Come If You Want - Chapter One

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You are reading ‘Come If You Want,’ a serialized novella by Brendon Holder. This is the first of four chapters.

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Men came to Palmer like Happy Meals, which is to say that they gestured the meek sustenance of a chicken nugget and would likely only be enjoyable in the backseat of a car. After that, as with all fast food, Palmer would feel guilty. Feel stupid for bending a knee to his feeble willpower. For opening and firmly fastening his heart like a drive-through window, and thinking that this snack and toy, in the form of a boy, could ever make him happy. The men came to Palmer hot, quivering with the hopes of romantic potential. But then they cooled, leaving Palmer with an ache that would outlive the relationship.

It wasn’t like he was in a rush to find a boyfriend. It just seemed like the practical thing to do. Someone to split the weekly orders of $67 sashimi with, or to help him determine if a poster was off-center before he mounted it to his wall. Such things were better in pairs. Being single never bothered Palmer, but there were these knifey little reminders everywhere. Sharp elbows. Stabs that alerted him to his solitude. Nudging him that maybe there was another way he ought to be living.

The docile quakes of a nearby train cradled his apartment, trembling above the swooshes of his washing machine from the other room. It was nighttime, his time for retinol and masturbation. Although he owned blackout curtains, a pale light had begun to cut through the crevice of the shade, slicing into his wall like a katana. Duties done, damp sock askew, his mind chatter retreated to a whimper. Then, as if uneasy that his mind was suddenly empty, Palmer glanced at his group chat, giddily roaring at 11:53 PM even though they all had places to be the next morning. Phone above his face, he anchored himself to the ceiling rather than reading the chat from the side of the pillow. He didn’t want gravity to make his face uneven; he read about that in Goop once.

Calvin had just sent a picture to the group chat. This wasn’t unusual, as members of the group chat frequently sent images of things, to the extent that the group chat operated more like a group picture book than a place for conversation. On some days, the group chat communicated only through images and video links, expecting that the visuals they sent would convey something their texts could not. TikToks, memes, and other online ephemera replaced words, speaking on their behalf. At other times, a trio of them would send the same image at different points of the day, without bothering to check that someone else had already sent the exact same thing. Regardless, they received customary thumbs up for their services; the world rolled on like this at times.

But the image Calvin sent to the group chat was new. At least, new to Palmer. The screenshot was of an Instagram post framing a guy named Timothy, whom Palmer knew, next to a man whom Palmer did not.

Now… the group chat wasn’t really friends with Timothy, only putting up with the stench of his excessive cologne (Santal 33) and his habit of talking too close to their faces when they ended up at the same party. Timothy loved gay cruises, flexed a seemingly unlimited SoulCycle budget, and proudly displayed a tattooed stencil of the boot of Italy on his right forearm. Palmer once asked him for Italy recommendations, assuming he knew, and Timothy responded by saying that he’d never been, that the tattoo was inspired by his love for Olive Garden. This made sense to Palmer, of course.

On his wall, the shimmering snip of light squinted to a wink, while Palmer, unknowingly, fingered through the chat.

“OMG, is that a new man?” texted Kieran.

“Right? It’s been like… two months,” said Basil.

“ANOTHA WUN,” voicenoted Terry, somewhat nailing the imitation.

Palmer put an exclamation mark on Basil’s message and zoomed in on the new man’s face. The new man looked normal, thought Palmer. A visible hairline and caterpillared eyebrows that quarantined a serviceable face. The man was smiling. A grizzly, open-mouthed smile, and yet Palmer couldn’t see any of his teeth. Just a black hole that reminded him of the solar system.

Palmer typed, “Where does he find these people?” and hit send. He punched out of the photo to investigate Timothy’s Instagram page, searching for answers in his images: he was 5’8” (according to his Instagram bio), and despite his smaller frame, it was his facial asymmetry, akin to Quasimodo, that prevented anyone from referring to him as a twink. That last little bit was not according to his Instagram bio; that was according to Calvin.

Michael sent a panda bear emoji, then a fist emoji, and finally a wink emoji.

