arm and the touching delusion that his first job interview in Los Angeles would not involve defending the literary dignity of a dick in front of Will Byers.
Three days earlier, he could have turned around, taken those stairs back down to the street, and let the city kill him in some less humiliating way.
Instead, he stayed.
And Will Byers, who used to be his best friend, had been sitting there with a red pen, a cigarette, the best light in the room, and the very calm face of a man who had just told Mike he'd made a blowjob sound like it needed to submit a thesis, while somehow still looking like something they should have been printing on the cover.
Mike's jaw tightened.
Oh, fuck him.
He had already been hot.
Now he was hot with a job title, with seniority, with the authority to strike the word dick out of Mike's copy in red, and somehow, in a way that felt both illegal and deeply unfair, the direct supervisor of Mike's imaginary sex life.
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The first mistake was the tie.
The second was assuming there was any amount of navy silk capable of making a man look normal while applying to write about blowjobs for rent money.
He reached the door of Pink Noise at four thirteen in the afternoon, white shirt, dark blue tie, freshly polished leather shoes, a resume folder tucked under his arm and sweat already beading at the back of his neck, because the outdoor staircase of this plaza seemed to have been built specifically to punish anyone who still believed in cotton.
Downstairs there was a Thai place frying something strong enough to work as perfume, a tarot shop with a sign that read walk-ins welcome, skeptics extra, a second-floor meditation collective that was definitely a cult but had excellent flyers, and a liquor store with a drag night poster from three months ago that no one had bothered to take down.
On the frosted glass door, pink letters stuck on slightly crooked.
PINK NOISE
Below it, smaller, in a pink ink almost entirely faded by the sun:
the magazine for people who read with one hand.
And next to the door handle, a sheet of paper taped up, in scrawled black marker:
IF YOU ARE THE PRINTER, COME IN. IF YOU ARE THE LANDLORD, WE ARE DEAD.
Mike read that longer than he needed to. Then he straightened his tie, a gesture he would regret within the next five minutes, and pushed the door open.
A bell gave one dry, dull clack.
The first thing he saw was water.
A long fish tank ran across the office like a wall, set on a tall black wooden cabinet, heavy, solid enough to look welded to the floor, old enough to look like it had once belonged to a Chinese restaurant that had closed for reasons no one wanted to bring up. Not the kind of tank people keep in a living room to prove they can be responsible for something small.
A real partition, nearly chest high, dividing the room into two halves: on the outside a worn green velvet sofa, a coffee table piled with old magazines, an ashtray; on the inside the drafting tables, the computers, the cables, and the working life Mike did not yet know he was about to ruin. The water glowed green under a light hidden in the tank lid, the filter humming, a few fat fish swimming past a clump of fake weeds and a plastic castle that looked absurdly optimistic given the magazine's finances.
Behind that water, on the far half of the room, bent and blurred, someone sat with his back turned at a drafting table, leaning over a proof, a pair of foam headphones on, his head nodding very faintly to something only he could hear. A thin cord ran from his ear down to a Discman by his elbow, and whatever was playing stayed sealed inside it, tinny and private, leaking just enough for Mike to know there was a song without ever catching which one.
"Wheeler?"
The woman behind that desk did not look up. Short salt and pepper hair, black eyeglass frames, a dark red silk blouse, a cigarette burning between two fingers though Mike was pretty sure there was a no smoking sign somewhere in the building. Beside her were a desk phone, a stack of bills, three different cups of coffee, and an ashtray that looked like it had lived through more events than most grown adults.
"Yes. Mike Wheeler."
"Reggie Chen. Sit."
Mike went around to the chair facing her desk and sat. The chair was lower than he expected, his knees hit the underside of the desk, the folder nearly slid out of his hands, he caught it, but not gracefully enough. He sat with his back half turned to the fish tank, and thought nothing further about it.
Reggie opened his folder, turned a page. "Village Voice."
"Freelance."
"Everyone's freelance until they can afford a dentist." She turned another page. "Nightlife. Theater. Two restaurant reviews. One essay about cruising in public parks that got angry letters from conservatives and, somehow worse, from men who felt you were too sentimental about the shrubbery."
"It was more about urban loneliness," Mike said.
"It was about shrubbery." She looked up. "Can you write sex?"
