The Formula

I’ve known Costa for more than ten years now and I remember the moment we met, they opened the door at the youth detox the day after I was hired, their eyes wide, their hair tangled, it’s one of the two times I’ve looked at someone and known we are going to know each other for a long time and what do you do with a feeling like that except grip it close, knowing I’ll never really be ever rid of you, we are never going to not know each other? Friendship was the only religion that made sense to me after I left home, left is a euphemism, my mom sat on the taped-up leather couch in her sunroom cluttered with laundry detergent boxes and wilted rubber trees draped in Christmas lights and said I’ll never accept you I’m proud of my traditional upbringing, it’s that kind of moment that ends one life and starts another, things like that made me into this kind of person, a queer who sees another queer in a doorway and thinks we are going to know each other for a long time, that’s how I met Costa.

The first thing I really loved about Costa was their laugh, how their laughter starts out loud, then retreats like a flashy animal burrowing down their skinny throat into a pink-tented home, finishes with Costa twisting their chin, the animal’s tail vanishing between their chipped teeth, they laughed at my shyness, laughed at falling objects. No one else laughed like that, from thunder to murmur, everybody else laughed the reverse, small to big, I did too, and Costa had no idea how unlikely their laugh was, I loved to hear it. We watched reality TV surrounded by teenagers oozing drugs from their pores, the detox was in a run-down duplex down by the river’s oily sleep, Costa had worked there for years and watched the drugs get deadly, our job was to be support workers which meant we were lifeguards at the pool of opiate withdrawal, we chatted with nurses who rotated with dixie cups of blue pills big as plum pits, we answered phones and poured Kool-Aid, truth serum in pink streams. The teenagers stayed for a few days, drowsy in their rooms, curled up between us, returned again and again, they came with backpacks full of muddy shirts, we wore thick garden gloves to sort the laundry in case of syringes, in the beginning I heard nurses complain that the sickest ones were “frequent flyers,” said they just use this place like a homeless shelter, Costa never said that stuff, Costa folded their shirts like letters to friends, I thought I’d do the job for a few months for some cash but I stayed two years, because Costa.

Costa’s eyes are so still and blue they can ask any question and it feels like a compliment, I watched them draw kids out so smooth, so slow, the kids at the detox all loved Costa’s laugh and how it cascaded and fled, I wanted to be filled with that sea lion bark, I used to think Costa found everything funny on some level, now I know different. On those couches, I told Costa the whole story of my life, they were the first person I’d told the whole story to front to back, I told my life like a spine-split novel, about my dad’s houseboat that caught fire, about a roadtrip to Whitehorse to hook up with an older paleontologist who stole my keys, I was so lonely in those days, out of touch with my family and working nights with Costa and doing grade 12 math and geography on the library computers to be able to apply to college, the job of waiting out dopesickness made it easy to ramble to Costa, an unquenchable bleed of sound came from me, we weren’t going to quit because we were both getting paid to do human, that’s what we called it.

It was the always-situation with my brother that I was venting about when Costa told me about the Formula, their skinny legs knotted around a pillow like a birthing exercise, I told them about my big brother and why we didn’t talk anymore, it was in that zone between one and four A.M. and the whole thing came out about how my brother kicked me out of his place after my mom kicked me out, that was four years ago and now we didn’t talk, he texted long whinges about his job managing Boston Pizzas, but then where did you go, said Costa. Here’s the thing about Ike, I told Costa, all the light off the TV’s huge moon cheek swarming in their eyes, my brother Ike is a cruel person but thinks he is a practical person and no matter what he does he’ll argue he did the logical thing, he put my stuff on the sidewalk in plastic bins and texted me I’m just trying to help you keep momentum, that’s the worst part, knowing it was pragmatic to him, I had nowhere, back in those days I couldn’t stop obsessing over whether my mom had told my brother to kick me out or if he’d done it on his own, Costa was the only person I unspooled this to, and they never told me their story back.

Costa’s hair was freshly violet, I remember because their skin was scorched tulip petals at the hairline, they reached out and rubbed the untouched spot between my thumb and index finger, they said don’t give him any more of your words he eats them just like cereal in milk. Like the instant they opened the door and I saw Costa for the first time, I knew this moment was a fishing lure sunk in my memory’s ribcage, down, down, words just like cereal in milk, it’s still what appears in my mind when I’m talking with someone at a committee meeting who can’t listen, a picture of sentences slopping from a milky spoon into their greedy mouth, cereal in milk. Listen, Costa said, listen, I’ll tell you my Formula for texting with people who fuck with my head, I send back three random emojis, just random enough, I let the list of emojis scroll by and send three really random ones, it just works, people make a story out of whatever you send, it’s a way to send a something-nothing, it’s magic. They whispered it, that last part, something-nothing, magic, and I knew they were telling me something private and true, the world magic mouse-trapped in my chest, a recognition of how Costa’s disappointment in people was so pure it was distilled and sinister, a tiny bottle they set in my palm, the Formula.

