Metronome
- a short story about Brooklyn, timing and the cost of control
Metronome
- by S. Francis Burns
I buy quinoa at the Key Food on Union because the sign says SALE and adulthood loves signs.
Paper plates. Plastic cups. Cheap bourbon.
The scanner fails twice. The cashier taps the scale like it owes her money.
“Big night?” she says.
“Trying,” I say. And because I want a version of me to exist out loud, I add, “Got a new place. Across from the park.”
“Nice,” she says, in a voice that covers every kind of nice and none in particular.
On Lorimer, Mister Softee gives up after two bars. Heat has its hand on everything. The hydrant on the corner is chained but sweating anyway. A car service guy leans in his window, calling names like a prayer list. The B62 sighs at the light and does not move.
I think about calling my mother to tell her the new address. I picture her kitchen, the yellow phone that isn’t there anymore, the coil that used to hold conversations in its spiral. Last week she said, over grocery aisle noise, I’m trying the meds, sweetheart. They say they make you feel safe. I’m afraid I waited too long. I told her she didn’t. I meant it. I didn’t call back after that. I tell myself I’ll call tonight. I won’t.
In the elevator I practice the face. The one that says I have it together. The mirror blinks back fluorescent. Third floor. The hall smells like boiled cabbage and the ghost of somebody’s incense from last week.
Three light taps.
Mr. Alvarez in the Mets cap.
“Later, keep it down,” he says.
“Later,” I say.
He studies the cups over my shoulder. Taps his wrist with two fingers. “Metronome. Only honest instrument.”
“I’ll try,” I say.
He snorts with a smile, which counts as consent. Slippers whisper on the glue-down tile.
Inside: boxes along the wall. KITCHEN. BOOKS. CLOSET. The marker looked steadier yesterday. I line up the cups. Push a chair against the wobbly table. Text the group: Come hang. Add a party emoji. Erase it. Add it again. Send.
The AC pan spits. Plink. Plink. Plink. I put a metal bowl under it. Now the apartment has a bad rhythm section.
There is a thumbprint of wine high on the far wall. We tried to scrub it out last winter. I said it could stay. She said that was the problem with me. We laughed and did not fix it. I hung a calendar over it and pretended not to check the stain’s edge for movement.
A crack runs from the kitchen window down to the sill like a thin map of the coast of something. In February wind found it and sang. That night my father called to say his heart fluttered in a way that made the room turn. I stood with my ear to the crack and listened to the cold come in and said the right things and then the nothing things and then we hung up and I cooked rice and watched it run over because I put my hand on the stove and forgot it there.
The door frame still wears the dent from the cutting board I threw once. It wasn’t thrown at anyone. It was thrown at air. I picked up the pieces and swept and said “Okay.” I said it like I meant it. The dent did not forgive me. It still fits my thumb.
I open my banking app to transfer the last bit for the new place, prove I am a person with a plan. The login page blinks. I try the old password.
Wrong.
I try the better version.
Wrong.
Too many attempts. Account locked for 24 hours.
I laugh in a way that keeps my face still. I tell myself the deposit already cleared. I believe me for thirty seconds at a time.
People then pour in like weather.
A Greenpoint couple I’ve never seen: “Is this Melissa’s?”
“Sure,” I say. “She’s late.”
They set a Junior’s cheesecake on the box named KITCHEN like a flag.
The building WhatsApp thread starts humming:
– WHO HAS THE DOG
– KEEP IT DOWN
– IF YOU’RE ON THE ROOF DO NOT
– ANYONE HAVE AN ALLEN KEY FOR IKEA THING
Music goes on. Someone’s playlist with too much confidence. The bass line walks the room and we follow. A bodega cat appears in a stranger’s arms like a talisman, gets one photo, decides against us, swats, leaves.
Two pizzas arrive. Then eighteen more. The delivery guy looks saved. “192 Lorimer?”
“Absolutely,” I say, and sign something that isn’t my name.
We stack boxes on KITCHEN. Grease flowers. Someone flicks a basil leaf to the floor like confetti.
The bathroom grows a line that becomes a petition. Someone has a cape. The kid from two wanders in for chips and is christened BATMAN. A candle kisses the plant cutting. A dark leaf curls. The smoke alarm finds its whole voice. A woman fans wildly with a baking sheet and hits it on the fourth try. Screech, then mercy. We applaud wrong.
Pretend-people narrate their lives.
A man in a branded beanie says he’s “showrunning a docuseries,” then spells showrunner wrong when he texts me his handle.
