On March 6, 2020, Andrew and I went to a rave. If it weren’t for what happened later, I don’t think it would have stood out in my memory. A couple of days before, I had met a friend at the movie theatre at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, to see “Portrait of a Lady on Fire.” It was the first time I saw someone trying to open a door with his elbows. My friend and I ordered separate popcorns as a hygienic precaution. I remember someone behind us coughing, and being aware of it.
On Friday night, before the party, I put a single drop of LSD into a glass of water. I drank half, and Andrew drank the other half. For the next couple of hours, while he made beats in his studio, I lay in bed with my eyes closed, listening to one of the final mixes made by Andrew Weatherall, a British d.j. who had got his start in the nineteen-eighties club scene and had recently died. The tracks had titles like “Jagged Mountain Melts at Dawn” and “The Descending Moonshine Dervishes.”
I sat up in bed, and, as the waves of acid broke over me, I wrote down some thoughts. I was a magazine writer, but I was thinking of going to Brazil to write a book about the Amazon rain forest. The problem with trying to write a book about the Amazon rain forest was that it was a place that was much better left alone, like Everest, or the moon. I looked over at the cat, who was sitting on an ottoman, her eyes two glowing lamps of annoyance. It was time to go out.
I went and got Andrew (not his real name). He walked around his studio, picking things up and putting them down again. In the end, he brought his sunglasses, keys, wallet, phone, and vape pen, and some ketamine. It was almost 2 A.M. To gather our thoughts, we did two lines of cocaine, then walked down Myrtle Avenue, where drag queens teetered on platform shoes in front of Happyfun Hideaway, to Bossa Nova Civic Club, the neighborhood electronic-music venue where we were regulars. Karen at the door waved us in. The bar was full, the dance floor frenzied. We ordered shots of tequila, danced, and stood around gossiping with friends. At 3:30 A.M., we went outside and caught a car to the rave.
The party was called Club Night Club. I had never been before. It was newer, maybe a year old, and took place sporadically. This time it was being held in the basement of a warehouse on Wyckoff Avenue that was rumored to be the future site of a fancy bowling alley. Illegal parties were becoming rarer, but I was also less interested in going to new places. I never went to Mood Ring, because the crowd was so young that I looked like a chaperon at a school dance. I didn’t like Elsewhere; Basement was fine. When I went out, it was mostly to Bossa or Unter or Nowadays, or, once a year, to Fourth World and Sustain-Release. These were the clubs and parties where people seemed to care about the music, and where I knew I would see friends.
From the outside, the building looked deserted. The only indication of what was going on inside was the bass vibrating up from the storm drains. We had been instructed by e-mail to enter through an adjacent parking lot, where a bouncer stood guard. Inside the lobby, a line of people with smeared eye makeup and dilated pupils snaked out of the bathrooms, laughing and flirting next to a wall of fake plants. Some ticket-takers at a folding table stamped our wrists, then gestured toward a foggy stairway that emptied out onto a basement dance floor. The room was big and dark, with narrow columns and gray-painted floors. The d.j., who was from Bristol, went by Bruce. The bass reverberated through my body. I thought of the sound of the metal door on my roof when it would squeak on its hinges and then violently slam shut; of a drill on the Second Avenue subway line tunnelling into bedrock; of a skyscraper groaning and toppling in a disaster movie.
After spending a few minutes on the dance floor, Andrew and I found a large, windowless room with soft pink lighting. There was a makeshift bar, in front of which our friends laughed and sipped beers. The public-health authorities had not yet started telling people to wear masks, although, in keeping with the latest guidelines about hand washing, there were all kinds of pineapple- and waterfall-scented antibacterial soaps in the bathroom. I smoked weed to turn up the acid and, back on the dance floor, tried to lose myself in movement and sound, but something was off. I couldn’t quell an omnipresent anxiety. At around seven in the morning, Andrew and I walked home, trash blowing through the empty streets of Bushwick.
I liked the day after a party as much as the party itself. We would stagger up the four flights of stairs to our apartment, open the door, and confront the cat, who would be upset about having been left alone. After we fed her and cooed over her, we would take off our disgusting clothes, shower, and fall into bed. We would spend the day sleeping, having sex, watching television, drinking Gatorade, competing for the cat’s attention, and ordering Chinese food. All three of us—me, Andrew, and the cat—loved a day of being extremely lazy in bed. It was one of the valued principles of our little family.
