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Steve looks at the wall of notebooks, jammed between the register and reading nook of the first bookstore he’d seen. The covers are all made by local artists, which, in this neighborhood, means a bunch of vegan leather and ugly collages. The former remind him of his mother’s Bible and the latter look like puke, so he grabs the only other one on the shelf. It’s the least offensive notebook there, covered in a bunch of loosely-knotted bracelets haphazardly glued to the front.
He doesn’t even remove the journal from his backpack until almost midnight. It looks childish under his desk light, but the pages are just empty, lined notebook paper.
He grabs a pen and thinks about how he should start. The classic ‘Dear Diary’ is far too much like a thirteen year-old and ‘Dear Journal’ sounds contrived. He eventually decides to skip the greeting and heads it with only a date and time.
He supposes his first journal entry should be something significant, like spouting about his childhood. His only points of reference are the various biographies on his bookshelf. Those always seem to begin in the middle of some important life event.
“My name is Steve Rogers,” he writes. “Born in Brooklyn in 1986. SHIELD Captain: Afghanistan, 2006-2008 & Iraq, 2008-2013.”
The information takes up barely two lines of his compact handwriting. The immense space below looks like a school essay that he didn’t finish.
“Went for a run around 6 this morning,” he continues. “After that was breakfast and a shower. Then, went to Ben & Pat’s for groceries. Lunch was half past noon. Met with VA counselor at 2. Bought this journal, then returned to apartment and fixed the master bathroom faucet. Made dinner and read for about an hour. Watched TV. Finally, decided to write this.”
Steve looks at the page. He prints his name below the entry, then packs up and goes to bed.
The next morning, he wakes up and goes for a run at his usual time. The journal is hidden away in his bedroom, but he still thinks about it while making breakfast. Sam didn’t suggest how often Steve should try to write, which was odd. He supposes once a day is plenty.
He walks into his bedroom to look at the journal. The cover is still pretty garish, but the tactile sensation is actually nice, like rubbing soft twine.
He opens it up to peek at his inaugural entry and almost drops the book.
There is a line scribbled at the bottom of the first page in handwriting that is decidedly not Steve’s.
“Which part of Brooklyn?”
Steve closes the book and takes a moment to breathe. He’s heard of vets having hallucinations, but he’s in a good place right now. He’s not experiencing any anxiety, save for being freaked about the unexpected writing.
A deep breath and a quick calming exercise later, he opens the book again. The writing is still there, more like graphite than Steve’s own pen markings. Steve traces the letters with his finger. They don’t feel embedded into the page. He flips the page over. His own writing is slightly raised, but the paper behind the mystery writing is completely flat.
He’s sure there wasn’t anything in the book before he used it. Ruling out another person is also easy. He doesn’t live with anyone, hasn’t shown the journal to another person since buying it, and no thief would break into the house before dawn just to pull a prank like this.
Steve stares at the page and then at his desk. He grabs a pen, not sure if it’s the same pen from last night or if that would even matter. Below the other line, in the page’s bottom margin, he writes, “Bushwick”
Nothing happens.
He’s not sure what he wants. Maybe it’ll flow in steadily, like actual writing, or maybe it’ll come in a single block. A few minutes pass. He wonders if he’s supposed to look away, if staring at it will just prolong the wait.
Steve waits half an hour, feeling dumber with each passing minute. It probably says too much about his life that he has time to do this, and also that it’s the most exciting thing to happen to him since the park made a “runner’s only” lane.
Just when he’s about to give up, words gradually form.
“Same,” It says. “Surprised we’re not more messed up.”
Steve feels weirdly giddy, like he needed validation to continue talking to a book.
“It’s not all bad,” he says. “At least it wasn’t like Brooklyn is today.”
“True,” the book writes. “I miss the dusty old bodegas, though. Ever try that weird Vietnamese toothpaste? Looked like Crest, but tasted like cabbage. Never thought I’d be reminiscing about that.”
He has never heard of the cabbage toothpaste, but the mention of it pushes Steve further towards believing that this is all real. The only Asian toothpaste he’s ever come across has been in specialty stores, and those flavors had always seemed normal.
