Creative Thesi

THE EVIDENCES

A thesis submitted to the Kent State University Honors College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for Departmental Honors

Ben Schwartz

May 2012

iii

Thesis written by

Ben Schwartz

Approved by

______, Advisor

______, Chair, Department of English

______, Dean, Honors College

Accepted by

______, Dean, Honors College

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION...... vii

CHAPTER

I...... 1

II...... 16

III...... 39

IV...... 50

V...... 59

VI...... 77

VII...... 89

VIII...... 101

IX...... 107

X...... 123

Introduction

I would prefer, if you are preparing to read what I’ve written, that you skip this introduction and read the thing itself first; it’s not my right to color what you’re going to read before you read it.

The Evidences is a partial transcription of what has been accreting slowly around my mind these last few years. I say ‘partial transcription’ because, as I wrote it, even if I didn’t know the exact measurements of what I wanted to make, I knew at least the general shape of it; I was always aware of the shadow its form would cast. I say ‘accreting’ because one of the chief processes that led to The Evidences was stumbling onto ideas for it by chance—or maybe, I’d stumble onto things that would echo a curled feeling already inside me, and by this echoing make that feeling, for a second at least, unfurl, so that I could see it clearly, much in the way that seeing a corpse might make you acutely aware, if only for a minute, of the certainty of dying, a certainty that, for the most part, is balled up within you, harmless. I think I believe—at least I believe right now for the length of this sentence—that there isn’t anything about living we don’t basically know from the start; of course we can gorge ourselves on facts, learn history or anthropology, the names of all the bones in a bat or our feet, memorize the esoterica of our stomach’s acids and rugae, the names and other names of constellations, but as far as living goes, that is, what it means to be alive, we must be born with that knowledge innately—we may think

vii we find it in art, but what we’re really finding is something that, by its aesthetic properties, is able to kindle these latent facts to life for a moment inside us.

The Evidences, like any novel, is a response to, and attempt to create, that feeling, that realization. Whether or not it’s successful, is not my place to say—at least, not right now, because I still am too near it to know; I’ve started, ruefully, to walk away from it and look toward trying again anew, but it’s yet to dip below my mental horizon. What I can, and will, try to offer you here, is an explanation of some of the structural intentions, insofar as I had any

(because, in my experience at least, any structural intentions you have while writing something are only intuited as you work, and only actually perceived afterwards), and to point out a few things that might, on a second reading, clarify and maybe even enhance whatever it is that’s to be found in The Evidences.

You’ll notice I said ‘novel’. You’ll rightly point out that it’s just barely novella length

(word-count wise, it’s right around the length of Breakfast at Tiffany’s), that while there are gestures of continuity from one story to the next, some vague attempts at carrying over characters and establishing a timeline, the sections aren’t unified in the overtly novel-like way.

On all these points you’d be right, of course. I called it a novel for a long time, but what I’ve thought of it as recently, is a book. That is to say, it is fiction, but doesn’t follow any of the rules of the forms—novel, novella, short story collection—exactly—and you’ll find that most books, most books worth anything anyway, aren’t slavish to those distinctions either; there are parts of

Moby-Dick, for instance, that are essays, parts of novels like Omensetter’s Luck or The Tunnel that have been excised and ran in magazines as short stories, passages of non-fiction in Dickens or Tolstoy or Flaubert; Boswell’s Life of Johnson is full of novelistic genes. My point is that, as

I worked on The Evidences, I treated it as I do people: an entity unto itself, without need or use in

viii comparing it to anything else. It’s easiest to call it a book because it has all the earmarks of one: pages, words on those pages, a spine, etc.

To proceed along this inquiry into form, you’ll notice there are ten sections, each without title, only numbered. There is no significance to the numbering itself, but I did purposely choose not to title each section. In earlier drafts, each section had a name, but was only given one to keep me organized as I worked, and I decided that by leaving them untitled I was facilitating, if only in a minor way, the intermingling of the separate pieces, contributing to a unity that comes from somewhere other than plot.

Because there hardly is a plot—although, maybe that’s not fair to say. So many books have been accused of plotlessness—Ulysses, Infinite Jest, Wittgenstein’s Mistress. I’ve never understood these allegations—or rather, I understand them, and discount them. Take Ulysses, for instance. A common thing to write about it is that Nothing Much Happens. But it’s a mistake to confuse nothing much happening with plotlessness; in Ulysses, the ordinary ramblings of an ordinary day are the plot, and are as good as any other. The Evidences is also, on one level, a book in which not a whole lot happens. People walk around, are in love, sleep, drink, live quietly in their fantasies, read, sit. And yet, for all the things I neglected to do in The Evidences, one thing I did strive for was a kind of narrative momentum, or plot, if you like, throughout.

