As far back as he could remember, Henry had felt encumbered by his humanity. The first story he told me, the night we ‘hit it off’ was of him, as a little kid, hopping from rock to rock in a creek bed near where he grew up, imagining himself an ape- man, or a frog- man, or some kind of jumping animal-man. When I met him he was poring over an article about the sense organs of tiger sharks, and every now and then he’d close his eyes and move his hand around in front of him, as if he, too, could sense electromagnetic fields with ferrous hairs set in pits beneath his skin.

It was the Barnes and Nobles on Telephone road, the new one, and it was raining in a slow, gray drizzle that made all the windows fog up and made everything seem at the same time obscure and dull. I had the day off work and was bored, infinitely bored. The sun was just setting, a faint, neurasthenic fizzle. I went to the bookstore as a last resort, a place to dissolve a couple of hours, to absent myself from existence in between the covers of some hipster novel. I was into Douglas Coupland and Chuck Palahniuk at the time, and wearing black leggings beneath vintage dresses. I had my hair in pigtails that day and was feeling faintly self-conscious.

So that, when I sat down in the back of the café, I was quick to notice when someone looked at me. The first couple of times I glanced up I didn’t catch him, but I was fairly sure to whom the gaze belonged. A young man in a pageboy hat, dorky muffler and equally dorky tweed jacket, his face buried in a Nature magazine.

I tried to go back to the novel I was reading — something about someone’s grandmother in Palm Springs — but I kept feeling the insistent prickle on the back of my neck, that ineluctable feeling that one is being looked at. Finally I sat up suddenly, with the pretext of fixing my hair, and our eyes met.

His were a deep, somehow spirally, green, and even from across the café –if you’ve been to the one on Telephone you know it’s big and L-shaped — they drew me in like a hypnotist’s. His eyebrows were thick and very black, like the hair which hung in thick curls behind his ears, and he tried to smile. I say tried because what came across was really more like someone trying to mime a coquette’s blush, a quick downturn of the eyelids and brief flash of the lips.

This gesture was so odd in a boy, and so awkwardly done, that I almost couldn’t resist going over and hugging him, strangers that we were. I felt warm inside, way down low, and a stirring, half maternal and half lustful, that I knew I should have feared.

Instead I got up. I was too sad at the time not to be adventurous, and walked past his table, slowly, as silkily as I could manage, shifting my weight from one hip to the other as I passed. I picked up a magazine from the shelf — Nature, of course — and walked back to my own table. I felt his eyes jump up and trace my back as I walked, the pronounced curve.

And a thought occurred to me, that I wanted to fuck him, and a resolution formed in my mind — I would talk to him today, right now, in fact, and would invite him to the new year’s party my roommate was having.

My father had died a week before, a dull and colorless death, like everything else about him. Tuberculosis, an antibiotic- proof strain caught in a hospital, we assume at the time he was having his ear reattached — long story. So he died after five months of being sick and it left only my mom and me. We didn’t like each other.

I walked up to Henry’s table, feeling oblivious, like a character in a slide- show, and put my hand on the chair opposite his.

“Want company?” I said.

He said “sure” with a self-deprecating laugh and made a smooth, refined gesture with his hand to say, ‘go ahead and take the seat.’

So I did, and we learned about each other. At first I had a hard time believing he could be sadder than I was — I who had just lost a father, and had spent a year pining away for a boy who, again just a month earlier, had gotten himself killed in a shipwreck. And maybe it was just the rain, softly erasing everything outside the windows, or the crowded emptiness of the café, that recurrent drabness, slightly sinister, of a chain-store, but it seemed to me that here was the loneliest, most disconnected person I’d ever met.

I learned he had a bachelor’s degree in Anthropology and lived in a place paid for by his mother — that he had never worked, read comic books every day, and was not a virgin. As he talked he made curiously laconic, sweeping motions with his hands. His eyes seemed to change shape when he moved his head, the irises set with bluish bars of light, like diamonds.

