He knew it was a story the moment he hit bone.

Fast friends, they had met six months earlier, lived together five, and that night he brought her there, to where as an undergraduate he had sometimes sat with coffee before class, this in the days before he had found a part-time job and could afford decent coffee, brought her there because the benign familiarity of the place promised insulation against the awful business of the evening: that the last three months there had been between them a wretch like love and that she had slept with a boy — her first — to disavow it, which was neither of theirs to do.

The invitation came easy, “Come,” and she came, questions, suspicions withheld, if there were any on her part, if she had heart enough to know that what she had said the Thursday before, referring to what she had done the Friday previous, translated through the nonchalance of her tone, weakling shrug, had meant to him, When flowers burst through the grout in the pavement, I will find them and crush them because I am a loyal denizen of this city.

In his tired late-twenties, following an uneventful mid-twenties, two books down and neither a winner, missing his St. Louis sister and her French bulldog, Charlotte, the city had become for him a bully, a sociopath, really, and a daze of disappointment so routine it left him godless and languid. New York City is a narcotics dealer and the hangover dealt, he had recently written, but what was the next line? ‘I am unhappy,’ is a premise, not a story, and a premise too commonplace to pique his own interest. Another way of putting it is that he was very unhappy and embarrassed of his unhappiness yet so drained by it he couldn’t bring himself to do the one thing that might make him feel better — write something decent. “What am I doing here?” he overheard himself ask, actually, involuntarily ask, a rush of morning commuters disembarking for their second connecting train.

This was before they met. The city changed, pretended to change, after he met her.

Conversation was conversation over the menus at first, no politesse or visible tension, but trepidation radiated, he felt, from his joints and his muscles — electric crackling static so bright as to be seen, loud as to be heard. He was right. She noticed, and the mood between them muted — an audience quieting before the anticipated stir of the curtain. Torrents of conversation, fervid, rapturous, confessional, had engulfed them always; it was unnatural, horrifying, this hush that spelled surrender.

Then food. He cut and chewed, screwed up his courage to speak, knew in his silence the consequence of speech, the transubstantiation of words into ruin and so could say nothing, was mute and appalled at what had to be said — and it was then, at that exact moment, that his knife hit bone. Breath scored to heartbeats and seconds thundering as if passed beneath a guillotine, he pushed at the bone and tried to speak, sawed at the solid bone and willed the heavy speech, leaned hand and wrist into the bone, struggled, was silent, sawed – tore – and realized with a shock of humor the uncanny, enacted metaphor: he simply could not cut through the bone; he simply could not say the words. And instantly, he was unburdened because moments like this — moments like this occur only in stories, and so this, then, this night must be a story. He was the author of vignette too elegant to be believed. Life had become a story too ironic to be believed.

Now he did not fear to say:

“You have a drug problem.”

If a face could shrug. ‘Well, probably.’

“You have, also, a drinking problem.”

“Yes,” she said at once.

“And you slept with someone because you’re afraid you love me.”

“There was,” she admitted in her accent, “an impulse.”

His only struggle now was to reign in a smile of pure incredulity because it was and was so perfectly a story.

He had moved to this city, had lived with poor and very poor and lately middle-class, men and women with faces like three o’clock under the office fluorescents, and then had met and moved in with a Soviet girl who dated women the age of mothers, and he had become her friend, her only friend, confidant, floating conscience, and together they had done such things as break into an anonymous high school one stormy Sunday for the pleasure of walking the halls with an impunity enjoyed by no one there, and how do you not fall for that, soaked through and criminal, after she says it isn’t women she wants but a man and maybe you. You do not, though solid and taciturn, uncomfortable admitting to yourself anything you would not announce to a note-taking room, hesitate to describe nights out with her magic. Magic, you hoarsely whisper, and are right and unashamed. It is after such a night that she casually remarks to you, “I slept with a boy,” her first time, and asks for a hug, asks like it’s hers, this trauma.

But then, just a moment ago, willing yourself to say, “I knew it was stupid, and I would never have asked you for anything, Mita, but we were in love, at least nine weekends in a row, and you’re horrible, you’re horrible for wrecking that,” you choke on your words, hit bone and saw. The analogy translates with a crispness so starched had you read it in a story you would have scoffed, “If only the world were so generous with symmetry!” Then it would drizzle when you frowned. Then you’d find love by the tulips in spring. Instead you look for yourself in clouds and finds clouds, imagine faces, a train car.

But it happened. And so it must be a story. Already you’re removed, dispersonally drafting the action in real time. The scene plays out — it is not lived; it is written:

She apologies, admits your logic, “…wine, coke, am afraid of men.” She speaks of a childhood, monster father, summarizing a novel. She’s crying now. “I’ll go to meetings,” and breaks bread, truly, breaks bread with you while striking this peace. It’s authored, unbelievable. You pay and part.

Outside, sundown. Snow will come surely as night.

Walking west, you encounter in the street a man, his head to the sidewalk in shame or in prayer. He bears a cardboard sign that reads, ‘Who would believe this happened to me?’ and while you’d suggest a change of emphasis — ‘Who would believe this happened to me’ — you are delighted to find the manuscript has sprawled from between you and Mita, which was a tight little scene but ultimately unsatisfying (“Is he happy now? Are they in love again?” Questions the author has evidently declined to answer), that the manuscript has sprawled, drafting now the entire city, the span of the evening. You pass the figment thirty dollars, he being of a substance too fantastically real to be believed or denied, and what’s money in a story to your actual, leather wallet?

Snow falls. You call it gracious, the way it falls. You say it makes sense, the only, perfect sense: you felt like snow inside this entire time.

A block beyond, you receive a call, brushing flurries from the screen. It’s your freshman roommate. You haven’t spoken in three years. He’s in town, nearby — at the bar, of course, where you first met her. It cannot be that he, a boy who sings and spends weekends listening to boys who sing, would know this stodgy bar of smoke and snare drums and women the age of mothers, but you can you rightly say a character knows anything? You join him there because it is written.

You pull up a stool, shake hands and say hello. You tell him nothing of earlier, assuming, in the way of fine storytelling, that whatever he says will be the author’s idea of what you need to hear.

“Dave’s mad at me,” he tells you. Dave’s the boyfriend — nice guy, presumably real. “I saw a doctor. They told me the coke is ruining my teeth. I’m cutting back,” he tells you, “to one can a night.”

There it is, you smile, you swoon and you laugh, there it is, the satisfying coda — wry, humane and actually said. It is the author’s way of telling you that everything is not so bad, that some things are funny, some problems, really, not very big problems. You could be one of those people, the author implies with the timing of the scene, so near to the end the sentiment’s sure to stick with you.

You do not explain to your friend the tickling irony of what he has said because it is unartful for characters to indulge in laborious exposition.

You stay for an hour, chat amiably, untouched by the animal of the evening caged now in narrative — cordoned off by narrative, made harmless, purring.

At the end of the night you take the train uptown rather than homeward because that is how this story would end, and so it must and so it does:

He would ride the train north, to the end of the line. From his window he would gaze over the tunnels and over the city, thoughts now withdrawn from the reader, who is left to guess at what this man, were he real and therefore free, unpredictable and subject to consequence, would or might or could be thinking in this, one imagines, profoundly lonely moment. Readers would agree, however, that it is insensible for this character to go home. That would make no sense. It would be poor writing. And so he would not go home. Stories like this, if they aim to ring true, if they know what’s good for them, end rather with wandering, with unanswered questions, a tightly controlled expression of endless possibility constrained by time and place and desperate choice.