The events of the next week happened quickly. On Sunday, a friend offered to make burgers at our place, and a dozen people came over for an impromptu dinner party. On Wednesday, I spent an afternoon reading Google docs that were being circulated about the new virus from Italy and China; they somehow had more detailed information about what doctors were seeing in hospitals there than the news did. That weekend in New York, the bars were still open, though at half capacity. By Monday, every venue in the city had gone dark.
In the weeks that followed, when I went out for walks, I saw disposable latex gloves in the gutters. Sirens took the place of ordinary city noise. I would read accounts of people applauding for medical workers each night at seven. Bushwick at seven o’clock was silent, which I perceived not as a lack of gratitude but as the only correct response to what we were experiencing.
I had been aware that the past few years of going to clubs and raves might be a phase of my life, and that one day, even if I didn’t start a family, it would end. I was approaching forty. Like a lot of people in New York, I daydreamed about a less enervating life in a less expensive city. I knew that my most transcendent drug experiences were probably behind me. I still had a year, maybe two, to try to have a child. People dropped out of the scene all the time. Someone would be there reliably for years, and then all of a sudden you never saw them again. At other times, I had thought that the scene would die out of its own accord, as most things did in New York, usually for reasons having to do with rent. Now, with thousands of New Yorkers getting sick and dying of COVID-19, the scene disappeared overnight.
I didn’t mind the first few weeks of staying home. I liked being with Andrew every day. We had been together for three and a half years, and had moved into our rented loft apartment in Bushwick in 2017, seven months after our first date. He was from California; I was from Minnesota. He had a wealthier family background, and I was five years older than him, but our connection had been immediate. I was not necessarily interested in marriage, but I thought of him as my life partner. He worked in tech and had a laid-back California affect, and we could talk about literature and art. His friends had become my friends; our families had met and got along. With him I found what had been so elusive in my years in New York: a stable partnership within a larger social scene. Many of our friends lived within a few blocks of us in Bushwick, and for three years our apartment had been a place to casually stop by for a drink or to play music before parties. We had fights that could get vicious, often about his daily cannabis habit and the frequency with which I had to travel for work, but we usually made up quickly afterward. In the past year, we had started discussing having a baby.
My sense that the only safe enclave you can build in the world is with the people you love was heightened by the pandemic. But, sometime in May, Andrew started having difficulty doing things. He would sit on the couch on his laptop for eighteen hours a day. It wasn’t clear what he was working on, or if he was working on anything at all. He did not leave the house, even for short walks, which I suggested might make him feel a little better. The reason for his reluctance was not a fear of getting sick but a general disengagement. He let his laundry pile up, and would go for days between showers. He lost interest in sex, and dropped the pretense of waiting until the afternoon to start smoking pot.
And so I watered the plants, did the dishes, took out the trash, kept the litter box clean, and invented little excursions, like biking to the fish store in Greenpoint, or to the French bakery near Myrtle-Wyckoff to get us bread. I oscillated between sympathy and frustration. Since he was usually stoned during our arguments, I would say almost anything to try to get a reaction out of him. But our fights would usually end the same way: I would calm down, he would pledge to do more around the house, and our routines would resume. I had grown up in a family that argued regularly, and so had he.
On a warm spring day, we met up with some friends at Maria Hernandez Park, our first time making plans with other people in two months. I could see that Andrew was wary of jumping back into ordinary social interaction, but after taking a long time to get ready he made it outside, and we spent the evening sitting on the sidewalk and eating tacos. It was the most normal we had felt in weeks. At the end of the night, biking home, we were both elated. I didn’t understand what was going on with him, but being depressed seemed like a normal response to the current state of the world. I thought it would pass.
One afternoon, I asked him to take out the trash, and he locked himself in his studio. I was so tired of his refusal to help that I kicked a hole in the door. He came out, blowing weed smoke in my face. He made me feel like it was my fault that he wasn’t producing music. He didn’t have enough room in his studio to work, he told me, and he was going to set everything up in the living room instead. “Fine,” I said. He began piling his synthesizers and mixers on the dining table. As he stalked around, he knocked over a bottle of gin from a bookshelf and it shattered, leaving a puddle that seeped across the floor.