One of the lessons of art in general and of literature in particular is this: that it’s not what, how and why you’re telling.

To answer the latter question first: I told what I told in The Evidences because I wanted to capture a certain quality of feeling. If I could describe this feeling briefly I wouldn’t have had to write the book in the first place, but I’ll translate it into useless brevity thus: there is, in the spectrum of our feelings as human beings, this sort of poisonous boredom, which is a

ix combination of fear, apathy, and defeat, that can quickly cover us up; I wanted to convey this feeling and to show people reacting to it, because in their reactions they, purposefully or not, can break through the mundanity of their surroundings and into the breathless space of apprehension, either for themselves or for the reader. I guess this idea is close to the classic conception of epiphany, but I wanted to, by the nature of the world that I created, distill any sort of usefulness beyond clarity out of these epiphanies. I think I thought at one point that the usefulness of an epiphany could be carried beyond the moment that creates space for it; I know differently now; there isn’t any use for one besides making that single stretch of time a little more bearable—and that’s really one of the purposes of art in the first place. That is to say: you don’t glow for the rest of your life from that one moment’s revelation, nor are you automatically any better off in life for having read Hamlet. Having done so might open something up inside of you that will lead to being better off, but there’s nothing inherently life-changing about the epiphany Hamlet could instill in you.

The How, to you as a reader, is less important. I wanted to create characters whose behavior would reveal the way in which this boredom bore down on them. They may not be sympathetic in terms of their mindsets or attitudes, but I did try to create avenues into a sympathy, or understanding, of why they are the way they are. Their personalities are sometimes hard to distinguish, and each character’s voice, particularly the voices of the ‘erudite distant young men’ template (Smythe, Royal, James, and Joey) blends in with the others—but this is how it should be in the world that I tried to create. I wouldn’t be upset if as a reader you mistook one character for another; the idea of the whole book as a game of shifting masks is not something I’m adverse to. I don’t like when authors make show of their power over a reader; purposeful obfuscation and unnecessary difficulty are useless, but again, the atmosphere that I

x tried to create necessitates a kind of confusion, or a blank unease, that is difficult to read through sometimes—in part because it doesn’t always work.

The second big How of the book was the language itself: I experimented, from the very beginning, with the way a sentence could be made to work. Prose style is one thing, but, barring only a few examples, I can’t think of any book whose language surprises, even if it pleases, me.

I didn’t want my sentences to just amble peaceably through your inner ear. I wanted to teach

English to walk on its hands, wanted to break syntax and let a new air in, to make sentences that collected and fell avalanchingly down, atonal catastrophes of adverbs and mouthfuls of modifiers, great fugging clouds of qualifiers that hammer with all the forcefulness of ambiguity at narrative certainty. I wanted to surprise you—and of course, attempting to surprise is a triple- edged sword: you risk not only coming off as just a novelty, but also of frustrating your readers.

And I know that at times both of those things will run through your head as you read, and rightly so—but know this: I tried hard to make sentences that read well, and to make them, in their own way, musical; you may not, as Joyce claimed you could do to the “Sirens” section of Ulysses, be able to dance to it, but if you try to figure out the rhythm I think it will change, for the better, your reading experience.

That’s all that I have to say about The Evidences. Anymore would risk compromising the things that I tried to seal up in the book itself. These sealed-up things don’t have a real name and are what all authors try to tuck away in their pages, and I hope that, when you read my book, you can find some of them.

There are a handful of people I’d like to thank: first, Dr. Margaret Shaw, my thesis advisor, not only for appearing when I’d all but lost hope of finding an advisor, but for putting up with my erratic work habits these last two semesters. Also: Dr. Elizabeth Howard, Dr. Yuko

Kurahashi, and Dr. Vera Camden, the members of my oral defense committee, for taking the time to read my 35,000 word imposition and meet me to discuss it; their opinions made the final editing stages much more fruitful.

And and and, finally: Jenni. Always for.

xii

“The world does not manifest directly, in anything, God. There is no inscription limned in the boles of trees, or among the clamoring sands of the beaches, or latticed between the webs of your nerves and sinews and organs, that reveal him. It is only obliquely that whatever he is is shown; the negative space of the world is where he is, if he were to exist anywhere; by design he is the exact sum of all the things the world is not.

Your every motion is the one he would not make. Your every choice is the exact one he would never have conceived for you.

The world only implies God.”