A woman in linen says she’s “sober-curious” and double-fists seltzer with gin, winking like this counts.
A guy with new white sneakers says he “advises two pre-seed fintechs,” then asks what pre-seed means. He is kind to the dog. I decide that’s the real line on his résumé.
The Greenpoint woman strokes the cheesecake box. “My aunt taught first grade thirty years,” she says to no one. “She used to let them think they invented reading.” Her boyfriend squeezes her wrist once, a small repair. She lets him.
The man in the beanie squints at the breaker panel like it insulted him. “My uncle was an electrician,” he says. “Queens.” He takes a beat, “You want me to...?”
“It’s fine,” I lie.
He hears the lie and lets me keep it.
Someone goes live on their phone.
“Turn that off,” I say, grinning like a host.
“It’s private,” she says to six hundred strangers.
Later I find her in the hall with her back against the paint, thumb hovering over end. “Sorry,” she says, small. “Sometimes I think if I don’t show it, I wasn’t there.” She laughs once. It breaks and holds. “I don’t know who I’m trying to convince.” I nod like I know the rest. Maybe I do.
From outside: a drum. Then three. Then everything.
A march you did not get the RSVP for rolls down Metropolitan, strollers, bikes, cardboard signs, a banner too wide to read in one glance. The chant is half-said, half-sung, becomes beat. The beat climbs the fire escape and stands in the window like a guest we cannot afford to feed.
The room swallows it. It is too sweet not to. A glitter jacket turns a pizza box into a tambourine. BATMAN capes the dog and the dog forgives him.
The AC pan spits more insistently. Plink. Plink. Plink. I add a second bowl. Now we are a band that can’t keep time and doesn’t know it.
The elevator pings and does not open. Voices inside try on bravery.
“We’re good.”
“We’re, fine.”
A butter knife worries the seam and bends. The beanie man pries with his MetroCard, grinning at the futility because it’s better than saying I can’t help. “Queens,” he tells the door, and the door keeps its secrets.
“Who’s Eli?” someone asks.
“We love him,” someone else says.
We do.
I open the fridge. The quinoa looks back like a dare. The shelf sags from years and cans and my habit of storing too much orange juice and not enough food that can be chewed. We used to put our leftovers on the middle shelf, hers on the left, mine on the right, and pretend that meant anything. The metal remembers the weight.
From the street: a chant that forgets its words and decides rhythm is enough. From somewhere upstairs: a baby that disagrees with all of this. From behind me: “Do your passwords start with a one or a two?”
“I don’t remember,” I say. “I tried both.”
“Bold,” they say, admiring nothing.
My phone buzzes: Missed call - Mom. Voicemail - Mom.
I don’t press play. I already know the shape. Call when you can, sweetheart. I picture her trying the new pills at the kitchen table, setting them in a row like soft stones. They say you feel safe, she told me last week. I’m afraid it’s too late. I said it wasn’t. Said it twice. Then let the day do what days do to intentions.
Another buzz: Voicemail - Iris.
I turn the phone face down. It still shines through my palm.
“Speech!” someone calls, bored of meaning’s delay.
I raise a cup. “To pretending we know this song,” I say. “Thanks for coming. The show is on a budget.”
The speaker gives a little pop, like half a balloon dying.
Before the power goes, there is a second where everything is exactly where it is supposed to be, mouths open, eyes not yet asking for light, all of us mid-breath and willing to be fooled one more time, and the apartment holds us the way it did on nights we made promises we couldn’t keep and kept them anyway for as long as they lasted.
Then the power decides it is done.
Not a boom. A subtraction.
Everything inhales and forgets to exhale.
Phones rise like a constellation that doesn’t remember its shape. The drumline outside dies mid-step and a hundred feet learn how to stop. The only sounds left are the car service radio, a far siren that loses interest, and the drip, drip, drip of the AC bowl trying to keep the beat.
The hallway emergency light tries to be brave and fails. Someone in the bathroom whispers I’m almost done like it matters now. A woman on the couch uses her phone as a mirror and stops halfway through her lipstick and sets it down and looks like a person who has lost the thread and is relieved.
“Mr. Alvarez?” I say into the stairwell. My light is a small moon. It shakes.
The stairwell breathes hot. A shape moves. A foot misses. The sound is small.
Not a bang.
A soft thing failing to hold.
“Stupid,” he says. Breath like paper. “I rush.”
“Stay,” I say, already down in the cool corner beside him.