“Who are you?” he writes. “Or should I be asking what are you?”
“Nope,” the book writes. “I’m not giving out my personal information willy-nilly. Unlike some people, I like to protect my privacy.”
“Then why did you respond to my first entry?” Steve asks, a little annoyed by the refusal.
“Don’t really know,” the book says. “It’s not everyday you open up your logbook and find someone’s first diary entry in it.”
“My friend says I’m supposed to call it a ‘journal,’” Steve writes. “Makes it more accessible that way.”
“Whatever, Bridget Jones,” the book replies. “Just don’t go whining to me how Billy didn’t sit next to you at lunch or something.”
“If you were a good diary, you’d know Susie told Billy that she liked him during recess last week, so now I’m mad at the both of them,” Steve writes. He even includes a drawing of a grumpy little girl for good measure.
“Self portrait?” the book asks.
“Nah, I’m taller,” Steve writes, “and a bit more of a boy.”
“Boys are nice,” the book says, “but I’m guessing you’re more of a Susie man?”
Steve bites his lip. This isn’t something he expected to talk about.
“I can do both,” he says, scratching the pen a little too lightly in his haste.
“Can you now?” the book writes.
Steve, whose friends have to notify him whenever anyone flirts with him, is surprised to sense a touch of sly humor in that response. It’s making him blush a little, just sitting in front of his journal early in the morning.
He hesitates for a second, then puts down, “I can, but I never have.”
This is verging into territory that he’s never talked about with anyone, not even Sam. Some of his closest friends have guessed, or at least made jokes about it, but it’s always been too embarrassing to discuss. During deployments, when sexual humor was everybody’s mother tongue, he used his Catholicism as an excuse to keep silent, and dealt with the innocuous teasing.
The book takes a minute or two to answer.
“Judging from your flood of personal info on the first page, it’s not because you’re still a child,” it says. “Is it by choice?”
Steve bites his lip. “No,” he writes. “I was just really sickly when I was young, so most people shriveled when they looked at me. When I enlisted, the guys always snuck off to brothels, which wasn’t my thing. Now, I guess I’m just focusing on something else.”
“I remember the brothels,” the book writes. “C.O. always made the whole squad do extra drills whenever one of us got the clap.”
“You were in the service?” Steve writes.
“Yeah,” the book writes. “Pretty much same place and time as you. Though, I did some time near Kiev towards the end there.”
Steve pauses for a second, rubbing his thumb a bit too hard on the side of the pen.
“Do you get nightmares?” he scribbles.
Immediately, he feels stupid, like a little kid asking their parents about monsters in the closet. He starts to write an apology, but his letters are intersected by “Yeah.” That’s soon followed by: “Used to be almost every night, but it’s better now.”
Steve runs his finger under the reply. He wishes he could feel the indent in the page, to make this seem a little more real.
“Sometimes, I wake up shivering so much that it reminds me of when I was a kid,” he writes. “I’d get bad fevers, soak through the sheets. I even hallucinated a couple of times. I’d sometimes see Christ, but he was always scary, nothing like the pictures around Sunday School or in my Bible. He was always the Christ from this statue of the crucifixion in my grandmother’s cathedral, all bloody and skeletal. One time, I told our priest that I hoped Jesus wouldn’t be the one to welcome me into Heaven, and he looked at me like I was hoping to go to Hell.”
The book again takes some time to answer.
“I was conscious when the chaplain read me my last rites,” it says. “He wasn’t even part of my squad; he was some random Bulgarian who kept switching between Latin and bad Russian. I remember being so annoyed that I couldn’t understand it, that I deserved better. I know I’m supposed to regret being that selfish, but I still don’t. After being put through all that shit, I feel like I deserved that comfort. I know it doesn’t make sense, but screw that.”
Steve laughs. The dark humor is comforting, something only fellow vets usually understand.
“I got read the last rites twice as a kid,” he says. “The second time was with the bishop, which I think was a big deal for my mom, but all I remember is staring at this giant mole on his chin.”