This was the beginning of a book Nathan Smythe started writing maybe three or four years earlier, before he received his full professorship, as the philosopher Leon Aylmer. Not under a pen name, he assiduously pointed out to himself; no, instead he fabricated a person out of essentially nothing, really only in his spare time (not copious during the time he worked towards his degrees but still somehow always present each working week, solid and hard and apparent in that pressure, like a diamond squeezed from coal), buoyed by a detached amusement he could cause to well up from some dark sector of himself. He actually never made it much further than this, the first argument of Aylmer’s Precepts; he spent a lot of time writing snippets of biography or generating titles of theses written about Aylmer, theses titled with that dry block-

1 rhythm these sort of things (he knew of course by experience: his own contribution was titled

“The Aesthetics of Fantasy in the Works of E.C. Grayling”) typically exhibited: “Unchosen Son:

Aylmer’s Quarrel with the Past”, “Time and Fear in Aylmer’s Precepts”, “Taught to Think: The

Renaissance of Didacticism in the Works of Leon Aylmer”.

So in the process of birthing a full grown man and his history, Smythe developed a couple of troubling (to him) habits. For one, he actually would, to friends in conversation, in texts, or in emails, quote Aylmer. At dinner one evening even with a girl he was at the time seeing, he said over his Terminator sub “’Every activity is nothing less than an arena, and the stakes never less than the next word in the continuing long definition of our character.’”

“Who said that?” she asked.

“Leon Aylmer.”

“Who?”

“Leon Aylmer? He was a philosopher?”

And he doodled absentmindedly not squares or squiggles but invariably the same stern older Aylmer’s face, line-laden and haggard, in the margins of his notes or on the fly-leaves of books.

This was all in the past, and really only a trifle, a vanity from his younger days; well, at least so may his thoughts have run when Smythe unearthed beneath a pile of old pages, in an old suitcase he had taken around as an undergrad and then grad student, bedizened with bubbled brown faded hoops where he had set on it dripping cupsfull of coffee in the claustrophobic cells he was permitted to live and work in in Leebrick and the grad student office, a couple sheaves of loose papers, one of which contained the famous introductory paragraphs (one critic had called them, or would have called them, “the first gasp from the mouth of philosophy, which has lain

2 dead and untouched essentially since the death of Wittgenstein killed—or until now, seemed to have, killed it”) of The Precepts and another which bore at the top like letterhead, a frowning scrawled old man’s face, below which ran a timeline of Aylmer’s life, or one of a few possible lives, because he had shot, tentatively at first, as if with moral reprehension, a couple of narrative arcs off from the foci of Aylmer’s birth. Later he would overcome this strange guilt, but the business of Aylmer’s lives troubled him goodly at first, and he had couched the problem in an abstract and general inquiry, unwilling to expose his secret game, to a friend: “Because, okay, how does one extrapolate, backwards I guess, from a book to a life, to excuse me the life? You know?”

What it came down to was maintaining the equilibrium of veracity in the tiny universe he and Aylmer inhabited together (truth of course being out of the question, but—“truth is the name we give to things whose falsities are beyond our abilities to assail; it is possible to be unable to extinguish a sun and yet still know there are forces ponderous enough to choke one out”). But this was all youthful hot folly and, staring at it now, though at twenty-eight still not out of place or importunate feeling youthful and certainly still plagued by folly, Smythe riffled the papers a few times from one hand to the other, with a feeling of recognition, with a feeling of surprise, with, he might’ve gone so far to say even, the feeling one maybe would have hugging an ex- lover, and then put them away.

Outside a cabal of heavy stormclouds prepared to march against Kent. The climate has a way of being shocked and tensed before, and not after, a storm, when it becomes dewy and sickly-sweet, heavy and sleepy, all rain-laden; it offended Smythe’s sense of the needful procession of things, as much so as would a person whose face reddened and whose eyes balanced crescents of water on lower lids before they got slapped. Walking to his car, he was

3 aware of the sky’s portentous churn above his head. It was Friday then, and felt it in a terminal sense; everything was obscurely, even luridly shadowed, to Smythe; he walked straight and steady to his car, silver, which reflected the clouds overhead in a distorted smear; but he felt dazed, as if confronted after a long period of knowing waiting with the onset of some apocalypse—well, maybe not the apocalypse, exactly, but with, all suddenly, the world as operant: the world precise, and a mechanism reaching its apogee; in a flight of fancy his body was a peg or a node: for what? The old feelings, and then—Leon Aylmer, of course, was called the “stormy old man” by his admiring pupil—he got into his car and headed home.