Mason and Jack both reacted with a “Haha” to Michael’s string of emojis. This made no sense to Palmer, but he added a “Haha” anyway and turned on his white noise machine. The room suddenly felt like the inside of a fleece sweater, and the silver razor of light expanded gently. He tongued his mouth guard in place and raised his phone to his face again, allowing the light from the screen to torch into him and cast droopy shadows on his face like a Scream mask.

Calvin sent another message to the group chat, a Twitter link this time. It was a Lena Dunham post from 2018. It read, “I may not have a good body, personality, or attitude, but I can always find a boyfriend!!!”

Palmer wasn’t sure if Calvin was referring to Timothy or himself, seeing as Calvin had been through four different partners since his arrival two summers ago and pronounced “pro bono” as “Pro Bono,” as in, supportive of the lead singer of U2. He was a human rights lawyer.

He refocused on the Instagram page. There was a time when Palmer thought Timothy was cute. He had even gone on a few dates with him. But after his group chat advised against it, telling him things like ‘never settle’ and ‘boys are like buses, miss one, next fifteen: one coming,’ he lost interest and stopped responding to Timothy’s messages. His feelings drifted away after that. He didn't know where they went.

Bored with the group chatter, Palmer opened TikTok and began to scroll through. It was a last-ditch effort to turn his brain off. He welcomed the app’s autonomy, how he didn’t have to curate a single thought of his own. Opinions and hot takes were fed to him without discretion, airplaned into his brain like a warm spoon to a toddler’s mouth. The white noise went to work, as did TikTok. He swiped and watched as a window flipped open:

A trio of women dressed in sports jerseys bounced their bodies in tandem to a Camila Cabello song. “I’m from the city where the streets ain't pretty,” went the song. Palmer favourited the video to learn the dance later and swiped.

Another window:

A shirtless blonde stood in what looked to be a basement with a pink and white mattress visible on the floor behind him. He gripped a board between calloused fingers that contained words like shoulders, back, and upper pectoralis. His pecs were pronounced, introducing themselves before his face, illuminated by an off-camera ring light. “If you want to work on your chest, you gotta make sure you’re pressing on different muscle groups,” he announced. The push-up board was an apartheid, siphoned off into coloured sections for each muscle group. “These colours will help you switch up where to press.” Palmer thought of his sock, damp on the floor somewhere, and saved the video for future use.

Then, he swiped into another window: something about an American woman stranded in Pakistan. “Respect fa da law,” she purred. He flicked the screen, pushing to the next, and a new window cracked open:

“If you’re seeing this message, it’s your sign from the universe to stop and listen.” Palmer raised two fingers to flip to the next but hesitated, the icy light now pulsing like a vein. The speaker in the video was a wiry woman. Her eyebrows were penciled in, the left slightly longer than the right, and her hair looked inflamed, box-dyed red like a Loewe tomato. “Yes, you,” she said. It was a live stream, Palmer noticed.

“Something big is coming for you this retrograde. I pulled THE LOVERS card. A union. Two souls. You will meet your divine match incredibly soon.” She held a tarot card that contained the image of two naked white people, a voluptuous Adam-and-Eve-adjacent illustration with an archangel canopied above. Palmer noticed a fog cloaking the woman in the window with a grey shawl of smoke. He looked at her screen name, “Mizz Bella Noche,” it read. “Go to bed thinking of your specific person. Think about their qualities and the universe will bring them to you.” Then, she raised a black sequinned vape to her lips and pulled, the source of the foggy ambience. Smoke escaped from her mouth like an extinguished dragon. Palmer rolled his eyes and swiped, leaving the woman to herself.

Finally, a TikTok of Stanley Tucci preparing spaghetti squash presented itself in the window. Ah, the perfect wind-down video, thought Palmer. Stanley drizzled olive oil and paprika over the orange gourd. Then, he sprinkled diced garlic over the squash performatively, mimicking something he’d seen another chef go viral for. “I always use a bit of extra garlic. Warning in case you’re trying to French kiss me later,” winked Stanley. He gripped the tray that held the squash and placed it in the oven. The camera punched in as his fingers laced the dial to crank the oven to 350 degrees and set the timer to 35 minutes. Stanley wiped the gunk off his hands using his apron. But Palmer didn’t see that part. Palmer was already asleep, enveloped under a metallic blade of light.