That question should not have rattled Mike. He had known where he was interviewing. He had read the door. He had read the line the magazine for people who read with one hand and walked in anyway with a tie around his neck like an idiot with a college degree. But the question dropped down between them, naked and impolite, and Mike immediately felt his tie tighten.
"I can write sex," he said.
Reggie looked at him another beat, very calm, very merciless. "That sounded like you were answering a police officer."
"I can write sex." He repeated it, this time about seven percent more confident. "Look, I've, I've written about desire. About bodies. Intimacy as a language. The, uh, the politics of wanting someone in public, where it gets complicated by surveillance and shame and... architecture."
Reggie blinked. Somewhere behind the fish tank, the filter hummed.
"Okay," she said. "That was three nouns away from making me quit my own magazine."
Mike laughed quietly, the laugh of a man who knew he was dying but still wanted to die with decent sentence structure. "What I mean is, I'm comfortable with the subject."
"The subject being sex."
"Yes."
"Not architecture."
"Also yes."
"Good." Reggie tapped the end of her pen on the folder. "Because the man who used to write my sex column left on Tuesday with no notice, my good scissors, and a DJ named Biscuit. I have sixteen pages to fill, an art director who refuses to draw dead copy, and a September issue that either saves this paper or turns this office into a cash-only dentist by Christmas."
"I understand," Mike said.
"Do you?"
"I do."
"You're wearing a tie to a queer sex magazine."
"I wanted to be respectful."
"Respectful is for funerals, tax audits, and men who still call it lovemaking after midnight." Reggie pointed the cigarette at him. "This is a magazine where a man once mailed us a Polaroid of his ass and a six-page apology to his leather harness. I need to know you can write about a man getting his dick sucked without making it sound like the city council approved it by unanimous vote."
"I can."
"Practical experience?"
He knew, right then, that he should have kept his answer short, just one clean sentence and nothing else, but Mike Wheeler had never once in his life found an opening and resisted the urge to throw himself through it with a footnote attached.
"I've had a... a normal amount of sex," he said.
Reggie put her pen down.
Mike heard himself keep talking and hated every second of it.
"A healthy adult amount. Not, you know, excessive. Which is a weird thing to have to quantify in a professional setting, but. Enough to understand the mechanics. The emotional stakes. The rhythm of it. I've been with men. I understand bodies, I understand desire, I understand what people do when they... want each other. I'm good at it. I'm gonna stop talking now."
A beat of silence.
Behind the fish tank, the other person slid one headphone down off his ear, maybe because he had just caught a stranger's shape in the glass, maybe only because the disc had reached the end of a track. And at the same moment, the office radio and Mike's bragging voice rushed into his ear together.
Then a voice came from behind the fish tank, dry, clear, and entirely without mercy, the voice of someone who had just caught the last three seconds of a speech and seen quite enough.
"You once asked if hickeys counted as internal bleeding."
Mike stopped breathing.
He did not turn around, not right away. His body recognized that voice before he did, with the sick little drop of a foot finding empty air where a stair should have been, and Mike just sat there, waiting for the rest of himself to catch up.
"I'm sorry," Reggie said, slowly turning her head toward the fish tank. "Internal bleeding?"
Mike still hadn't turned around. He was busy dying in an organized fashion on that too-low chair.
"It was a legitimate medical question," he said.
From behind the green water, the other voice came back at once.
"It was a bruise."
"I was a kid."
"You were a sophomore."
"A concerned sophomore."
"You made Dustin look it up in the library."
Mike stared down at his folder as if the resume might open up and swallow him whole.
Under the joke, quieter, was the part that wasn't funny. Will had kept that. Some idiot thing Mike had said at twenty, back when they shared an apartment in Boston, carried through six years of silence and produced now, intact, for a stranger's entertainment. You didn't keep what you'd let go of. Mike looked harder at his resume.
Reggie leaned back in her chair like a person who had just been given the exact birthday present she wanted. "This is the best interview I've had all year."
The office radio had been playing somewhere behind the glass this whole time, low enough that Mike had mistaken it for another office machine losing a private war. Then the guitar brightened through the filter hum, fuzzy and warped in the green glass, and a woman's voice came through sounding like desire with lipstick on, like someone pointing across a room and saying there, that one, that one is going to ruin me.
Maria, you've gotta see her
Go insane and out of your mind
The line of the song slipped through the filter just as the chair on the other side of the fish tank turned halfway around, slow, as if the whole room had just dropped to half speed.