That was years ago and I can’t count the number of times I’ve used the Formula since then, it’s part of my arsenal now, how I do people, every time I use it I feel Costa rubbing the softest part of my hand during my story of exile, the instructions about the Formula, the cool pleasure that soared in me at Costa’s touch, and a fear, thinking if you can cut people off that easily you can cut me off. Ike was the first person I used the Formula on, he texted me how our mom won her war over the neighbour’s hedge by pouring rat poison into the roots and the neighbour’s thirteen-year-old labradoodle died by accident, our mom who wasn’t in touch with me but my brother acted like she was, I swiped the menu of emojis at the bottom of my screen and my thumb touched down, once, twice, three times. Since my brother kicked me out because my mom told him to, or because he was just an asshole, I’d demoted him to newsletter status, the keeping busys, the holding ups, the lots on my plate, but now I followed Costa’s Formula and sent the three emojis, a chef holding a spoon, a crow, and a blue heart.

My brother’s name filled my screen, IKE MOSS, the first time he’d tried to phone me since the inception of our silence, and I pressed the red circle, you working in a restaurant now? he texted, hey pick up, everything okay?, the crow and the blue heart shimmered ominously beside the chef, who exuded chipper confidence and gripped his spoon like a wizard’s magic staff, and my brother texted a teeming block of question marks. I was lying in the grit of my sheets I washed when a hook-up was coming over to fuck, infrequent enough for my sheets to feel like an arid beach, and I imagined my brother’s mottled hazel eyes decrypting the chef and crow and heart, I felt my breath slip out of my chest, I texted Costa, it works, their response instantaneous, magic, and a few seconds later, they sent me an emoji of a cup of coffee, a dancing robot, and an emoji hugging itself, then a selfie, Costa shirtless, fat pink lips, blue eyes, hair swept over in a flawless green wave, shoulders glowing slim and bright, backlit hills in the slushy field of flash on pillow.

I got into college, quit the detox and I knew Costa was wounded when I left but I said nothing to them, I just couldn’t take watching the kids sweat and puke anymore and hearing how many died from overdoses, I told myself I was starting over, my little list of computer language courses like a precious one-way train ticket, and when we texted they never asked about school, just updates about our nurse nemesis Kailey and our favourite detox kids in choppy lines, and our friendship shifted into long phone calls when they were working nights the detox, I talked about how I never heard from my mom but I was trying not to care and I talked about my one girlfriend who broke up with me during a programming lecture and Costa told me vignettes about everyone who lived in their little apartment building, the woman who skipped rope on their ceiling, there were long silences on those calls, we sat together breathing, I could hear the detox TV in the background, and Costa’s mouth-wind like my personal static. When I didn’t hear back from them for three weeks after my exams I texted ghost ghost ghost, biked through the warm May rain, the season’s newly opened hands rubbing my cheeks. On the second floor of the detox Costa was on the couch, neck folded, osmosing a fourteen-year-old’s story about being given a pass to a gym, swanky, fluorescent lights, house music, the kid hadn’t known what the gym pass meant, but he loved having the longest showers ever and he slept on the green velvet couch in the locker room and when the dealer who gave him the pass asked him to beat someone up he just did it, and now that he was coming off all the down he saw all the faces, the noses buckling, the knuckles hosing, the whole broken-head movie, I lived through the zombie apocalypse, he told Costa, sobs cresting, Costa reached for his hand, said, I did too.