“A holy...mole-y?” the book writes, and Steve actually groans out loud.
“That was bad,” he says.
“Well, I’m a very bad man,” the book says. A little smiley face soon follows.
“First bad puns, and now lines from a bad porno?” Steve asks. “How do people even stand to be around you?”
“Haven’t got a lot of people around to piss off,” it writes. “It’s just me and my goats most days, and they don’t make fun of my amazing sense of humor.”
“Goats?”
“Yup,” the book writes. “After I came back, I decided cities and crowds just weren’t for me, so I moved upstate. Now, the largest crowds I see are at the county fair. And that’s just once a year.”
Steve tries to imagine a vet turned goat-wrangler and comes back with some pretty absurd images. Although, who is he to judge? He almost had a panic attack the last time the subway got stuck.
“Are you some kind of mountain man?” he asks, unable to resist a tease. “Or are you more into artisanal goat cheese and hand-sewn moccasins?”
“Hell no,” the book says. “I’m just a man with some goats, though my sister does occasionally mooch crafting supplies off me.”
“Too bad,” Steve writes. “I was hoping for a six foot beard and a field of rusty oil cans.”
“Got a beard,” the book writes. “Not six foot. Yet.”
“Is that so?”
A bunch of lines start to appear on one of the blank pages. Steve is confused at first because the scratches look nothing like writing, but then he realizes that it’s a crude sketch of somebody’s face.
It’s not a great drawing, more stick figure than not, but there’s a few recognizable features. The aforementioned beard is there, along with longish hair and a bit of a sour look. The eyes look like something out of a Garfield strip, but they’re small enough to still look natural. After the head is done, the book scribbles out some letters under the drawing. The final word turns out to be “Bucky.”
“Bucky?” Steve writes. “Is that your name?”
The book is in the middle of making another drawing, but it stops and the scratches move to right below Steve’s question.
“Yeah,” it says. “Did I not tell you that?”
“No,” Steve says. He watches the second drawing get finished. It’s a goat, drawn even messier than the self-portrait. Bucky seems to know his lack of ability, because he writes “Goat“ and inserts a little arrow pointing at the drawing.
“You’re really making sure I don’t picture you with two horns and a goatee, aren’t you?” Steve replies.
“Fuck off,” Bucky writes. “Says the man who won’t even draw me a smiley face. You anti-fun, Steve?”
“No,” Steve says, “just don’t want you to feel bad about yourself when you see the quality of my work.”
“Try me,” Bucky writes.
Steve barely glances at it before he’s turning the page to find a completely blank surface. Sketching in pen is never ideal, but he’s not going to risk cutting off communication just to scrounge around for a more comfortable medium.
He draws quickly. The lines start off a little stiff, but become more fluid as he goes. He has to run into the bathroom to get the fine details of his face, balancing the journal on his forearm so it doesn’t get wet. The drawing ends up being a relatively true likeness, with just his lips shaded a little too much.
He sits back down at his desk and waits for Bucky’s response. It takes longer than he expected, and he’s left awkwardly slouched in his chair. He wonders if he should’ve written a note to accompany it.
Eventually, Bucky’s reply appears.
“Impressive,” it says, and Steve wonders what that exactly means.
“Told you you’d be intimidated,” he says.
“Never.”
Steve waits a little, but there’s no further response. He feels a little awkward, now that Bucky’s last two replies have been so short.
“I bet I could draw you a really nice goat, if given a reference,” Steve writes, a little too quickly.
“I don’t think a photograph can be sent through this journal,” Bucky says.
“No,” Steve writes, “but cell phones usually have that function. If you give me your number, that is.”
“Smooth” comes the reply.
Steve waits to see if there’ll be more.
“I don’t have a cell phone, just a landline,” Bucky says, “but an afternoon of listening to a talented hunk gush about his problems instead of writing them down in a freaky diary might just liven up my day.”
Steve smiles at the compliment.
“Besides,” Bucky continues, “I might be persuaded into inviting certain people to my farm so that my goats can get the portrait that they deserve. Who knows? Stranger things have happened.”
Steve puts down his pen and watches the information come through.