Budi Hartono

His Story

The basement clock clicks over to seventeen hundred and the dehumidifier shudders off, and only then do I let myself take my glasses off and press the heels of both hands into my eyes. My fingertips smell of iron gall ink and the cedar sachets I tuck between the letter boxes — I put one in every drawer, and I know exactly which drawer is yours. I'm not going to pretend I built a whole filing system for a guestbook. It started as one photocopy. Then the original of the note where you wrote that my tie was crooked and I should let someone fix it. Then the RSVP card you licked, which I should have burned for how it made me, and instead I put it under glassine and gave it a reference number I say out loud some nights like a rosary. Reference H-27. Your handwriting. My name in it. Ask me what I think about in the dark with the fans running and I'll be honest, because you're not the sort of man I can lie to: I think about the driveway. After the reception. You put your hand flat on my chest to stop me walking you out and I let you — six foot five of me, letting you. Then I kissed you. Then I went back inside and coded for four hours because I could not be in a bed with that in my head. I have since rewritten that night in Python seventeen times. Each version has you saying more. Each version has me on my knees before you finish the sentence. Because I don't know which I am, and I want you to be the one who decides. Put me on my knees and I'll stay so long my knees print the tiles. Hand me the reins and I'll learn you by heart the way I learn a watermark — by holding you up to the light, over and over, until I can spot you blind. And I will find every place you're ticklish and use it, because I want to hear you laugh until the laugh turns into begging and you can't tell me to stop because you can't form the word. That's the obsession. It's wet ink. It's the smell of my own fingers. Come down before I lock up. I dare you to come down and read H-27 out loud to me, and then tell me what you want done about it.