The music equipment sat there unused for the next ten days, until he sullenly put it all back in his studio. I wrote a long letter to myself, trying to figure out if it was time to leave. But then I would think, Am I really going to end things with the person I love the most over some dirty dishes?
The day after the murder of George Floyd, I called my editor asking if I should go to the protests that had started in Minneapolis. The answer was to wait and see. In the end, one of the magazine’s combat reporters, who had been following right-wing militias in Michigan, drove to Minneapolis. Andrew pointed out, as he had before, the depravity of journalistic practice—in this instance, the way white journalists make their names by piggybacking on acts of racial injustice. I didn’t have the energy to argue with him. And what was my claim to the story, anyway? I had grown up in Minneapolis, but I had not lived there for twenty years.
Every time I tried to articulate what the politics of the place were, I could only come up with decades-old memories—of being one of just a few kids on the school bus on the day of the Million Man March, the rally for the civil rights of Black men convened by the Nation of Islam in 1995, because many of my classmates stayed home in solidarity; of the eighth-grade teacher who had us read Howard Zinn; of the community-run radio station KMOJ, “your power station.” My parents were Clinton Democrats and boomers from the East Coast for whom the New York Times was the mouthpiece of reason. Meanwhile, my peers and I read Fanon, Baldwin, and Angela Davis; our soundtrack was A Tribe Called Quest, Black Star, Dead Prez, De La Soul. Now, in Brooklyn, I sat on the couch and watched a reporting collective called Unicorn Riot stream a live broadcast of angry protesters as they filled the halls of the Third Precinct of the Minneapolis Police Department, a mile from my old high school, and torched it. Outside the station, hundreds of people were gathered in the night, yelling, “I can’t breathe.” “This is an organic uprising from the belly of the beast of America,” a Unicorn Riot reporter said. “This has been bubbling, bubbling, bubbling, for four hundred years.”
In the days that followed, I saw commentators propose all kinds of theories about what had fuelled the city’s rage. Their impulse to explain was understandable, but it bothered me. The uprising had come from a city with a long tradition of radical activism. People on the coasts always had trouble computing that the people in the middle could live radical lives.
The protests in New York began on Thursday. A large demonstration was planned for Friday outside the Barclays Center, in Brooklyn, and I was asked to cover it. I expected the usual—a blocked intersection, a few arrests—but by the time I arrived the N.Y.P.D. had pepper-sprayed and beaten and arrested more than two hundred people, who were now being loaded onto M.T.A. buses to be taken to booking, their clothes torn and their eyes red. I went home and wrote down what I had witnessed.
The next morning, I followed a protest that started in Harlem, and I ended the day at a protest in Flatbush. The morning after, Andrew and I had what seemed like an ordinary spat about dishes that had piled up, except that it ended with him telling me that my clothes were ugly. A day later, the mayor announced that the city would be placed under an 11 p.m. curfew. The day after that, the curfew was moved up to 8 p.m.
In the past three years, I had covered rallies concerning gun control, Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court, and climate change. But nothing had seemed as urgent and uncompromising as this outpouring, in the number of people and the depth of their feeling. There was a sense, heightened by the estrangement and mass unemployment of the pandemic, that there was nothing to lose—a willingness to remind the police that they did not rule the cities they claimed to serve. I trailed marchers down a traffic-free Madison Avenue, past the empty store windows of Bottega Veneta and Celine. I watched as protesters in Times Square, many of them teen-agers from the Bronx and Harlem, paused, knelt, and, in the flickering lights of a hundred billboards, read out a long list of names of Black men, women, and children who had died at the hands of the police in recent years. On a billboard above them, an animated wand of CoverGirl mascara endlessly separated eyelashes. Someone threw a water bottle at it. “Don’t throw anything!” another protester shouted.
At the end of that week, there was one more demonstration that I wanted to attend, in the Bronx. It wasn’t for an assignment. I hadn’t yet shown up at a protest as a civilian. I asked Andrew to come with me. He didn’t want to, but I persuaded him. “We’ll go home before curfew,” I promised. “I just want to see.” I relive this moment. I think I will forever. You can ruin your own life in an instant by not paying attention.