He, though he lived fairly close to the campus, preferred generally taking a car to walking, for reasons vague even to himself—and in truth invisible to all others; Smythe had a nasty habit of, when someone gave him some sound, simple advice, something even or maybe especially that he had thought worth doing and easily done himself—say a colleague, leaning on the lintel of his office door, pen behind his protruding monkey-ear, says “A couple of filing cabinets would help quite a bit”—and this same sentiment expressed by Smythe himself basically everyday when he confronts the hopeless palimpsest of his desk, of saying “No, yeah, I definitely should,” which of course ended up being, though seemingly in accordance, or at least seemingly seemingly in accordance when actually politely evasive, neither, but the kiss of death, or its living cousin procrastination, for whatever amendatory course of action was suggested. All this is to say that although he by no means had funds in any way ample, and though every year he lost muscle mass and became paler and paler, and despite the other piled reasonable evidence suggesting he should do otherwise and several bland comments from various nearly-concerned sectors, he chose to drive to work and back.

And today ponderous karma, a force he only sporadically believed in with any fervency, and then only in its most evident manifestations, seemed to rouse itself and cross his purposes with a slow nervous van, hugging the median line and applying its break at every side road. He adjusted his rearview mirror in an access of rage repeatedly.

Home: the accrual of dishes in the sink was not so many as to disallow another and so without washing any he was able to eat his dinner and slip in a plate in a tremulous cleft between a bowl and a colander. He decided to go to the bar. It was Friday and he was already dressed.

He had a day’s shading across his chin and neck and lip, and with a dozen or so languorous drags of an old razor rid himself of it. He headed out a little later, at a time congenial and acceptable for such things.

The dark clouds and their low pregnant bellies threatened to outdo the asphalt, shade for shade, in leaden inscrutability. Smythe amused himself en route with the fact new-revealed to him that, really, he could not conjure in his mind’s arena the layout of his apartment; he knew it by heart of course as soon as he saw it; but now (as ever) he could only bring up spurious after spurious version; and what exactly was incorrect about these replicates he could not say; only that they were just that, and really it wasn’t out of the question that the wrong thing was not so much in the actual way he arranged his mental image, say where he laid the bed down and in what sprawled arrangement his books on the table were in, but on some other level, some stitch in a separate plane on which—but Aylmer, resolute “unspiritualist”, as he called himself jokingly once, said—well, but Aylmer.

The bar, The Loft, was beginning already to clot with people: that distinct bracket of years, ill defined, during which women seemed to him able to come to the bars, was, as usual, represented not so much by any happy median as by the polarized extremes: a couple girls, all

5 shouting body, cupping colorful fishbowls or alcopops, and set against them a few older women, newly divorced or uninterruptedly single, drifting about. The men more numerous were also generally older; a bald man whose proximity to death was directly proportional to his long

(narrowing to a finger point focus) chin’s proximity to the thick but quickly weakening foam head of Guinness in front of him, perched on a stool ogling mainly the crystalline array of liquor bottles behind the counter but occasionally with bewildered obligation passing over one of the women, any one, when they neared him; younger older men, more dedicated, aiming flirtatious smiles at the younger girls, smiles that, somehow, became ineluctably translated by the time they were noticed by their target, by some intercessional force maybe’s alchemical handling, into threatening, in a flaccid sort of way, leers. One man in the corner near the big barrel of peanuts was unwittingly boring a young blonde he had unwittingly pinned on her way back from the bathroom with innocent stories about his kids and wife; but in ten minutes, when he unwittingly will come across predatory when he fatherly will offer to buy her a drink, she will find her escape, and he something to puzzle over for the rest of the evening as he throws darts glumly for an hour: this was the scene Smythe walked into. He made his way to the bar and ordered a beer, a pint of Bud Light, and settled himself toward the back of the place, in a black-lacquered booth shooting diagonally from the wall and stunted enough that one person could perhaps, he thought, sit comfortably there without appearing to others to be taking up more room than he deserved.

There was a famous picture of Aylmer with a beer, black and white though it was taken in the mid-nineties, his dark craggy features in profile looking fixed, Ahabian. He had once said “I don’t read books; I chase them down, madly, and I kill them dead.” This in The Paris Review, actually, sometime in the mid-to-late-seventies, just when the third edition of The Precepts was released. He was a manic reader, Aylmer was, driven through things by his sheer rage at his own

6 ignorance, “a debt inherited at birth and never paid off”, he once also said, later, when, on a tour in Germany…

Someone at the bar, a hunched back from Smythe’s angle, was animatedly conveying something to the body adjacent and the bartender, whose eyes passed between the speaker and the television hung in a corner in even rhythm.