He asked me if I liked Neutral Milk Hotel, talked at length about Devo, and finally informed me, in a pathetically suave way, that he thought I was good-looking.

“I love your hair,” he said (sloppy pigtails). “And your nose — you look like something out of F. Scott Fitzgerald.” He paused to smile sheepishly — “the kind of cute that kills.”

And of course I swoon for awkwardness, for the barely contained and the overeager, and so I didn’t laugh but looked him in the eye when I asked him to come to the party.

That night it rained more, I drank a lot and Henry showed up late. Our apartment was a small two-room, with a single sliding door and brown carpet, a faux-wood table, and cigarette burns on everything. The Faint was playing — forty or so drunks mulled about and Henry picked through them like a robot, seeming lost and shy. I let him for a few minutes before appearing, framed in a doorway. I was wearing tight pants folded up, Dr. Martens, a white blouse and a skinny tie.

Over more drinks he told me about his childhood, with a savant-like volubility. He told me the jumping-on-rocks story, and I began to glimpse why it was he seemed so amazingly lonely.

“Let’s have a pity-party,” I said, starting to get sentimental, and I told him about my father, and my mother, and about John, whose ship sank off the coast of Chile, about dying and about my longing for sexual fulfillment, the missed loves and the men who just didn’t give a shit, or couldn’t.

He sat there — we were on the rug, holding cosmos — and something in the softness of his expression, the unmoved, laconic arch of his thick eyebrows made me feel small and petty, as if I were shrinking to a dot, a speck on the face of his huge darkness.

Finally: “I’ve been rejected by everyone, and feel like I have no prospects in life,” he said, “but none of it matters. Nothing matters. I exist, and have come to believe my existence is a mistake. I have all these instincts which are suited to nothing and don’t benefit me in the least. I’m convinced that I’m made for a very certain role, and that role doesn’t exist. I think sometimes that I would be happier as a spider, or a nematode, some insensible thing…” He talked like someone who read lots of old books but had no friends and so hadn’t got the habit of real conversation. I began to get uncomfortable.

“Who wouldn’t be?” I said, in an irritated tone, and I led him into my room, where I kissed him only partially to shut him up. Though he never smiled, except in embarrassment, and always had a sad look, he was an excellent kisser, exhibiting an urgency with his tongue and the tips of his fingers that I would have called fierceness, had I not been met by the insistent, wide-open indifference of his eyes.

The next day it was clear and cold, there were only a few, thin gray clouds drifting over the sea. He called me (he actually called!) and we met at Barnes and Nobles, from which he took me to the mountains to watch the sunset.

I thought it was unbearably cute how he sat in a tree, with his shapely legs, clad in very tight, serged jeans, folded beneath him, and asked me if I had ever been a Cure kid. Of course I had, and I never stopped loving them, really. He said ‘Lovecats’ was one of his favorite songs and it made me sort of quiver and melt, with the strange mixture of sentiment and sex that only Henry was ever able to evoke.

The tree extended a burled, gnarled limb over the precipice, on which he sat so that he seemed surrounded by the sky. It grew dark quickly, and our silhouettes soon stood out against the purple and orange in the west. It looked, I remarked, kind of like an oil spill, on fire in the ocean.

He swung down, hanging in the air a moment and then landing in a crouch behind me, which sort of creped me out. He stood up reluctantly, and on the narrow path back to the road he hopped from rock to rock, instead of walking, as if a creature not quite comfortable yet with bipedialism.

He drove me back to my apartment, then, and we fucked. It wasn’t great, but it was good, which made me feel like there was hope.

In the next couple of weeks I learned that I was very poorly suited to dragging Henry back into life. We did just about everything together — went to Trader Joes and ate free samples, danced in the car to Human League and sighed to Joy Division, drove in circles. We even tried miniature golf, though he insisted it would be more fun if we came back at night so that he could climb all over the stucco castle, an leap from one windmill to the next. I suggested he could do that by himself, though I was kind of afraid he would.