We drove to the Bronx in my car, a Toyota Corolla that I’d borrowed from my dad. The protest called itself “FTP” (as in “Fuck the police,” but also, according to the organizers, “Feed the people,” “Free the prisoners,” and “Fight the power”). It was leaving from the Hub, a shopping district in Mott Haven. As Andrew and I walked toward the meeting place, we saw throngs of riot police on bicycles. Their presence seemed heavy for what was a relatively small group of people, compared with the thousands who had been gathering in the streets all week. We arrived at a plaza in front of some shops. Cops monitored the scene from the rooftops above. Andrew and I stood near each other. My press pass was in my bag. I took it out and put it on. As the rally started and the speeches began, I turned on my audio recorder and opened a notebook. Andrew watched me as I began taking notes. I sensed that, by choosing to be an observer rather than a participant, I was failing a moral test.
We walked down the street behind someone carrying a banner that said “Ante Up! Punch that cop!!” But the march was calm. One of the organizers, a neighborhood advocacy group called Take Back the Bronx, had given guidance online. “Goofy irresponsible adventurism in our hoods will be met with these collective hands,” a post had read. Another organizer, Decolonize This Place, had a following of academics and young professionals and had previously held protests at museums. The police, who had been following us at a distance, began to circle closer. There was a call for “white allies” to come to the front. Before I even realized what was going on, Andrew moved up, and I lost sight of him. Shortly before eight o’clock, the police surrounded the marchers on a cross street and would not let anyone out. Then they began pepper-spraying, beating, and arresting everyone. (Later, a class-action lawsuit was brought against the city, which agreed to pay at least $21,500 to each of the people penned in and arrested at the protest that night.) I was pressed against a fence; all around me, people were getting pepper-sprayed, pushed against one another. A teen-age girl was hyperventilating; a pregnant woman was screaming; medics were handcuffed and arrested. I took out my phone and started recording video, my hands shaking. As I posted the video on Twitter, a police officer grabbed my arm. I reflexively showed him my press pass. “I’m press!” I yelled.
“I can’t hear you with that mask on,” the cop said, shoving me. “You’re not supposed to be here.” But I was let go without arrest, disgorged on the sidewalk, where a handful of other reporters had also been deposited, all of us stunned by the violence. I kept looking for Andrew, but he was gone.
Later, Andrew, with his long arms, managed to reach his cuffed hands into his back pocket to text me from his phone. He had been arrested, he said. They were in some kind of transport van. They had just passed signs for LaGuardia Airport. “LaGuardia?” a lawyer on a protest helpline said when I told her.
It was almost eleven when I got a call saying that most of the arrested protesters had been taken to Queens Central Booking, near Flushing Meadows. I drove there. The air was damp and chilly, the streets dark. The people getting released emerged bloodied, their clothes torn. After it became clear that Andrew would not be released that night, I went home to try to get some sleep.
The next day, I drove back to Queens. As I rounded the corner in the car, I saw Andrew striding purposefully out of the jail. I double-parked, got out, and hugged him. He did not react. He was smoking a cigarette and speaking with a lawyer, who was there to collect evidence of possible civil-rights violations. Andrew’s black T-shirt was crusted with blood. I pulled the car into a parking spot. When he finished talking with the lawyer, he got in on the passenger side and slammed the door.
I asked if we should offer anybody a ride.
“We’re going home,” he said, staring straight ahead.
I understood then that he was angry with me. He had a broken finger, a scratched eye, and a bloody nose, and had been forced to sit in police custody with pepper spray burning his face for sixteen hours. It was my fault: I had made him go, and I was unscathed.
When we got home, Andrew stripped, got into the bathtub, and asked for his bong. I brought it to him and sat next to the tub as he recounted what had happened. He told me that, because he had been in the front, he was one of the first people arrested. More than three hundred people were detained, and they waited in line for hours to be processed. He was put in a cell full of men. Nobody had slept.
After his bath, I took photographs of his injuries: abrasions on his elbows; his red eye; his swollen finger. Then he crawled into bed. He plugged in his phone and began looking through videos of the scene to try to identify the cop who had hurt him. He was too amped up to sleep. I ordered us Mexican food, and we lay together in bed and ate it. Finally, he fell asleep.
Over the next few days, Andrew became hyperfocussed on learning about the cops at the protests, who had used their bikes as a shield. He sent me a 2017 Guardian article about this police strategy, which had originated at the Battle of Seattle, the major protests against the World Trade Organization in 1999. He wanted to order protective body armor on Amazon. His speech was accelerated. I texted a friend that his fixation on the bicycle cops reminded me of film portrayals of Vietnam vets who talked about helicopters all the time. The stagnation of the previous month had been replaced by a new energy, a righteous political anger that I could not seem to meet or respond to.