Somehow (actually he felt by dint of repeatedly and tactfully staring at her back, the center of it or near-to just where her flesh ended and her dress began) Smythe found himself talking to a girl whose age in relation to his, though a difference at least of three years, fluctuated between older and younger continually.

“I’m Nathan, hi.”

“Hi Nathan, I’m Stacy.” Blonde but at the roots dark, her hair fell in natural curls down around her squarish jaw. His eyes’ appraisal of her body ran smoothly as a call and response prayer, each answer given plainly as it was asked. Her skin was mottled a little and reddish beneath the dim lights.

“Hi, nice to meet you.”

“You too…this is my friend Angela.” But Angela was a spectre and only remained on the fringes of their conversation for a minute or two before finding herself back at the bar, next drink in hand, heel cocked on the stool and her ankle reddening, thinking hatefully of Smythe who with his uncrooked smile certainly the least near a leer here by a considerable shot.

“So did you hear about the student who tried to kill his professor?”

“What?”

“So do you like know the professor who got almost killed by his student?”

“No, is it funny?”

“What?”

“I said is it funny—I mean, no, what happened?”

“Well, I mean this kid who’s a student shows up at his professor’s house with like a knife, you know? And tries to kill him?”

Smythe stared sidelong at her for a moment, a grin slowly erasing itself, as he realized, and then—“Oh, oh you mean Dr.—oh no, yes, that happened—I mean I guess the details are hazy, I don’t think that the kid was trying to kill him, per se, you know?”

“Do you know the professor then? So who was it?”

“I’m sorry, I thought you were starting a joke, actually. It sounded like the beginning of one of those a priest, a rabbi, and a lawyer walk into a bar sort of things, you know?”

And so they continued, as the bar became more and more swollen with the hum of other people’s conversation, music, the bleating TVs, the clink of glasses on tabletops, closing and opening of doors, and the wind rattling something metallic in the building’s roof, to fire arrows of conversation just past each other’s ears. Smythe had another glass of beer before Stacy cajoled him into splitting a pitcher of something with her; he sat across from her now watching the shaking amber in her glass turn itself backwards and forwards as she gesticulated. His own glass shrank twice quickly to nothing and Smythe enjoyed the intrusive softness of his thoughts, the warmth and buzz across his cheeks and the bridge of his nose. As for Stacy, her face had a reddish look to it from the start, rawish now as if windchapped—speaking of, that wind still ran unfettered someplace above their heads, havoc and tumult, a banshee. For some reason Smyth’s every sentence was tagged with “I think” or “Hey do you think”, although it didn’t seem to perturb Stacy at all. The bar’s patrons, as the night slid itself forward, seemed to Smythe, returning to his conceit, a mechanism, virtuoso clockwork suddenly; each time weight was

8 shifted, a sip or shit taken, a wink ignored, a smile flashed, thigh bared, angry departure made, every time Stacy itched the flesh above her right breast, each time Smythe himself blinked—it all seemed to be the winding down of an elaborate time piece, precision crafted to serve this function, to gauge this night, to stop it at the proper time; a device preordained to measure and appoint and see to the exact moment of its own dissipation, measuring its unfolding only by the speed at which it unfolds; Smythe parted his lips and let a little beer down.

“You drink fast, huh?”

“I don’t think normally I do; actually you know I haven’t drank in a while.”

“I come here every Friday, actually, or most anyway; sometimes I go home on the weekends.”

“I think for a while I had a real moral opposition to drinking—“

“This was my best friend Ashley’s favorite place to come when she went here—“

“—or maybe I was like afraid of it.”

“—we would always do pitchers too.” A small miracle happened that neither noticed: they both blinked three times at exactly the same time.

“Wait,” dully he said, “are you a student?”

“Me? No—why, do I look young?”

“You are young.”

“Do I look young like a student?”

“I don’t know what a student looks like, actually.”

“What, but you said you’re a professor?”

They both stared at each other and laughed, for possibly different if even present reasons.

“You want anything else?” she offered, getting up.

“Oh, thanks, I think I’m done, thanks.”

“I’m going to use the toilet, be back, don’t move.”

“I’ll be here,” he replied, and watched her go. At the bar he could see her friend, her upper torso turning slowly counterclockwise. She was speaking to a man in a blazer. Had

Aylmer been a teetotaler? No, because in the picture there he sat with a beer; no, Aylmer was a man who liked beer, and after all why wouldn’t he? The man “with godless passion pursued everything to its breaking point and just beyond; that’s the motive force behind his whole philosophy, ‘such as it remains whole at all’; and that is why, at his death, he left two children from different mothers, three broken marriages, virtually no money anywhere, and eight different editions of The Precepts in print.” So said a critic, on the fifth anniversary of—

She settled herself back into her seat; on the backs of her hands droplets of moisture flared when they caught the low light.