Costa’s hair was bleached and past their chin, their face narrowed, eyes lively as water sliding around smooth rocks, we stood in the kitchen and Costa rolled up cheese slices and devoured them like a snake absorbing a bird, they told me they’d been up and down, my usual lowkey rollercoaster, you know, I asked if they were okay and they said, tell me everyone who you’ve used the Formula on, it’ll make me happy. I told them how the Formula had helped me with Ike, he’d stopped sending the rants and now, every Sunday, sent three emojis, always pretty ones, sparrow tulip angel, cupcake mouse Christmas tree, and I responded with as much truthfulness as I could muster about how I felt towards him and our mom, peace-sign alien planet, snowman rainbow popcorn, my thumb alighting mindless, selecting my symbols for me, like Costa said, and that was how my brother and I sent little fires between our screens, here I am, ocean lightbulb boy. Milk lightbulb skeleton, Costa smiled listening, I told them that my mom texted me for the first time since she’d thrown me out, since that final sunroom conversation, Ike tells me you’re doing well, nice to hear you’re back in school and on good terms with your brother, Love Your Mum, and my thumb alighted on house cloud turtle, pictures that made my stomach seep lemon water, an hour later she texted back, you’re very busy with school I understand it is nice to hear from you, as if I’d been the one who had ruined my own life, and Costa nodded and exhaled, mazel tov, their ironic laugh jumped, Costa’s irises shimmering tidal pool clear, I dipped my fingertips right into their pupils, right down into their ink, and I said, how long?

We spent the next week on the couch, my housemates were away for Christmas, and Costa bucked in the couch’s soft ditch, I DoorDashed Kool-Aid, stirred it with a little warm water like I’d seen the nurses do for nausea, and tipped it down Costa’s throat, they asked me to put on Good Will Hunting, a movie they’d seen a million times that calmed them down, and then they asked me to lay on top of them to weigh down their shaking, a quilt and a blanket between our bodies, Robin Williams’s voice droned on about friends and war, and Costa slept, when I got up I looked back down at them and dragged a layer of sweat off their forehead with the coast of my hand, and I put my hand to my own forehead and felt all of their cold and heat together, I wanted to kiss their eyelids, those familiar suns. I’d been protected from the heroin withdrawals at the detox, kids kept to their rooms for the worst of it, but with Costa I felt it all, they said me weighing them down got rid of the bone hurt, I felt their marrow cook, I felt their breath separate from their brain with a low ripping sound, I kept rice steaming into a porridge with brown sugar and ginger, something I remembered my mom did once when I had teeth pulled, hot spoon like a second tongue, her voice, her dressing gown filling a doorway.

We talked about the Formula, Costa told me how they discovered it, it was when they changed their name, their mom said the same thing to them that my mom said to me about being gay, I’ll never accept you I’m proud of my traditional upbringing, like they’d both trained from the same shitty mom handbook, and when Costa moved out here to be close to the ocean and become Costa, their mom sent long texts as if nothing had happened, one night Costa’s thumb punched out a big block of emojis and they selected three, it was chicken raindrop traffic-light, and they sent it and laughter shook their body, their body was like that instrument that plays through the air, you know the one, theremin, yeah, theremin, they’d never laughed like that before, a laugh like a spinal fluid spasm, they threw up on the kitchen floor, strange water. It felt so good that Costa kept using the Formula, for the ex they lived with in a van for six months after their last homeless shelter, she turned vicious in close quarters, their text exchange was just her rage paragraphs then Costa’s emoji trios in between, Costa said, everyone told me to block her but being silent and weird is much more powerful, I used the Formula for dealers too, I used it for my sister, I used it for landlords, I never block anyone, I hate that, blocking is weakness, and I let Costa mutter this all out, it was the sixth day in my apartment together, a day of black coffee, frozen pizza and quiet litanies.

The next part is what I’ve never told to my fiancée Lu, friends or anyone, the last day on the couch we spent naked, I swear it was Costa who started things, I felt the blanket coming out from between our bodies, when Costa’s fingers felt under the elastic of my boxers I scurried out of them so fast, I pressed my shoulder into the hollow beside Costa’s neck and my fingers plunged inside them with such pure knowing of what I wanted, as I pulled my fingers out of them, their face strobed in my mind, like their face the moment we met, when they opened the door of the detox, do you know your moments of inevitability embedded in days and doors, Costa smelled like a week of cheese and Kool-Aid, they were slick with the drug cold-pressed from their pores, fully juiced, skinnier than I’d fantasized, sketch and hinge under their sweatpants and binder. When I woke, Costa was gone, I lay on the couch until the nest of young birds in my stomach snarled upward at my mind, I piled seven pizza boxes on top of the sink, I drained the last of the colour from the pitcher, I walked to my regular coffee shop, the rain battered my hood in a way I’d never known rain before, pellets rang hard off my small moving tent, each drop a discrete bullet, I drank sour espresso at the window, my fingers, the bank of morning steam, the cup, it all smelled like Costa, I sat until my phone buzzed, shooting-star turtle skull, and I did not hear from Costa again after that for two years.