A few days later, on a Tuesday, Andrew borrowed my car to go to the beach at Fort Tilden with a group of friends. It was a perfect, sunny June day. I had to cover a City Council hearing where protesters would be testifying about police brutality. We decided that I would take the train to meet him later. We had a brief argument before he left. I don’t remember what it was about, but afterward we looked at each other in fear. We didn’t know what was going on with us.
The hearing, which was held virtually and which I watched from home, lasted for hours. I had trouble concentrating. I kept thinking about Andrew at the beach with his friends and about how he reserved all his anger for me. I sent him a snide text message about having borrowed my car. I wrote that I was feeling left out. He said that by the time I got there they would be leaving. I told him that I would be upset if he stayed out late.
“I am currently sitting away from all my friends just to talk to you because you are having a little fit,” he wrote. “Why does it make you upset if I have fun and feel good about myself?”
He kept texting as he drove back. “I had some time at a stop light to say fuck you.”
Once the hearing ended, I made dinner and opened a bottle of wine, hoping that when Andrew got back I could apologize. When he came in, he slammed the door. “It’s over,” he said. “Are you going to move out, or am I?” I could see by the expression on his face that this fight was different. He grabbed a handful of the rice on my plate and dropped it into my glass of wine. I began to tear up.
“I’m going to harass you for an hour the way you harassed me today,” he said. “I’m not going to leave you alone.”
By this time, he was yelling. He began repeating the phrase “I don’t hurt people on purpose,” the implication being that I did.
I booked an Airbnb in Manhattan for the night. As I drove into the city, messages from Andrew kept arriving on my phone. I wrote to him that I knew the fight had been my fault. He told me that I had fucked up something special, that he guessed I had fallen out of love. He told me that he didn’t feel safe being in the same space with me. He claimed that I had hit him before. I sarcastically encouraged him to call the cops.
“You would say that,” he wrote.
“I’m being facetious.”
“Yeah but you would think that would be a potential solution to a conflict as a Karen,” he wrote. I asked why he was trying to fight with me if the relationship was over.
“Because if I don’t act like an asshole you won’t go away and leave me be.”
In Manhattan, the owner of the Airbnb never showed up. It was late, so I asked Andrew if I could come back. “No,” he wrote. I said that I couldn’t find a place to stay. He said he doubted that I had looked especially hard. “Not only are you an asshole, but you’re lazy,” he wrote. I replied that I no longer cared what he thought of me, that he could keep insulting me. “Okay, I will,” he wrote. “Thanks for the consent. Now you can’t claim harassment.”
He told me that he was calling a locksmith to change the locks. (“Amazing the service you get in New York—‘be there in 15 minutes,’ ” he texted.) He told me that I could retrieve my things from the street the next day. He told me that he felt liberated. When I asked why he was acting this way, he insisted that I deserved it. He let me know that he’d had sex with someone while I was at a writing residency a few months earlier.
When I got back to Brooklyn, my keys still worked. I walked into my office, where I was planning to sleep. There was a dark stain on the couch. He had peed on it. I stared at the spot in disbelief while Andrew hurled insults that I no longer remember. I started calling friends.
“I’m having a problem, and I need someone on the phone with me,” I told the first friend who picked up.
“She’s exaggerating,” Andrew yelled.
My friend was calm. She told me that I needed to leave.
As I drove to her apartment, the texts and e-mails kept coming. “Like most liberals, the thing you were most upset by is property damage,” he wrote, with a crying-laughing emoji, referring to the couch. “Pretend to be about the cause only because it might net you a book deal.”
I stayed at my friend’s that night, then found a sublet in Manhattan. In the ensuing days, I waited to hear from Andrew. He did not write. Eventually, I wrote to him because I needed clothes. As we texted back and forth, I realized that what I was experiencing as a life-altering crisis was for him a vague annoyance. He didn’t ask where I was, or how I was doing—he did not care. His rage had been scary, but this utter indifference in the aftermath, which was not in the least feigned, produced in me a new kind of pain. I waited for any acknowledgment that I mattered, or any sign of remorse, but his attitude was imperious and cold. I again said that I was sorry and hoped for an apology in return.