Of course we both read a lot, and sometimes together. He had no problem with the silence of a library — his history had accustomed him to it. It turned out he knew Turgenev, had gotten through Moby Dick, loved Lermontov as much as I did, and was currently into Yukio Mishima, who I could never crack, and, of all people, Lawrence, whose use of the word ‘loins’ I could never get past.

Sometimes I would just pretend to read, and instead watch his face as he went through a book. It had that resigned look, departed from the world, like someone who has given up on life. These looks unnerved me, and every time I saw them I would think about my friends, and wonder what they thought of him. Nervous, I had tried to put off introductions as long as possible, but these things happen.

I’m pretty solitary, and do things on my own, but I treasure those friends I do have, and, though it shames me, I care a lot about their opinions — even the stupid ones. I worked on the weekdays and so I didn’t get to see people very often. I hung out with Henry more than just about anybody at this point.

When I saw his apartment for the first time, I was unsurprised, though I did get a chill, as of recognition, and a feeling of terrible pity that I tried hard to stifle. It was a studio, only one room. There was a mattress on the floor, a single sheet and a single pillow on top of it, and other than that it looked uninhabited, more like a storage unit than a home. There were no posters, no clocks, no glasses, no decorations of any kind. In one corner stood nine or ten rectangular white boxes, which he told me held comic books. About nine thousand of them, he said, with a sheepish, blushing smile.

And that’s when the issue of the superhero first came up.

“Wow,” I’d said, and didn’t give it much more thought. But he glanced over at his stack with a look of tenderness, as if the boxes were photos of a dead relative. Then he scratched the back of his head and started telling me at great length about his obsession with mutants, super heroes, flying men, men with x-ray eyes, women who can call down lightning, anything having to do with the meta-human.

“It’s kind of my idea of the sublime,” he was saying. “That connection,” his eyes became dull and unfocused, his hands wandered as he searched for the words, “between the human and the not-human. As long as I can remember I’ve felt it was the only thing I was made for, to swing on power-lines, high above a city at night…” And he sat down on the bed, like something that had got the air let out of it. I was uncomfortable, and wanted to diffuse the air of a confessional that had come to pervade the room. So I sat down next to him, and started kissing him, gently at first, to rouse him back to life and then he started to respond.

He leapt on me and we shuffled each other’s clothes off, fast and awkward, and he got really into it, though there seemed to be an attitude of regret imposed over the whole thing, and he came like a sigh, just before I did.

One Friday towards the end of January we were in a café on Main Street, and I was feeling lonely and stifled. I felt a need for social life, for a scene, a party, anything with a group of people. I think it was that I needed to establish myself in a purely human way — not this mute ardor that Henry burdened me with.

My friend John had called that day, inviting me to a party that his band was throwing, they’d just finished recording an EP or something, and there was going to be a lot of drinking.

“I could stand to drink,” I said.

“Yeah.” I knew he didn’t like parties, or people, and had a sensitive streak about boys who were in bands, so I tried to bring it up subtly.

“So I think I’m going to go to John’s party.” I guess I failed at the subtlety.

Henry didn’t really respond. He looked off to the side; in his eyes there was the light as of a smoldering thing.

“You’re kind of dead inside,” he said.

I started, taken aback. “What?”

“Deep inside.” He pointed down. “Where there should be an animal inside you, there’s nothing. You’re just the human shell.”

“What the fuck?”

“I’m sad,” he said, as if changing the subject. “I’m tired of thinking.” And he tapped his feet on the floor, looked down and pulled his cap low on his forehead. I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

I went to the party, and since I was feeling bad I got drunker than I should’ve, and made a fool of myself in front of John and his band friends, which really bothered me. I offered to bring Henry but he’d sensed too well that I really didn’t want him there.

At night when I got home, I still had the spins. I felt suddenly very lonely and I regretted everything. I needed a voice, attention, some kind of human sound to reassure me I was still in the world. So I called Henry. I don’t remember what I said exactly but he seemed annoyed and reticent.