“Back,” needlessly, with a breath; a wave of soap-smelling air came toward him.

“Yes,” he said needlessly too and smiled.

“Where are your hands?”

“What?”

“Your hands?”

“Oh, in my lap.”

“Playing with yourself?”

“HA, no, no, not at all, here,” and he flopped them palms up on the table; his glass fell on its side, and a little stream of beer lolled out of it, a narrow tongue.

“Ohp,” he said, and righted it.

“What time is it?” She asked as she looked at her cell phone, produced from between her breasts.

“Good hiding place,” Smythe said flatly, and felt it die.

“Place’s probably going to start closing up,” she said.

“Where’s your friend?”

“Oh probably somewhere around here,” this lightly and with a glance over one shoulder to look and confirm and then back. “Where you going after this?” Her eyes were green and frank.

“Um, nowhere, I guess.”

“You want to come over to my place for a few more drinks?”

“Yes,” he said, pinioned by foresight.

“Okay, great, I’ll go let Angela know what’s up. Can you drive? Or should we call a cab?”

“Oh, no, I can drive, yeah.”

“Okay cool,” and she, did she wink, and got up. He rose too, and counted the bills in his wallet, then decided he needed to use the restroom. In the bright light he examined his face. A man chatted amicably, dick-in-hand, to another, pasty, a few urinals down. His broad red neck looked briefly like a torso to Smythe.

“Hey, know a cab’s number?”

“What?” Smythe turned around to the find the bald man from the bar, the old man, staring up at him, like a child.

“A cab number?” He swayed and grabbed Smythe’s lapel, straightened himself. “Whoa there,” he said in a sudden southern accent; he looked to either side as if about to impart a secret, then patted Smythe’s chest and shuffled off to wash his hands.

Back at the bar, Stacy, Angela, and the man in the blazer stood conversing in the dark.

Angela hung alternately off of the man and the stool behind her. When Smythe approached…

“…then just tomorrow then, okay?” He said “Hi, everything okay?”

Stacy turned and wasn’t Stacy, but an older woman. And the others, wait, these weren’t anybody he recognized. “Sorry,” he muttered, and moved away. They stared as he floated away from them and toward Stacy and Angela and the man in the blazer, who were standing nearby, in a similar arrangement.

“Ready? Everything okay?”

“Yeah, fine, are you ready? You can drive?”

“Drive me too,” spluttered Angela.

“Do you need a—“

“She doesn’t need a ride.”

“—ride?—Are you sure, because really it’s—“

“She’s fine. You’re driving her?” She pointed to the man in the blazer. He nodded earnestly.

“You’re driving her, okay. Angela, he’s driving you, okay?”

Her hands on the bar stool, ass at their faces, Angela turned over her shoulder, “What?

Yeah, he’s taking me, yeah, yeah, got it.”

“Got it?” Loudly.

“Got it, bitch!” and a dry retch. The man in the blazer turned his back to them to attend to Angela, the conversation effectively terminated.

Stacy took his arm. “Let’s go.”

“Okay.”

“Where’s your car?”

“Oh it’s near, actually.”

“Okay, good.” They were at the door. The bartender was beginning to wipe down the bar in front of him, taking abandoned glasses of half-finished or, in the case of the old man’s

Guinness (save for a narrow hole in the center of the head) untouched drinks. Smythe opened the door and felt humid air, smelled it. He heard a noise he couldn’t ascribe to anything, a sort of massed whispering in a sibilant language, and felt a sensation of tapping at the base of his neck.

“Oh shit, you know I left my keys with Angela, hang on.”

“Your house keys?”

“Yeah, so she could let me in and make sure I was okay.”

“Alright well why don’t I go get the car and pull around. Are you sure she’s okay?”

“Okay, yeah, great,” and she went off. Smythe stepped outside.

The clouds had kept their promise: rain fell hard and constant, chittering all around him at once, invisible except for up and down the street in intermittent patches where the globes of orange streetlamp-light hung and illuminated them. Immediately soaked, Smythe turned down the sidewalk, followed closely by the bulky red-necked man, the glum man with a family, wondering if he had been this evening, earlier, unfaithful to his wife, and the old man, all without umbrellas and all in moments drenched in the constant hiss.