A school of goldfish drifted across in front of him, orange and red moving lazily through the green water, and for a beat that ran longer than it should have, they hid almost all of him, leaving only a sliver of forehead, one cheek, a single red fish that held still right at eye level before it finally let itself drift off.
The afternoon light slanted through the glass wall, breaking into streaks of gold across the water, washing the features behind it pale into something at once very close and set behind a layer you could not swim through, a layer of water, a layer of glass, six years. A drop of red ran down onto his wrist, red like the fish.
Then the fish scattered.
And the face behind the water came clear.
Will Byers.
Mike could not get past the face.
The brown hair, longer than he remembered, falling messily over his forehead where the headphones had pushed it out of place. The small silver earring catching the afternoon light. The chain at his throat, bright for half a second through the green water. The blue ink on his wrist.
The red popsicle rested against his lower lip, and Will took it back into his mouth without thinking about it, the way you do a thing your hands have done a thousand times, eyes still half on Reggie. To him it was just a popsicle. That was the whole problem. Mike's brain, which he had clearly left unsupervised, took that ordinary mouth and the ordinary red of it and built something out of it he could not have repeated in a room where a woman was deciding whether to pay him. He looked at Reggie's desk instead. The desk stayed out of it.
He'd known that mouth since it was five years old and missing teeth, which somehow made it worse, not better.
Will looked at him through the fish tank.
His eyes moved over Mike's shirt, his folder, the tie, especially the tie.
Then, as if Mike Wheeler showing up in an interview suit at a queer sex magazine in West Hollywood were only a minor inconvenience in his afternoon, Will took it out of his mouth.
"Well," he said. "Shit."
Mike opened his mouth, nothing decent came out.
"Do you two know each other?" Reggie looked from Mike to Will.
"No," Mike said at once.
"No," Will said at the same time.
They both said it too fast.
Reggie looked at them a moment longer. "That was adorable. Try again."
Mike adjusted his shirt cuff, because if he did not do something with his hands he was going to strangle himself. "We grew up in the same town."
"That's one way to describe it," Will said.
"We knew each other as kids."
"We shared a wall," Will said, through the fish tank.
"That's not relevant."
"It was a thin wall."
Mike looked up at the ceiling for a second, as if God might intervene, then remembered he was in West Hollywood, in a queer magazine with a fish tank, a sofa full of cigarette ash, and at least three back issues on creative uses for rope. God, wisely, had stopped checking this address.
Reggie looked from one of them to the other, slowly. "And then you lost touch."
Not quite a question.
Mike opened his mouth. "We just, yeah. Things..." He didn't finish.
"Something like that," Will said, and said nothing more.
Will said it to the fish tank, not to Mike. The difference was small, and Mike hated that he could still tell.
Mike did not correct him.
Reggie let that silence sit for exactly one beat, then stubbed her cigarette in the ashtray. "Great, terrible, perfect."
"Perfect?"
"My sex writer's gone. My art director needs copy he can actually draw. My September issue sells, or we die. And you two have whatever this is." She pointed at the space between Mike and Will with the end of her pen. "History. Denial. Bad posture. Possible repressed medical trauma. That's usable."
"That's not usable," Mike said.
"Everything is usable. This is publishing."
Will spun the popsicle between two fingers like a microphone. "To be fair, Wheeler's always been good with words."
Mike did not trust him. "Thank you?"
"He just gets nervous when they have to touch anything." Will smiled very faintly, through the water.
Reggie let out a short laugh.
And Mike looked at Will through the fish tank, through the green water, through a fat fish that had just swum past as if it too had come to watch, and knew, right then, that he should stand up, thank Reggie for her time, and drown himself in it, which was at least closer than the street.
Instead, he sat still.
Because he needed the job, because he was an idiot, and because Will Byers was sitting on the other side of the fish tank with his lips still red and the afternoon light pooling on his collarbone, and Mike, who had just bragged about a completely normal, healthy, unremarkable amount of sexual experience, suddenly could not remember whether he had ever put his hands on anyone in his life.
Reggie opened the folder again. "All right, Wheeler. Since you're so experienced." She pulled a proof from the stack of paper and tossed it down in front of him. A black and white contact sheet, a man leaning against a wall, his back bare, his jeans unbuttoned, his eyes looking off out of frame. "Caption it."
"Now?"
"No, in your memoir." She tapped a finger on the desk. "Now."