Costa said a thing to me when we worked at the detox, you don’t talk like anyone else I know, you talk the way a hummingbird drinks from a feeder, you don’t finish thoughts you just kind of hover around and sip and keep going. The hummingbird accusation repeated on the loop-track that runs at a diagonal around my skull, the tilted ring of a planet, a groove in the bone that hosts the worst thoughts that orbit me, some stay for days, some for years, never truly leaving but continuing a quick song along the ridges, until summoned, it haunted me, you never finish thoughts, I told my boring friends at my lab job the hummingbird thing and everyone agreed that Costa sounded sketchy, what kind of person takes off like that after the way I helped them, but I left out part of the story, as in the part that I was in love with Costa, for the lack of a better word, I couldn’t close the space they had opened inside me so instead I raged about the hummingbird comment, how dare they know my hovering.

My fiancé, Lu, when I met her on the third day of my next job, I recognized the always-already feeling from Costa, this time I played it smart, on our fourth date I informed Lu about the feeling, I know we are going to know each other for a very long time, and she smiled, moved forward, removed the bandanna from her hair, and unzipped my pants in a single gesture. After our first big fight I used the Formula on her, tugboat avocado dinosaur, and she texted back WTF?????????????? and turned up at my place, my housemate pretending to scramble eggs while I feebly explained the Formula, as soon as it left my lips I understood it was a mistake to speak it to Lu, a bigger mistake to blame in on Costa, revealed how we spoke with each other. What kind of a person comes up with something like that, Lu said, whirling her arms, and I watched my housemate laugh so hard that eggs fell out of his mouth, there was no explaining Costa, no defending Costa, Costa was Costa, I told Lu, I couldn’t explain it, like I couldn’t explain why when my mom died a year later the first person I needed to tell was Costa, we hadn’t spoken since we’d had sex, I was on the toilet at work crying from head to toe and I texted: gravestone gravestone waving-hand mom.

Three months four days clean was the first thing Costa said to me the next day when I took the SkyTrain and a bus to their place out in the suburbs, a bungalow with a yard for their stripey rottweilerish mutt, they sat cross-legged on their couch, they asked questions about my mother, not about how she died but about who she’d been, I talked about her framed oil paintings of women with braids, how the painted braids seemed to me like poised snakes, the rubber trees she draped with Christmas lights, the line of sand in the bathroom sink because she rinsed her watershoes there after her morning swim in the ocean, those swims were the only thing that kept her mood stable, her revolting soups, fruit cocktail and chicken and dumplings, chili with cool ranch doritos, her jars of sun tea on top of the fridge that she called dry-drunk moonshine, her wet footprints on the hall’s scratched-down carpets that cured into salt stains, Ike moved back in there for the final months of her life, never told me she was sick, he packed photographs, her Bible and her watershoes into a box and sent them to me, he emailed me a photo of her beloved sunroom in its final incarnation, a black leather couch framed by rubber trees and piles of newspapers, oh you grew up in the detox that’s why you loved working there so much, Costa said, and they laughed, just like the hummingbird comment this hit me quiet, their beard piled big and soft on their chest, the way they touched their beard I could tell they were pleased by its heft, their laugh was still a whole self-contained language for me, many words spoken at once, a full-circle uttering, and they got up from the couch to pour the coffee that was placed steeping on the radiator, white gills breathing warm air on Costa’s bright shadow.

There was a river close by where we walked their mutt in mucky halfmoon beaches among the toothy rocks, we watched barges stacked with cars glimmer by, spaceships, Costa murmured, I waited for Costa to apologize for what had happened between us, I’d fantasized that Costa would turn to me and say I recognize now how I mishandled things, I value our friendship, but nothing came, so I told them the story of trying to use the Formula on Lu, they laughed so hard the dog came running up and pummeled their chest, crying with worry. I asked Costa if they still used the Formula and they nodded to the rhythm of their dipping joint, oh yeah sometimes, yeah the only person I use it with the most is my sister, a wave at a tugboat, your sister?, I said cautiously and Costa nodded, told me how their sister sent them photos of her garden, nephews’ birthday cakes, your basic milestone shit, still used Costa’s deadname, Auntie. They told me about their job managing inventory at a pharmacy, their weightlifting routine, the guy they were dating, don’t worry I didn’t meet him in a recovery group, Ned, an introvert who owned three trucks and taught music to seniors, they didn’t ask me if there would be a funeral, they didn’t ask about Lu or when our wedding would be, they pointed at the cars on barges, chanted in their new, deep, gorgeous voice, Subaru Toyota Subaru.

