The soldier was standing on the subway platform. I knew he was a soldier because he wore a uniform. It was green, slightly loose-fitting. He stood with his thick legs wide apart and his hands clasped behind his back. His head was lowered, abashed, as if somebody had just finished telling him off.

The doors closed, cutting him off from me, and the train moved forward.

Three days later I saw him again. I was at a bar, trying to avoid dancing. I’ve always hated dancing. When I showed an early boyfriend pictures from my sister’s wedding, he told me that I looked like a plank of wood. At bars, I liked to stand outside, smoking one cigarette after another until my mouth hurt. In the morning, the skin of my gums would be shredded, and everything would taste like blood.

The soldier was ordering a drink. He had blond hair, longer than you would expect. He wore a digital wristwatch, a silver slash against his tanned forearm. I was too far away to see the time it displayed.

There was a mirror behind the bar. People were all around me, pushing up against me, trying to order drinks. When I looked in the mirror, they formed a tapestry. I could smell their sweat, perfume, cologne, makeup, the wax in their hair, the moisturizer on their skin, the detergent that they used on their clothes. When I looked at the soldier I imagined that he smelled like nothing. He had a solid, almost round face, and broad shoulders. Wearing jeans and a button-down, he looked older than he had in uniform. I guessed that he was about twenty-seven. By the time he managed to order a drink, I had decided to talk to him.

For a moment he disappeared, but then after a few minutes of frantic searching, where I told my friends I was looking for my wallet, I found him again outside. The relief I felt nearly buckled my knees. He wasn’t smoking. He stood with his hands in the pockets of his jeans, looking up the street. It was cold. I had my jacket on.

I stood next to him and rolled a cigarette. Tobacco spilled out over my fingers. I felt embarrassed of my bitten nails. Although I wanted him to, he didn’t turn to watch me. I felt jealous of whatever he was looking for, up the cold and empty street, a silo of rain and refracted light. Maybe he was waiting for somebody. That was what it looked like. Lighting my cigarette, I looked in his direction, hoping that he wouldn’t turn around and see me staring. Having always struggled to be direct, I liked to practice when nobody was looking. I noticed that the soldier’s shirt collar was crumpled, and there was a mark on his neck, like a bruise or a stain, just below the hairline. I wanted to reach out and touch it, as if it were a button that would set some process in motion.

I had to talk to him. Moving closer, I asked him quietly if he wanted a cigarette.

“No,” he said, politely. “Thank you.”

“Okay,” I said. There was a pause. The frigid air found its way up my sleeves and to my heart. “I saw you,” I said. “The other day. I was on the subway, and you were on the platform.”

“Oh,” he said.

“You were in uniform,” I said. “You’re a soldier.” Surprising me, he laughed. It was a real laugh, unforced.

“I didn’t see you,” he said. He was looking at me properly now, and I saw myself as he might, my short brown hair under the lights of the bar, the knitted scarf around my neck.

“I was on the train,” I said.

I wondered if he liked men or women. The bar wasn’t a gay bar, but I hadn’t seen him talk to any women, of which there were many. I didn’t know how to ask him, and before I could, he said goodbye and went back inside, to the warmth, the light that contracted and relaxed like the body of a python. I stayed outside, hungry and alone.

Later he bought me a drink. It was a gin and tonic. He hadn’t asked me what I wanted. I was standing on the edge of the dancefloor, watching my friends. He pressed the cold glass, wet with condensation, into my hand, and spoke into my ear. His breath was warm, and he seemed drunk.

“Take me home with you,” he said, pressing his cheek into mine. “I don’t want to go back to the barracks.” I laughed. Retrieving my jacket from the bench I’d hidden it under, we went out together. He put his arm around my shoulders.

“I live nearby,” I said. “We can walk.” For a while we didn’t say anything else. He was slightly taller than I was. The street lights spun around me. My stomach was full of light, as if, before leaving, I had swallowed the disco ball suspended above the dancefloor. I remembered, in a panic, that I hadn’t cleaned my bedroom before going out, and that I didn’t have any condoms.

He slid his hand beneath my shirt. He had a hangnail that caught on my skin, and his fingertips were rough and dry.

My apartment had orange walls, smelled of mildew and, thanks to my roommate, vanilla-scented candles. It was always either too hot or too cold, and I constantly felt as if I had a low-level fever. A bowl of apples sat on the chipped card table we used as a kitchen counter. There was a photograph of the Paris skyline taped to the wall, the corners ripped and furling. My roommate had left the television on. I picked up the remote to turn it off, and as I turned back around, he kissed me. When he pulled away I wiped my mouth with the back of my sleeve.