Smythe turned at the corner and approached the parking lot along the road. Really it was a terrible storm. Thunder hoarsely bellowed and lightning made the world out of the darkness in its flash and then disdainfully let it sink away again. Smythe thought he heard a plash, and turned: the old man had fallen into the street, was splayed on his back and silent; he stared up at the sky wincing as drops nicked him in his open eyes. The man with the neck and the man with the family both approached him, slowly, as if they thought he might be dead, and one shouted something unintelligible at the prostrate figure. Smythe stared and then himself advanced to the man’s side. “Are you okay? Is he okay?” He looked down at the two men. Neither responded.

Smythe saw the man with the neck take the old man’s far shoulder and begin to prise him from the asphalt. Smythe took the other and the man with the family, once the old man was up sitting, placed his two palms on the narrow back and together like this they righted the fallen man.

“Do you need a cab still?” Smythe asked, and then to the other two, “Do you know any cab numbers?” They shook their heads. The old man had been muttering an explanation only he if anyone could hear, and he kept brushing off his ass. Smythe offered to drive him home,

“Here, where do you live?” But the old man waved him off and walked carefully with unambitious step down the street; cars passed by and lit up his soaked pants and spindled legs and between them, raindrops nearly to the ground. The remaining three proceeded in silence to the parking lot. At their cars, Smythe looked between one and the other. Their faces were unengaged, their thoughts secrets. “I am not entirely convinced that the world is going to continue after my death,” Aylmer once said. It occurred to him, then, still in the rain, ran through by what he imagined as long threads of rain lowered from cloud to ground continuous, it occurred to him how little his thoughts had in common with Aylmer’s; how alien seemed any of the man’s multiple mapped lives, how different Smythe’s fire from his in the dark.

“Yes, this is right, this is how it should be,” he said.

***

Monday afternoon, Smythe made his way back to his office from Oscar Ritchie sweating.

He sifted the massed papers on his desk for hours, and gathered all the Aylmer material he had.

The sun wasn’t so low yet in the sky during the summer, and it hung at the top of his window as he stared down at what he’d collected. All out before him, he discovered that all told, the collected excerpts from The Precepts, the portraits repeated, the critics’ comments, the biographies, the scattered aphorisms, all totaled, written out, less than fifteen pages front and back.

II.

Out of what charity exactly I couldn’t say at the time, but suddenly it was on our agenda that we were taking her brother out, to a “nice dinner” she said. Well, she was taking both her brother and me out to a nice dinner, in the light of an evidently unexpected (though she told me also it happened every year) windfall of Christmas money from her wealthy grandparents.

Joanna had a gift, I’m sure she was convinced, of routing her actual anxiety through a different outlet; what this routing consisted of was, when say she was angry, shaping her face into crude caricatures of pleasanter feelings and lobbing her voice up into high-pitched crystalline unpersuasive imitations of pleasantness. So when she told me about this money and gave nonchalantness her best shot I could parse out the real emotion beneath the surface—and, troubled, found that it was an unusual mixture of humble embarrassment feathered with a gaudy crowing pride. I asked her about it. But the light retreated deep back into her eyes as she back- pedaled inelegantly but ineluctably away from my advances. The idea occurred to me that maybe she was upset to still like a child be receiving gifts from grandparents, and I thought back to my own Christmas just-passed, and images of me opening presents in my pajamas like I had on the twenty twenty-fifths that preceded it flit over the impulse, and, like a crop duster loosing veils of a holocausting dust from its wings, withered all my drives to dig.

Winter, a ragged lupine northeast Ohio winter, this year was circling, striking, and retreating: two days’ worth of snow (“curtains in the air and coverlet on the ground” professor

Ryder would’ve just recently wittily quipped to a class) would be followed by a week of almost balmy weather. And like a harried prey we felt its presence more acutely because it was withheld: the eye we knew, if not the tooth and claw, was always upon us, and so people shivered and caught cold, stamped imagined snow off rain-soaked boots when they entered houses, and pissed and moaned about the chill in the warmest winter we’d had in the last decade.

The night we took Zeke out—or, I guess, Joanna took both Zeke and me out—it was raining I know, but whatever the weather was doing during the day was beyond me: I spent it inside, not having woke up till noon, pottering around the house, glazing at the TV, playing videogames, or, in the occasional paroxysm of guilt, taking dutifully up a book for a few minutes before, finger marking the page, laying it on my chest and, despite ten hours’ worth of sleep and stored energy barely taxed, dozing, as wan as the weak winter sun bleary behind the argent patchwork of winter clouds, its mirrorcolored light polished by no hope.

My house is not a large one. Across from the old closed Six Flags, in the shabby neighborhood that grew like a fungus in its shadow, littered with delinquent kids; in the summers the air will be shot through with their antic cries, and, layered in the wind that chases the life- debris up and down the streets, the whirr of their bikes’ wheels as they spirit themselves towards some minor misdeed. Too there used to be the screams of the parkgoers’ riding the Superman, which abutted the main road very nearly: my mom sitting on the porch would bitch about it.