We sit on concrete that has all the patience we don’t. Lights from phones wander like moths. A neighbor slips past whispering Sorry in three languages. Someone prays in Spanish. Someone throws up neatly into a Solo cup and says, “I’m okay.”
“Sixty,” he says. “Give one minute the dignity.”
We count.
At nine, BATMAN runs down the hall with the cape in his hand, no dog, jubilant anyway.
At sixteen, a couple fights through the drywall, everything muffled but the apology they both talk over.
At nineteen, the baby upstairs remembers being born.
At twenty-five, the WhatsApp thread pings in the dark like rain on a tin roof:
– ELEVATOR?
– ELEVATOR???
– IT’S FINE
– PROBABLY
At thirty-two, the stuck elevator starts a chorus of It’s fine that makes no one fine, and a nurse in scrubs inside says, “If anyone passes out I’ve got them,” and then laughs at herself in the dark.
At thirty-eight, a Hasidic wedding band three blocks away tries a key change and wins; the melody drifts like a rumor you wish were true.
At forty-one, the hydrant out front coughs itself open and children convince their parents to stop being adults for two minutes.
At fifty, someone on a Citi Bike with a broken headlight chants to nobody; the chant folds into weather.
At fifty-six, someone sits beside us for a breath and leaves, and I feel better for reasons I can’t defend.
At sixty, we stand.
“Slow,” he says, and we do. Left hands on the rail. My light soft on the next step. He mutters numbers under his breath. Not a prayer. A measure.
His door opens to lemon oil, dry wood, a photograph with the face turned toward the wall. The metronome sits on the table beside an ashtray with nothing inside it. His late wife’s scarf hangs from a chair back, a curl of color that refuses to be a relic. He flicks the arm.
Tick.
Tick.
Tick.
Sixty. The honest thing.
“Used to rush everything,” he says, not looking at me. “You can rush grief for years and it will still be where you put it down.” He adjusts the metronome one click, then back. “Better to let it keep time.”
“You’ll be fine?” I say.
“Not forever,” he says. “Tonight.” He smiles like he’s letting me borrow it.
Down the hall, the chaos runs out of money. The live stream dies at 1%. The elevator coughs awake. People clap for the elevator like it’s a band at Union Pool. A sprinkler head in the ceiling finally gives up and turns the hallway into a polite rain. Shoes squeak. Laughter comes in under its breath. Everyone promises to text.
Back inside, candles make cheekbones heroic and eyes tired. The pizzas cool into ideas. The Greenpoint woman slices the cheesecake with a plastic knife that doesn’t want to participate. “She hated sweets,” she says about her aunt, and eats the first bite like a truce. The boyfriend nods, learning something he’ll forget in a kind way.
The beanie man is on the floor with the dog, teaching it to shake. “Queens,” he says to the dog, and the dog pretends to understand. He looks up at me, suddenly serious. “You good?”
“I don’t know,” I say.
“Same,” he says, and goes back to the dog, which is the correct choice.
The live-stream woman stands by the sink with her phone face down and her hands in the dishwater, washing three cups like penance. “Do you need help?” I ask.
“I needed something,” she says, and rinses, and sets the cups upside down. She dries her hands on her skirt and finds me a trash bag and holds it open, and we fill it without speaking like we have done this before together in a different life.
A Polaroid floats in the sink, a face half-born from water. I fish it out and stick it to the cabinet with a wet thumb. It holds.
The phone on the counter blinks: Voicemail - Mom (1). Voicemail - Iris (1).
I play none. I don’t have room in this light for either voice. I put the phone in my back pocket like a debt.
People leave in clumps, humidity wrapped around their throats like borrowed scarves. On the stoop, someone says they’re going to Bushwick, which is a direction and a mood. Someone else asks if I’ll miss the bodega cat. I say yes. It is the truest thing I’ve said tonight.
By two, the building thread cools to embers:
– THANKS FOR TONIGHT
– SORRY FOR BEFORE
– DOG FOUND
– ANYONE KNOW HOW TO FIX A SPRINKLER
The power returns like a shrug. The fridge hums. The playlist tries to remember what we were dancing to and gives up. I turn it off. The quiet feels earned.
I take the stairs to Mr. Alvarez. He is asleep in the chair. The metronome keeps time, a small tireless arm.
Tick.
Tick.
I turn it two clicks slower. Sixty becomes fifty-eight. He does not wake.