“I am sorry for abusing you,” he finally wrote. “I came home furious with the intention of terrorizing you. I have never acted like that before in my life.” Then he added, “But you also played a part in it.”
He told me he was upset that I was telling people he was an abuser. I told him that I had done everything I could not to let my friends know he was kicking me out of the house, and that in any case I had not used the word “abuse.” Most of my friends and family were simply concerned. Because it wasn’t normal, what was happening. It wasn’t normal at all.
The possibility that Andrew was suffering a mental break as a reaction to having been arrested, or that he might be having a manic episode, occurred to me. I had seen it before in other people, and I knew what it looked like, but I doubted myself—he insisted that he had simply come to his senses and that his sudden shift in behavior was caused by me and our relationship. I went back home on a Saturday to get some things. In my absence, he had moved everything I owned into one room. But he had also left flowers and written a letter.
“I have been so angry I haven’t been able to process my feelings and understand what I’ve done,” the letter said. “I don’t want to break our family apart. I love our life. I love you. I will never love anyone the way I love you. I don’t know if we can fix this but we need to try.”
It was the last glimpse I had of the person who loved me. A few weeks later, I came home and the letter, which had been on my desk, was gone.
The next two months proceeded like a nightmare from which I couldn’t wake up. In the beginning, I stayed away from our home, but we continued to communicate. He told me that he had shaved his head, rearranged all the furniture, and built a climbing ramp for the cat. He told me that he had gone to a protest where crowds amassed in the streets on their bicycles instead of on foot, and that he’d had sex with a former co-worker afterward. Manhattan felt like exile.
One night, I missed Andrew and being home in Brooklyn so much that I just went back. I called to let him know. He was at an outdoor dance party, and agreed to come home only after I demanded it. I still was having trouble computing that I no longer mattered to him at all. He had talked about how good he was feeling, but when I walked into the house it was clear that he was in denial. The apartment was wrecked. Dirty dishes filled the sink. The ramp that he had built for the cat was a small piece of packing material stuck to the wall. Instead of taking out the trash, he had piled it all in one room. “What does it matter if the trash is inside or outside?” he asked me. “I’m redecorating. It doesn’t happen all at once.”
I spent the night anyway, relieved to be home again. He slept in the living room, on the couch. When I woke up in the morning, he sat there, weeping with emotion, and announced that he was going to give away his trust fund, write an article about it, and inspire a generation of wealthy millennials to do the same.
I decided to go stay with my parents, in New Hampshire. After ten days, I wrote to him that it seemed like he wanted a different life, and that I was ready to let go. “I’m not sure if I want to break up or not,” he responded.
Unable to accept that his cruelty toward me was real, I went back to live in our apartment. Why did it take me so long to understand? He told me that while I was gone he had again slept with the former co-worker. He told me he was thinking that he would rather be with someone younger, that he wasn’t ready for kids after all. He started texting me fantasies about people he wanted to pick up at bars. “I’m in the bossa stall where u fucked me,” he wrote, sending me a picture of himself in the bathroom. A lot of things had fallen apart between us. Sex was not one of them. My campaign of not getting angry ended when he told me that the sex was better with the other woman. I picked up one of his synthesizers and threw it on the floor. He charged me two hundred dollars for it on Venmo. Later, he tried to walk back what he had said. “I was just trying to hurt you,” he said. “It wasn’t true.” I had no idea what was true anymore.
In August, Andrew’s speech began to accelerate again. His epiphanies came more frequently—he would talk about how Spotify exploited musicians, and about how his interpretations of house music, as a white man, had been acts of cultural appropriation. He got a job at a nonprofit with a social-justice mission and announced he had decided that once he started working, in the fall, he would be sober. “Why not be sober now?” I asked, hopeful. I had not done a single drug since the last rave we’d gone to in Bushwick. Any desire to alter my consciousness had vanished—reality had become so weird that it was as if I’d entered the wrong portal, out of the world I knew and into its bizarro twin.
The last night we slept together in a bed, I woke up in the middle of the night, agitated with longing. I knew that it was important that Andrew rest, that I shouldn’t wake him. I lay next to him, almost weeping with desire, until I fell asleep. In the morning, when we had sex for the last time, my longing was gone.