“You know I hate talking on the phone,” he said. “Almost as much as instant messenger. I’ve had too much of disembodied voices and I don’t want yours.”

The next week they were opening up a new exhibit at my work and so I had to go in every day. I saw Henry only once. It was Thursday, bright, clear, windy. The air was dry and bits of blown-down trees and newspapers were scattered along the streets. He came over to my apartment — we both drove — and we watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which was one of my favorite movies and which he said made him nostalgic and lonely.

“Why are you lonely?” I said, afraid that I wasn’t present enough, that having been gone for a week I was no longer real to him.

Henry didn’t say anything, only shifted his strange, too-intense eyes and ran his hand down my back, to where it slipped under my jeans. His finger pressed oddly and warmly into the crack. I felt disgusting and sweaty and I hadn’t shaved so I didn’t respond. I just lay there on my stomach, looking towards the TV. Finally I guess he got bored so he removed his hand and turned away.

Just then I heard the door open and shut to the other room, which meant my housemate was home. I sighed and looked suspiciously at the door. I didn’t want to talk to her. I didn’t have to, of course, but the idea of another woman being in the house bothered me.

Henry whispered something.

“What?” I said. The wind blew things up against the walls, and made a loud, omnipresent sound, so that it felt like we were under siege.

“You want to?” He repeated, kind of smiling embarrassedly.

“Elena’s home,” I said.

“Oh.” The movie had just ended. He got up, and stretched his arms, in their close-fitting brown jacket. “You know,” he said, “we haven’t been with each other for more than a week…”

“We’re with each other now.”

He turned on me. “You know that’s not what I mean.”

“Elena’s home.”

He paused, and looked down, putting his hand on the back of his neck the way he did when he was about to say something embarrassing.

“I don’t want your mind,” he said. “I don’t want your words, or your ideas, and I don’t want you to want mine. I don’t want you to care about me. You know I want love, but I don’t want your intellectual love — there’s something deadening about it. You’re like a neutron star.” He didn’t explain this. I sat up, looking at him with the beginnings of tears, the feeling like something hot coming up between us. He seemed incomprehensible as a Martian just then, an inscrutable creature. I tried to hold his hand.

“I don’t want your hand,” he said, with suddenness. The wind shrieked. “You don’t understand what love is. You don’t know how to love with the right part of yourself — with all of it. I don’t want your soul — you can keep that. I want your cunt.” He stopped short, blushing, but then went on. “I want the secret, the dark part of you. I want what you’re ashamed of, and what you don’t believe you have. And — ” he stopped again. “You’ll take this as an insult.”

“I just well might,” I said, hardening.

“But it isn’t. You see, we’ve been too human.” Henry would do this. He would say nothing, or talk in terse, Hemmingway sentences for days on end, and then suddenly come out with a long, philosophical speech, usually attacking philosophy or speaking. “I need what’s female in you, and I want you to want what’s male in me.”

“So I’m just a hole to you?”

“No!” he yelled. He stood up, and of his expression I could only get this unfathomable sadness, the aloneness, and it seemed to me to be a look of tenderness, betraying everything he had just said.

But he went on: “No. Not a hole. Your hole.” I started to laugh, but it died. “Your cunt is the most individual thing about you, no matter who you are. Dick and Pussy is the highest form of love, not the lowest. I — ” He broke off. I turned with a pouty expression towards the wall. I hate being corrected, and the fact was, I had had just about the worst experiences with ‘dick and pussy’ of anyone. I lost my virginity in a bathtub, was raped, if you must know, by a man who was either named James or Jeremy and whom I only saw once afterwards. He didn’t recognize me, so I can’t be sure. I never told Henry this.

“I want to live,” he finally said, “and it isn’t fair. We’ve become robots. Naturally, it only follows that we would emulate our gods, who lost their genitals ages ago.” I took out my cell phone and dialed John’s number. I was getting uncomfortable, not scared exactly, but seized by a kind of pity that was like fear. Henry’s earnestness was a kind of defiance to everybody. In his svelte, loping movements and the direct sadness of his eyes there was a clear fuck- you, directed at no one in particular, but including just about everyone.