I walk back through the apartment touching the places that pretend not to touch back. The wine thumbprint. The crack-coast. The dent that fits my thumb. The tiny burned kiss on the counter from a pot put down wrong the week we promised to be better and were. I put my hand flat on the wall between the bedrooms and feel the old heat. There is a mark lower down from a shoe where a child I do not have kicked during a party I did. I kneel and press my thumb into it like I could make it mine.
At the window, McCarren’s lamps blink like eyes that stayed open too long. Domino glows its sugar ghost. The BQE admits it never stopped. The East River holds a ferry like a careful knife and gives back a cut of light. Somewhere close, the G apologizes for longer waits and is believed. A thin rain starts, then believes itself. It freckles the sill, taps the AC, finds the brick seam and makes a river exactly where the mortar sags.
I stand there long enough to forget to be anyone.
I pull the trash bag tight and tie it twice. I stack the empty pizza boxes on the box that says KITCHEN like a joke that got out of hand. I put the plant cutting in a mug and it straightens as if choosing is all it needed.
When it is morning by Brooklyn rules, first stroller, first dog sprint, first jogger pretending to love it, I pack the last box. I put the quinoa on top. I pick up the keys. They make no sound.
I lock the door, then unlock it and walk back in. The room smells like wet stone and something sweet that is probably just dust. I leave the keys on the table.
On the way out I stop in the hall. The sprinkler drip has become a steady stitch. A note is taped to the elevator: SORRY written three times. The beanie man stands under the leak with a baking sheet, catching water like luck. “Queens,” he says when he sees me, because he has run out of other words and this one holds.
Outside, the hydrant makes a rainbow nobody photographs right. A garbage truck lifts, slams, forgives. The car service window writes NELSON in dry erase and erases it. A man on Bedford says Yo to no one specific and means everyone. Mister Softee gets through the whole song once and we do not cheer. Across the river a ferry horn tries one long note and gets it.
I carry the box to the curb. It isn’t heavier than yesterday but it knows more.
The driver pulls up. Cross knocking the dash. Photo of a kid with a missing tooth tucked in the mirror. We idle at the light while ConEd cones hold court with no one working them. A cyclist weaves by with a bakery bag in his mouth, untouchable.
“Moving up or moving on?” the driver says.
“Across the park,” I say. “It’s been a hell of a ride.”
He smiles into the windshield. “Always is.”
“Grown,” he adds, a blessing that costs nothing.
“Trying,” I say.
We pass the deli where I once bought roses at two a.m. and a small man told me I was already late. We pass the skate kids who made the fountain their country. We pass a scaffolding tunnel that always rains even when the sky doesn’t. We pass a woman with a tote that says THE FUTURE IS FEMALE in a font that wants to be older than it is.
Traffic breathes. Stops. Remembers itself. The world keeps unfolding at a speed that makes math look like a superstition. The radio mentions weather and a lottery and a team that lost in the ninth. We touch the BQE and it growls and forgives. The driver hums something that was a hit three years ago and still knows the route home.
At the park, a dog drops a ball at the feet of a man who dislikes mornings. The man kicks the ball. The dog looks triumphant, like he invented fetch. The rain holds its breath. Then returns to what it was doing.
We stop at a corner with a daycare mural of smiling vegetables. I pay. I tip more than I can afford.
“Be well,” the driver says, like a man who has decided not to say good luck anymore.
On the sidewalk, the boxes feel heavier than yesterday. The air is cleaner by a percentage that doesn’t matter unless you live breathing it. A woman walks by carrying a croissant like a secret. A runner ghosts past in shoes that cost rent.
I set the plant cutting down to open the gate. It is still alive. It has decided, against evidence, to keep trying.
In the new stairwell, there is no boiled cabbage. There is a framed print of a lighthouse that has never seen this borough. The banister is cool. The lock takes the key without explaining itself.
I put the boxes down and stand in the new kitchen and hear nothing I recognize. The fridge hums a different note. The AC does not spit. The window shape is wrong but will do. There is a clean square of wall that will take a nail like it means it.
I open a drawer. It is empty and polite. I place the old keys inside. They sit like coins I can’t spend.
I close the drawer.
It closes softly, like a practiced lie learning to stop.
I take out my phone. Voicemail - Mom (1). Voicemail - Iris (1).
I don’t press play. I type Call you tonight to my mother and don’t send it. I delete the words and type Love you and send that instead. It feels like walking a glass to the sink instead of washing it. It feels like not nothing.
I pick up the mug with the plant cutting. It drips once on the floor and doesn’t apologize.
I set it on the windowsill where it will learn the light.
That’s enough.