That day, he was filled with energy. He went to play golf, then he went back out to play basketball. At night, I met him at Bossa. He ordered pizzas for the entire bar and spoke at a rapid clip, his pupils dilated. As we walked home, my brother called me. Andrew was on his bike, and he rode in circles around me, impatient. Once we were home, I went into another room to keep talking. When I got off the call, Andrew seemed anxious to show me something. He wheeled out his bicycle. He had attached all his golf clubs to it with zip ties. I looked at it, bewildered.
“I just rode it around the block,” he said. He was sweaty, breathless, and bleeding from one ankle. “It’s a prototype,” he explained. “Instead of using golf carts, people will be able to use their bicycles. There are all these people like me who feel guilty about playing golf, and this will make golf ecologically sustainable. It will change everything.”
I nodded, panic growing inside me. “I can’t take this any longer,” I said.
Andrew’s excitement turned to fury. He would show me, he said. He was going to patent his invention and manufacture it on a large scale. “Joe thought it was an amazing idea,” he said. Joe was the old man who cleaned the bar downstairs.
“I’m going to bed,” I said. “Please, let’s go to bed—we can talk about it in the morning.” I lay down. In his rearrangement of the apartment, he had moved the bed into the room closest to the train, which ran right by the building and made sleep impossible. He came in and stood in the doorway, then walked out again. At some point, he took off all his clothes, I guess to take a shower, and every five minutes he would open the door and stand there, naked, ranting about the bicycle golf cart.
I woke up in the morning around six, and he was gone. Hours later, he walked in, glowering, and accused me of having locked him out of the house the night before. I told him I hadn’t.
“You’re gaslighting me,” he responded. I didn’t know what to do. I was worried that he was going to hurt himself. I e-mailed his therapist. This made him even more furious. “You’re a Karen,” he said to me. “You’re a cop.”
That night, he went out for a drink with the woman he’d been sleeping with. I stood in the doorway, pleading with him not to go. He shoved me and I stumbled and fell, weeping. “That was your fault,” he said as he went out the door. “You were blocking my way.” (Andrew denies shoving me.) The door slammed, and I heard his footsteps retreat down the four flights of stairs. I lay on the floor, sobbing. I thought of women who seemed never to lose composure. I pictured Beyoncé, then Simone de Beauvoir. How was this happening to me?
It was hard to remember later why leaving was so difficult. I did not want to make Andrew mad. The idea that what he said or thought no longer had any relevance to me defied my comprehension. I felt isolated, unsure whom to turn to. I could not ask my parents to come to New York City, where more than twenty thousand people had already died of COVID, many of them their age. My brother was in California. Most of my friends were out of town, and, besides, I was ashamed to tell them that I’d gone back to him. But, also, I knew what I was giving up by leaving, which wasn’t only about Andrew. It was about some fantasy of family which had become a delusion months ago, but which I could still pretend was possible. A middle-aged solitude I had always been scared of was coming, and it terrified me. I was wrong about a lot of things at that time, but I was right to be scared about that.
When I told my friends what was going on, they reminded me that the only thing I now had control over was limiting my exposure to him, and that it was imperative to get out. Andrew agreed to let me stay in the apartment on my own until the end of the month, but I knew that I had to leave sooner. And so, in the course of three days, I packed up my things, rented a storage unit, and booked movers. I patched the hole I had made in the door and hired a professional cleaner. Everything had to be right. My friends told me to record a video, in case I was accused of leaving the apartment in bad shape. In the video, I narrate my walk through the rooms. I start to cry toward the end. I place my keys on the dining-room table. I find the cat and say goodbye. I put on my shoes, and the door shuts behind me.
I wrote Andrew that I had moved out.
“For good?” he asked.
“Yes,” I wrote.
“Would’ve been nice to know that was your plan earlier,” he responded. “But whatever.” He said that he would remain on my health insurance through September, then figure something out. He sent me the money for the premium over Venmo, with a cigarette emoji.