After that, Costa was in and out of our apartment every few weeks for dinners for a couple years, Lu surprised me with her immediate, total fondness for Costa, she went on and on about Costa’s talent for pacing the humour in a story precisely right, how they always came to dinners with a homemade cake, their back-pounding hugs, she said I’m so glad you have someone you can open up to since you lost your brother, she adored their big dog named Uber Alice, and I saw how Costa had fooled her, like they fooled people, I watched Lu tell Costa the story of interviewing sperm donors and Costa folded into their old listening posture from the detox, I saw myself curled and rambling out the story of my brother putting my stuff on the curb all those years ago, I saw Costa’s listening for the first time for what it was, a vanishing act. One night Lu asked Costa what they knew about my childhood and they recited every fact I’d told them at the detox and when I blanched with exposure and surprise, Costa smiled at me and said, be grateful, my love language is memorization. I told Lu the hummingbird comment and she shrugged and said I don’t know, people say weird stuff all the time and when I told her the hummingbird comment was one of the cruelest things a person had ever said to me she looked me over from head to foot and said, your problem is you take everything to heart. So I could not sympathize with her when we got an email from Costa saying they’d been evicted and were driving to Montreal with their dog to stay with a friend, then nothing, same as always.

I used the Formula on my brother when he sent self-justifying texts about why he deserved the whole inheritance, it was mom’s right to choose to leave me nothing, I used the Formula on a co-worker at the lab who sent vengeful texts after he was fired, every time I used the Formula I thought of Costa again and I wanted to write to them, tell them that whatever was going on I didn’t care, whether it was detox or depression, it didn’t matter to me, but I resisted, I am becoming a different person, I told myself, I am becoming a person who doesn’t need to know and know and know, so I said nothing to their absence and their absence spoke back to me in tongues, but the Costa-worry pilot-light at the base of my neck never went out, there was no stopping it, and when Lu gave birth a year later there was still nothing from Costa, I entered a tunnel of all-night walking, our son had colic, Lu’s C-section incision got infected, healed, got infected and healed again, time became a shroud that blocked my body from windows and faces.

Star waving-hand dog and Costa was back, the text arrived the day before our son’s first birthday, I showed Lu and she shrugged and said in a tired voice, they’re just going to let you down again, why do you want to get hurt, I went out on the porch and curled up in the corner of the half-broken couch out there, gripped my knees and closed my eyes and allowed my chest to void of breath and fill back up with memories of Costa, and my phone vibrated and shouted in my hand with Costa’s name, still recorded in my contacts as COSTA DETOX WORK FRIEND over a decade later, when I answered I put it on speakerphone to put distance between myself and their voice, when they began to speak my anger left me all at once. I thought I should just call, Costa’s voice said, I’m back on the coast, I need to know you’re okay, no apology, no explanation, nothing like that would ever come from Costa, I’m doing better again, it was touch and go for a while, when our son called to a raven through the window where Lu stood eavesdropping there was a pause, congratulations, said Costa, we spoke for a couple hours.

My son’s birthday party, I ran to the door, there was Costa in the cherrywood frame, shaved head, thick black beard, white jeans, their wide open eyes, an old argyle sweater I recognized from before, their embrace pressed all the bones in my body back into their correct places, while they held me I wondered why they were back and how long they would stay, then they walked around me into my home, dancing snow from their boots, and within a few minutes they’d filled a paper plate with red velvet cake and pineapple and had taken their place, cross-legged, on the couch beside Ike, turned and faced him, you’re Ike aren’t you?, said Costa, while Lu and I stared, Ike smiled uncertainly in his denim party blazer, and I watched my brother hug my brother and couldn’t contain my tears when Costa set his palms around the back of Ike’s skull and said, I forgive you for everything.

 

Alex Leslie has published two collections of short stories—People Who Disappear (Freehand), shortlisted for a Lambda Award for debut LGBTQ fiction, and We All Need to Eat (Book*hug), shortlisted for a BC Book Prize—and two collections of prose poetry, The things I heard about you (Nightwood), shortlisted for the Robert Kroetsch award for experimental poetry, and Vancouver for Beginners (Book*hug), shortlisted for the City of Vancouver Book Prize and winner of the Western Canada Jewish Book Prize for poetry. Alex’s fiction has been published in Granta’s spotlight issue on Canadian literature, Best Canadian Stories 2020 (Biblioasis), the Journey Prize anthology and Catapult. This story is from a collection in progress about rebirth and transformation. Instagram: @thisalexleslie