So clean-cut, he looked out of place against the shabbiness of my apartment. I took off my jacket and hung it up. We went to my small, messy bedroom and sat on the edge of my bed. The spring mattress sunk beneath our combined weight. I swung the door shut with my foot.

“I’m going to show you something,” he said, and took off his shirt.

I looked for a long time before I said anything. There was a ringing in my ears, like the ringing of a far-away church bell.

“Does it hurt?” I asked.

“No,” he said.

In the middle of his chest, embedded into the smooth, tanned skin, was a matte black box. A square, each side about an inch long. Not quite flush to his body, it stuck out slightly, and the edges cast a shadow on his stomach. It had no labels or other defining marks, and I could see no way that it would open.

“What’s inside it?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Do you want to touch it?”

“No,” I said, although I did. “Can you feel it?”

“Kind of. I can feel that it’s there.”

Then I did touch it. It was smooth, surprisingly warm. He was smiling. I wondered how many people he’d shown it to, if it amounted to a party trick. I wanted to know how my reaction gauged on the spectrum of such experiences. He looked down, watching my fingers against the metal. I felt sad for him, so sad that I wanted to cry.

We had sex, and afterwards, although I expected him to leave immediately, he didn’t. While he was on top of me, he’d held me tightly against him and the box had pushed painfully against my chest, but I hadn’t said anything.

We sat up in bed, side by side under my duvet, leaning against the unstable headboard. I noticed that he struggled to slouch forward.

“How deep does it go?” I asked.

“I didn’t see it before it went in,” he said. “And I’ve never seen inside it.”

His cheeks were flushed and his hair disheveled. I thought about him at the barracks, secure amidst a group of men. In my bed he seemed marooned, as if I had trapped him on an unfamiliar island.

“What do you think it might be?”

“I imagine that it’s my heart,” he said, “but I know that it’s not.”

“That’s what I’d imagine, too,” I said.

“How was that for you?” he asked, suddenly.

“It was nice.”

For a while we sat in silence, looking together at my bedroom wall. On it, I had a large reproduction print of an etching, which showed a view of Notre-Dame across the Seine.

I wanted to go to sleep, and I didn’t want him to stay. Still, he made no move to leave. His clothes were still crumpled on the floor. The room smelled of sweat.

“Do you want to sleep over?” I asked.

“No,” he said, reluctantly. “I guess not.”

When I didn’t say anything to persuade him, he finally moved the wrinkled cover away and stood up. I noticed that his thick thighs were pale. For a moment, he stayed beside the bed, fighting some kind of invisible urge. Then, he bent down and picked up his jeans.

I walked him to the door.

“I get anxious,” he said, lingering in the cold hallway, hands in his pockets. All I could think about was climbing into bed and falling asleep.

“About what?”

“Everything.” He paused. “I had a dream once,” he said, “where an angel told me exactly when I was going to die.” I smiled, thinking he was joking, and as he turned away I shut the door.

In the morning, wondering if I had perhaps dreamed or imagined it, I touched the place where his clothes had lain on the floor. My bed smelled faintly of smoke. In the kitchen my roommate was making coffee.

“Who did you bring home?” she asked. Her eyes were slightly red. She always slept with the light on, because she was afraid of the dark. I suspected it was the same reason she left the television on.

“A soldier,” I said.

“Wow,” she said. “I bet he was strong.”

“He was,” I said, not really sure what she meant. She took her coffee and sat on the couch. It was Saturday. “He had something in his chest,” I said.

“What?”

“Like a box.” She looked at me, confused.

“What do you mean?” I pointed at the place where the box had been on my own body.

“It was implanted into him. A black box.”

“Oh,” she said. She didn’t seem surprised. “I know about those.”

“What are they?”

“They give them to people with incurable illnesses. It tracks the changes in the body so they can be studied. My sister-in-law has one, because she has the gene for Huntington’s. It’s not in her chest. It’s on the back of her arm.”

“So he must have something.”

“He probably didn’t want to tell you about it,” she said. “I understand that.”

I made coffee and went back to bed. Outside, the sky was full of rain that hadn’t quite begun to fall. Looking up at the overburdened clouds, I realised I hadn’t asked the soldier’s name, and he hadn’t asked mine.

Curious, I read about the boxes and the illnesses that prompted their implantation. They were usually given to people who suffered from genetic conditions. The articles I read told me nothing about what might be inside them. They were in no way preventative—they were just monitoring devices, gathering data.

I missed the soldier, and wished I had let him stay. He had taken my phone number at the bar, but I had no way of getting in touch with him.