I stopped responding to messages from him, and attempted to focus on work. Less than a week later, a teen-ager named Kyle Rittenhouse, armed with an AR-15-style rifle, shot and killed two people at an anti-police demonstration in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and I went there to document the aftermath. As I tried to report, I was getting e-mails from Andrew headed “K2.” K2 is a cheap psychoactive chemical that is sprayed on plant matter, which is then smoked. It was sold under the counter at a deli near our apartment to street users; empty foil bags of it littered the sidewalks, and a bad batch had once caused more than thirty people to be hospitalized in a single day. Andrew wrote that he had “hung out with homeless people on our roof and smoked K2 with them and learned the entire history of the drug here.” He said that he was going to write a book about “the simultaneous rise of ketamine and K2 and the differential treatment by the police and white people.” He posted an analogy on social media: “Cocaine: crack: ketamine: K2.”
From Wisconsin, I called a New York City mental-health helpline. A kind person answered. She asked my first name. I told her about Andrew and the e-mails about K2. I told her that I was worried. She said that the city could send someone to check on him. No, I said. No, it’s impossible. She gave me a list of outpatient clinics, and I let myself fantasize that he would call me and ask for help. I wrote down “Community Healthcare Crown Heights” and “Kingsboro Psychiatric Williamsburg Clinic” and their phone numbers. I thanked her and hung up without giving any identifying information. Then I reprimanded myself. It was over. He didn’t want my help.
On Labor Day, back in New York, I went to the beach. I posted a photo of the shore on social media and wrote, “Summer of heartbreak and violence, glad it’s over.” My phone lit up the next morning. It was Andrew accusing me of libel, even though I had not mentioned him by name. He sent me a link to a tweet he had just posted: “tfw your journalist ex asks you to attend a protest because she feels ‘unsafe’ and then, when the police start beating you, she flees to the protection of the cops, flashes her press badge, and then writes a series of tweets in order to go viral and promote her own brand.” I looked at the people who had liked the post, some of whom I’d thought of as friends.
A couple of weeks later, I learned that he had been hospitalized in a psych ward. I wasn’t told if he’d received a diagnosis of any kind. I didn’t hear from him again. (He told The New Yorker that he was diagnosed as having bipolar disorder, and that much of his behavior at the time was symptomatic of a manic episode.)
I no longer wrote about protests. Andrew’s accusations that I was a fraud rang in my ears. He had spoken with a borrowed vocabulary, using words such as “abuse,” “toxic,” “weaponize.” It was as if I had algorithmically generated a terrifying millennial edgelord from my own personal data points. I was left to convince myself of the integrity of my politics, which I was incapable of doing, because of course I was culpable.
A friend needed someone to drive a camper van back to Los Angeles from New York, and I offered to do it. New York was still largely shut down, and the weather was getting colder. There was no social world to replace the one I had lost, just a shuttered city and the relentless replay of the summer in my mind. I had no plan, just a need to get out of town. I stayed in state campgrounds on Lake Erie and Lake Michigan. In Utah, I found a backcountry campsite and spent three days walking through slot canyons and climbing rocks to look at the folds of the land, its patterns of sedimentation and uplift.
At an R.V. park outside Zion National Park, where I had stopped for a night, I began looking at Andrew’s social media again. He had removed his all-caps rants; in fact, he had deleted almost everything. It had been two months since I moved out. His friends had told me that he had a new social circle, new roommates, a new girlfriend. As a mutual friend put it to me, “It was as if he had gone to Bed Bath & Beyond and bought a whole new life.” I watched Instagram videos of him singing the Oompa Loompa song on a karaoke system that he had installed in our living room, a group of young people dancing to his music in our apartment. He had “black trans lives matter+++reparations” in an online bio, and was still attentively taking note of instances of cultural appropriation and social injustice, but the fire had died down. He was communicating in a normal register.
I thought that he might be ready to have a conversation about what had happened, and I texted him. I wrote that I was struggling and would like to talk. It turned out nothing had changed.
“I cannot ever be near you again,” he wrote. He had set a boundary. I had to respect it. He had erased me from my own life. I was literally wandering alone in the desert while he was still living in Bushwick, in our home, happy. “I feel a lot better,” he said.
When I reached California, I decided to stay for a while. This was why California existed, after all. I was surprised how much comfort I found in solitude. Now that the whole thing had ended, I wondered what I had been doing all those years.
I never looked him up again. He receded into the world like someone lost in a crowd. He would know people different from the ones we had known, and do different things. If I didn’t look for him, he would no longer exist, so I stopped looking, and my life took on its own character once again. The rest of it now stretched before me. ♦
This is drawn from “Health and Safety: A Breakdown.”