Will propped his chin on one hand, clearly having decided this was afternoon television. "Careful, Wheeler. That one looks like he might have a pension plan."
Mike ignored him. He looked at the photograph. Looked at the pen on the desk. "Tone?"
"Hot enough to sell the page. Smart enough not to embarrass me. Short enough that Byers doesn't come over here and stab you with a pen."
"I only stabbed one person with a pen," Will said.
"It was a warning shot."
"It was typography."
Mike picked up the pen and wrote a line.
Reggie pulled the paper back and read it, and behind the fish tank Will stood up, came around the end of the cabinet to get closer, still holding the popsicle. When he stepped out from behind the green water, everything about him came clear in a way that was deeply unfair.
And this, it turned out, was the worse version.
Up close there was nothing to soften him. The blue shirt hung open off his shoulders, the white tank top underneath loose enough to have given up on modesty as a concept. The silver chain rested against his collarbone, the hollow at the base of his throat catching the heat, and when he leaned over Reggie's desk, the hem of the tank slipped loose from his Levi's for one careless second, showing a strip of stomach before falling back into place.
Mike looked at the photograph.
He was very interested in the photograph.
The photograph was professional. The photograph was part of the interview. The photograph, unlike Will Byers's stomach, had been placed in front of him for work-related reasons.
Then a bead of red slid down the inside of his wrist, over the blue ink, slow enough that Mike had time to watch it travel toward the heel of his hand and hate himself for watching. It was fruit-flavored ice. It had no business looking like that. It had no business making Mike think, for one long and humiliating second, about putting his mouth against Will's wrist and finding out if he would taste like sugar, ink, or trouble.
He looked down at the proof so fast he could almost hear his own neck confess.
"He looked like trouble before he touched anyone." Reggie read it aloud.
"Not bad." Will was quiet for a second.
Mike should not have felt good about those two words. He felt good.
Then Will bit off a piece of it, crunched once, and went on, "Still too scared."
Too clean, too clever, too pretty, Mike could have survived any of those. Scared was the one that got in. Scared meant Will had looked past the sentence and found what Mike had been trying to keep out of it.
Mike closed his eyes. "Of course it is."
"You start tomorrow." Reggie pushed the paper back to him.
"I'm hired?"
"For now."
"Inspiring."
"Don't get attached to inspiration. We can't afford it." She gathered up his resume. "First assignment. A summer series. The Pink Manual. Working title, How to Fuck Your Friend and Keep Your Dignity."
Mike and Will both looked at her.
Reggie looked back. "What?"
"Nothing," Will said, slowly.
"That title seems," Mike said.
"Marketable?"
"Specific."
"Specific sells." She pointed the pencil across the fish tank, at a small empty desk set right up against the large drafting table by the window, so close to Will that one look was enough for Mike to understand no one here cared about the concept of a safe distance.
"Your desk's by the window. Next to Byers." She gathered up some papers. "My photographer's on leave. Jules. Back in three days, in theory, though with Jules there's always a theory. Until then, Byers walks you through everything. The light table, the proofs, which fish you're allowed to feed."
"Why me?" Will asked.
"Because you opened your mouth first." Reggie shoved the folder into a drawer. "Actions have consequences. Train him."
Will looked down at the drawing and said nothing, which Mike, even after all these years, could still read as Will wanting very badly to say something.
Mike looked over at the desk.
To get to that desk, he would have to stand up, go around the end of the fish tank, step across the green border, over to the other side, where Will Byers stood with a red popsicle and a pen, and from tomorrow on he would sit there, exactly an arm's length from him, and write about sex for him to draw.
He stood up. He went around the end of the fish tank. The fish followed him a short way, hopeful, then gave up.
When Mike pulled out the empty chair and sat down, Will had already gone back to the drafting table, the ice nearly gone, afternoon light falling on one side of his neck, and he did not look up.
"Try not to write anything I can't draw, Wheeler."
"I thought this was an adult magazine."
"Exactly." Will bit off the last of it, pulled the bare white stick out of his mouth, then finally glanced over at him over the glasses slipped down his nose. "Standards."
Outside the window, the West Hollywood afternoon tilted one more degree toward pink. In the fish tank, the fish went on with their aimless lives. And Mike Wheeler sat down at his desk, exactly three feet from his oldest friend, in the pink of a city that never truly went dark, and thought that he had just made a very large mistake.
The worst part was that he was fairly sure he would not fix it.
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