I pressed call end before anyone picked up, and we were silent for a long time.

When I went over to his place on Friday, after work, I found Henry wearing these rubber prosthetic bat-ears, around the outsides of his own ears.

“I have to keep them on for a week,” he said, “and once my brain adapts I’ll be able to have superhuman, multi-directional hearing.”

“Okay.” I said. I sat down in his one chair, which he had bought for me. I avoided looking at him. “What do you want to do tonight? It’s my one night off.”

“Play chess,” he said. “No, actually there’s a show. Bauhaus. I have two tickets.” And I had to look. I wanted to give him a hug and a kiss but the ears stopped me.

“You look like something from the National Enquirer,” I said.

“And what if I do?” He frowned, as if hurt, as if I had stepped on his model-train set. “I don’t want to live just for the sake of having lived. I’ve got to be something.”

“Oh. Well then.” I was thrilled about Bauhaus, and I suddenly really wanted to get going. I was happy but at the same time I felt stifled and cooped-up in Henry’s room. I needed a crowd, I needed noise. Something occurred to me.

“What about the ears?” I said. He shrugged. He stood behind the chair and started rubbing my shoulders, which I must have told him at some point felt good. I knew what this meant and I looked up at him. In his upside-down face there was a far away, romantic look, filled with ardor and hopelessness. Gently, he bowed and kissed my neck. “Okay,” I said. “But we should be quick. The show…” I felt bad about saying this, but what could I do? I got up and kissed him, keeping my eyes closed.

We made love then, and he had the ears on the whole time. He stayed harder and lasted longer than ever before and it was good. It was almost enough to make me want him to keep them.

We didn’t have sex at all the next week. Henry went to LA to do something with school, or to visit his mom, or something. I hung out with John, or read, most of the time. I knew Henry loved me, in his fashion, but still, I wasn’t surprised when I found out he was cheating on me. He made no secret of it.

It was raining, again. We were at my place, playing chess. The afternoon was just turning into evening. Elena had left to go to the movies with somebody, so we were alone.

Only the table lamp was lit, everything seemed soft and vaguely defined. We were sitting at the little Formica table under the window. The darkness, his slow chess playing, and the sound of the rain was making me sleepy. Henry didn’t have the ears on anymore, but he said if he wore them now he could hear things a little better. I don’t know if I believed him. Now every time he got up, like to go get a glass of water, he would walk on his toes. This was his new thing — he claimed it would make him able to jump higher.

“So you’re going to walk on your tip-toes all the time?” I asked.

He picked up a knight, vaguely hovered it over a few different squares. “Yeah,” he said, somehow dismissive. “It kind of feels right.” He finally moved, and I responded quickly.

“So,” he said. There was the same sadness, the laconic wistfulness in his expression that had been there when I first met him. He touched my hand.

“I don’t know,” I said. I suddenly felt scared, as if his big presence were a threatening one, as if I would be swallowed up. He turned away. I felt guilty.

“You’ll be upset, won’t you?” I said.

“No. No, not at all. I’m happy just being with you.” This seemed odd to me. We each made a move and I wished one of us had the other in check so we could say it, ‘check,’ and it would be a dramatic moment. That didn’t happen. Instead he made a dumb move with the rook’s pawn, an insignificant move that had nothing to do with the game, then stood up, on his toes, and stretched his arms.

It was still raining, not pouring, but the windows were dark and the rhythm of it was dreary, so that it made you want to yawn. I pulled at my stocking, so as to have something to do, and I noticed, on the floor by my foot, a black hair band.

My hair had been too short to have any use for one, since before I met him. It could have been nothing, I thought, but still, I picked it up and with a half-teasing, mocking expression, I showed it to him.

“Whose is this?” I said.