My head hurting and my mouth sore, I went back to sleep. When I woke up, the sun had come out, pale and yellow. Looking at my phone, I saw that he had messaged me, asking if I wanted to have dinner with him. I replied immediately, saying that I would.

Later I met him outside an Indian restaurant downtown. He was wearing a sweater and the same jeans he had worn the night before. I was wearing a button-down, and I felt embarrassed for for having dressed more formally than him.

Sober, he was handsomer, more rugged, real. I could just see the outline of the box beneath his sweater, and when we hugged, I felt it, a flat, cold plane against my chest.

In the dim, comfortable restaurant we both ordered beers. I wanted to ask him about his illness, and I knew that I would. We were both reluctant to order food, and after asking us several times if we were ready, the bespectacled waiter retreated to the corner.

“Did you look it up?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. He didn’t reply immediately, but busied himself picking the label off his beer.

“I have a genetic disease,” he said. “A wasting disease.”

“Has it started?”

“No. It won’t start until I’m forty.”

“Okay,” I said. It seemed inappropriate to express pity. There was a pause. “I’m mentally ill,” I said. “I have to take medication.”

He laughed, and I noticed that one of his teeth was very slightly chipped. He didn’t ask me any questions about what I’d just said. When the waiter came back, we ordered food. Anybody else in the restaurant, I thought, looking at him, would be impressed by the straightness of his posture.

By the time we got to my apartment, we were drunk again. This time we went straight to bed.

“Have you ever thought of opening it?” I asked, when he took his shirt off.

“No,” he said. “I’m not a very curious person.” I laughed.

“I thought the army didn’t take people with illnesses.”

“They don’t,” he said. “I’m not in the army.”

“What?”

“It wasn’t me you saw on the platform.”

“But you went along with it.”

“Of course I did.” He was smiling.

“Well,” I said, because I couldn’t say anything else, “I guess it doesn’t matter.”

“Of course it doesn’t.”

He put his arms around me. Under the lamplight his shoulders were smooth and golden. The box was a black hole. It seemed that there were so many other ways to monitor a body that avoided the violence it amounted to.

“I’m going to show you something,” he said, and took off his shirt. I looked for a long time before I said anything. There was a ringing in my ears, like the ringing of a far-away church bell.

“Does it hurt?” I asked.

“No,” he said.

I didn’t ask him what he did, since he wasn’t a soldier. I felt disconnected from him, as if somebody had taken me and put me on a shelf. At the same time, I felt a strong desire to be physically connected to him. After we had sex, I put my head on his shoulder and pulled the duvet over us both. Through the window, slightly open, I could hear someone shouting in the distance.

“That was better than the first time,” he said. There was a long pause where I felt like the light that cocooned us allowed us to breathe, as if we were in a submarine, and if either of us stepped out into the dark, we would suffocate.

“Let’s open the box,” I said.

He put a hand to his chest, feeling the smooth metal. Something about the gesture felt protective.

“I don’t know how,” he said.

“It’s not helping you,” I said. “It’s just a monitor.”

“It will help somebody else,” he said. “It will help them learn about the disease.”

I sat up, bunching the duvet in my lap.

“I have a hammer in my toolbox.”

“I’m not cracking it open,” he said. “I’m not.” I felt angry with him. For as long as I could remember, I had been plagued by hellish thoughts and impulses, impulses so strong that it drove me to a rage when somebody refused me. I took medication to help me control my rage, my sadness, the lethargy and mania that came and went, so the anger was blunted, but I still felt it, writhing below the surface like an eel on a fishing line. I wanted to rip the box right out of his chest and crush it beneath my feet.

He sat up, abruptly.

“I think I’m going to go,” he said.

“Why?

“I’m tired.” I watched him get dressed. Now I wanted him to stay, but didn’t know what words would stop the process which I had unwittingly begun.

“I’m sorry if I offended you,” I said as he buckled his belt.

“You didn’t,” he said. “Don’t worry.”

I felt panic rising in my throat at the thought of losing him.

“Don’t go,” I said. “Please.”

He sat down on the edge of the bed.

“I think the box is empty,” he said. Moving the duvet, he took hold of my hand. “Everything is just easier if it feels like somebody’s watching.”

“Nobody’s watching me,” I said. The room was hot. I felt suddenly that everything was being recorded, the yellow light, the beige walls, the way my bed sheets crumpled around the oblong shape of my body. I felt like a patient in a hospital. Looking at him, I saw that his eyes were bright, the eyes of a woodland animal. There was humor in them. He was okay, maybe even happy.

“I am,” he said.