On his way home from work the following day, an unexplained urge ushered Palmer to get off the subway a stop early and walk through the farmer’s market. It was the summer, and everyone was pretending to know how to make stuffed squash blossoms. The bugs left hickey marks beneath his clothes. He pinched and pulled at his collar to alleviate himself from the heat and discreetly fingered his briefs out of his butt cheeks. He normally had to reapply deodorant throughout the day, his body producing a musk at any chance of exertion. Even the thought of escalators made him sweat.

Palmer reached into his tote bag to reapply sunscreen and rubbed his hands over his face, closing his eyes as he applied the clear, expensive gel. When he opened his eyes again, a man was standing across from him with something in his hand. A silver ray from the sun briefly haloed behind the man’s ears, causing Palmer to squint.

“I think you dropped this,” said the man. “It came out of your, er, tote bag.”

The man and Palmer both glanced at Palmer’s tote bag, the mouth of the bag agape under his left armpit. On it was the faded image of a demented Care Bear that read ‘Bear Week Anyone?’

The man held out his hand and opened it. Inside revealed what appeared to be a crumpled gym sock.

… But Palmer didn’t go to the gym this morning. Tabata was on Wednesday, and this was a Thursday. “I don’t think that’s mine.”

“Are you sure?”

Palmer studied the sock and doubled down. “Yeah, I’m sure.”

Skepticism broke out on the man’s face as his eyebrows reached closer to his eyelids. A shoddy performance of disbelief. He began to pout, and then his frown horseshoed at opposite ends into something else. A grin. He snaked his hand into the sock and lifted its cotton-white tip to reveal a face. It was a sock puppet.

“That’s okay. Don’t be sad. You’re hotter than Islamabad,” rhymed the sock puppet. It had freckles that blotted across its face symmetrically, Palmer noticed.

Palmer stared at the man who stared back at him, a blank page of a face. He had never been to Islamabad.

The sock puppet continued anyway. “Don’t be sad. Don’t be lost. You’re sweeter than spaghetti squash.”

Something distant clicked into Palmer’s brain, indistinct like a watered-down LaCroix, waking him up to something he couldn’t recall. “What did you just say?”

The man finally spoke. “I didn’t say anything.” The sock puppet glanced around the market, distracted. A young woman selling blush peonies observed their interaction from her cart. A man brushed by, gripping a case of peach cobbler. Everything seemed so normal, but not. How could it?

“Right,” said Palmer. His index finger stroked the glass screen of his phone for reassurance.

“Anyways,” spoke the man again. “I’m hosting a show. I’m a rhyming sock-ventriloquist if you couldn’t tell. It’s tomorrow night at the bar next to the park: Raoul's Roundhouse.” Palmer looked at the man, this time really studying him. He wore a trucker hat that read ‘Fort Loosey Food Co-op.’ His eyes were dark and crested into half moons. Like he was about to sneeze or… smize? “I’m Hank,” said the man. And the man named Hank looked good.

“Palmer,” Palmer replied.

Hank readjusted his hat, confirming what Palmer already knew but didn’t know how: he was bald but bald in a sexy-Mr. Clean-kindaway. Like Jason Statham, or that other bald actor in The Devil Wears Prada that Palmer couldn’t remember. Hank reached out to shake Palmer’s hand, the sock puppet still enveloping his palm.

His hand lingered in the air, suspended. An invitation, but to what? A deal, a truce, a treaty. The man’s shimmer had retreated with the sun, now tucked somewhere else in the neighbourhood. Palmer couldn’t see the flesh of the man’s palm, veiled behind white like a bride. A union, Palmer imagined, and surrendered his phone to his tote bag, releasing his hand, and himself, to Hank.

Palmer strangled the face of the sock puppet as he shook Hank’s hand and felt the mouth of the puppet flex open and close. Dilating, gulping. “8 PM tomorrow at Raoul's Roundhouse,” it said while biting into his index finger. Then it opened its mouth wider, this time swallowing Palmer’s fist whole, and spoke four more words: “Come if you want.”

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Thanks for reading the first chapter of ‘Come If You Want.’ I will be discussing it with readers and special guests in the comments and the Subscriber Chat, so download the Substack App to participate. If you like what I do, consider sharing with a friend (or group chat) or upgrading to paid. The second chapter dropped on Tuesday, July 15th. You can read it here.

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