“Probably this girl Alice. She has pigtails.” He didn’t seem surprised, or guilty, and he didn’t hesitate, so I thought, he must be innocent. But he went on, “I saw her last week.” It seemed not to matter, somehow.

“Last week?”

“When you were with John.”

“Touché.” I felt kind of embarrassed for having actually said touché, and because his face was so rigid; everything about him looked firm and impassive, and it made me nervous. “Did you fuck her?”

“Yeah.” Flat and toneless. And this I hadn’t expected.

A couple of days later I went over to visit him and found him hanging upside-down from the roof of his apartment.

He poked his head over the edge and said, “Come up and have some tea. It’s nice.” It was a nice day, in fact. Cloudy and cool, and you could see the mountains over Santa Clara, a bright green of new grass. His building stood on the slope of a hill, two stories of faded, pinkish stucco. He looked small up there, small and natural, like something everyone might eventually come to take for granted. The wind played with his hair and it was very sexy.

“Uh, no thanks,” I said. “How did you get up there?”

“The drainpipe,” he said, and pointed to the metal pipe than ran along- side the fire- escape ladder.

“Oh.”

“You want me to come down?”

“Yeah. Yeah why not?” He flipped himself over and slid down the pipe: crumbly bits of stucco and gravel rained down when he landed, with a mincing sound. We hugged briefly, and for some reason he kissed me on the cheek. “So have you been with any more girls?”

“No,” he said, scratching his neck in that impishly geeky way. “I’m designing a costume.”

“A costume?”

“You want to see it?” We went inside and he had a couple of posters up, which was new, a picture of Tarzan, a map of San Francisco.

“What’s that?” I said, pointing to the map.

“Oh.” He looked down. His face took on a veiled, indistinct look. “I’m moving,” he said after a while. “I’m gonna go to Oakland.”

“Oakland.” I sniffed. Then he opened up his little closet, with a proud sweep of his arms and a spandex monkey-suit was hanging there, with a cartoon of some-kind of bug on it. I considered giggling, but no sound would come out. I felt held prisoner, mesmerized, as if in a vacuum.

“Look, Henry,” I said.

“Call me Mantis.”

I looked at him. “No. No, why didn’t you tell me you were moving?”

“I did,” he said, in a small voice, pretending to be oblivious.

“Yeah, just now!” Pause. “I’m not calling you ‘mantis.’”

“That’s okay.” He shrugged. He still had on his page-boy hat, and was wearing an argyle sweater. I sat down at the table, leaning my head on my elbows. He went into the closet, fidgeted with something for a while, then came back and joined me. “So,” he said, “I’m gonna leave tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow? Are you fucking serious?” I can imagine what a charmingly tragic expression I must have had, turning suddenly pale, my eyes wide with little tears appearing at the corners. This didn’t comfort me. “What about packing?” I said.

“Everything I have is already in boxes.” He indicated the comics.

“Yeah.” And I couldn’t look at him anymore. I turned my head down and cried. I thought about John, and the band, I thought about work, and without this presence, which I hadn’t looked for, and which I had gladly taken for granted, it all seemed small and petty and insignificant. I felt like someone who had just missed being part of history, or like a movie extra just walking off the set.

Henry was silent. He didn’t know what to say. I could tell he felt bad, but also that he was resolved to go, that the huge, dumb and elemental force of his personality was at the head of him, and had made its will clear. At the same time, without that intensity, without that awkwardness, I didn’t know what I would do.

Finally he came over and lifted me up by the shoulders, gently. He sat down and pulled me into his lap, where we kissed, sadly, for a few minutes. Then we had sex, on his unmade bed, and as he was buttoning up his shirt he led me to the door.

A few weeks later I heard of a news story, in a San Francisco paper, about a masked figure who jumped off of rooftops and appeared at the scenes of muggings, fights. A girl with a Russian name said he had saved her from being raped. This masked man, or someone dressed as him, had also been spotted at a rock club in Berkeley. That was the last I heard of the odd phenomenon (15 minutes, maybe) and I never saw Henry again.