And a little beyond sound but still somehow palpable to the ear, or to an invisible organ not quite the ear but like it would be the weight of all that movement and commotion, screeching kids at

17 the waterpark gleeful, tennis shoes treading hot pavement, golden brown elephant ears like entwined intestines and slowly sogging, beneath a dusting of powdered sugar, in their own greases, parents arguing adultly, subtly behind children’s backs, constant fretting and awareness of money spent spent spent on a day like this intended, dreamed, envisioned knowingly-falsely to be one of happiness but seen to be only hassle, greasy insalubrious carnival food, bedraggled walkings-about in the heat, and the incessantry and buzzing of kids, constant as the locust-whirr of bike wheels in summer, a ritual submitted and resubmitted to and remitting only at last as the long day burned itself out.

Well, I was a nervous kid, and addled in some ways by this nervousness. And I knew when my mom would, sitting smoking on the porch with Ray or John or Chris or Tony or

Anthony (I think I remembered them all), stare out past the haze and the trees drooling in the recent rains and humidity and say “Can’t stand that fucking noise,” and I would agree, that we meant, actually, two different things.

But my house, as I said, is small, and all that day I saw as much of the weather as I did my parent and step-parent, which must be, given the size of the house and the limited possibilities of their and my trajectories moving through it, some kind of minor miracle. I can’t focus on anything during the day if some plan is hung up in the evening ever, and so it was this day, Joanna having called me early in the morning—sleeping, I missed it of course—with our evening’s schemata, and delivering as well the onset of my anticipatory paralysis. Eventually, mercifully, Joanna got off work, and I was given the go-ahead to head to her house. I went up to my room, a loft with a lowered ceiling, a single bed, a desk, one small shelf and an old fat TV, bulbous and glazeeyed, on top of it. It was only after I had turned around once and fished on

Facebook for a few minutes that I realized there was a reason for me to have come up here, and

18 it was only after another minute’s fumbling that I realized I was already dressed, showered, up- gussied, hygiene the first ritual I’d attended to once I’d woken up. With my reason unraveled, I decided to leave.

I stopped in my mom’s room on the ground floor and peered in, chary, still with something intuitive and vestigal, something bright, refusing to believe that she had been this close to me all day and unseen, and that I would not find her laying there, as she always did on her off days, supine, eyes’ beams pointed TVwards.

“Alright mom,” I said, “I’m leaving.”

“Where’re you going?”

“To see Joanna. We’re taking her brother Zeke out to dinner.”

“Oh, okay. Hey, could you thank her for the Christmas presents for me? That was so sweet of her, honey.”

“Sure.”

“Did you get her parents anything?”

“What?—No.”

“You didn’t? Do they know she got us something? Did they get you anything?”

“I think they might know and yeah they did. But—“

“You should’ve gotten them something—“

“—Well yeah but they know probably that I couldn’t afford anything. And anyway—“

“Doesn’t have to be something big.”

“Yeah—well. It’s okay I think. Too late now anyways.”

“Alright. You going to be stay out overnight?”

“No, I’ll be back tonight. Later though.”

“You won’t be here for dinner?”

“No, we’re taking her brother—“

“Oh that’s right. Okay. Have a good time. You know we would’ve been happy to help you buy them something. Her parents.”

The drive to Hawthorne was not a long one. Earlier on in our relationship Joanna and

I had even talked about walking the distance between our houses, or half of it each anyways, and trysting in the night wherever that mesial point may be. Well, that was before our easy fire was sooted up at all. Now no longer such a clean burn, I figured maybe asking her she would still say yes but our conscious efforts would cause the concept to strain beyond bursting. And any honesty would be the cost, and any attempt at honesty as strained, farcical, and obvious as

Joanna’s concealing affectations of pleasantness. I morphined these thoughts quickly with the old reliable tincture, that this was only the natural temperature adjustment of a maturing relationship, and all the feelings of ash were just part and parcel of our new weight, heavy enough to hold us down and together in a way I was just unhumble and ambitious enough to convince myself to believe was needful.

My graduation tassle, which my mom had slung around the rearview mirror when I drove her and Tony and my grandma to Samurai Steakhouse after graduation, swung as I drove now, the silvered ’08 medallion lolling in and out amongst the green and white threads. Something locust-whirred and I was suddenly remembered of the old pageantry: the Greenman, before I was a Golden Flash: a fairy, maybe, or a pookah? A pusillanimous green-capped pookah, Aurora’s was always anyway: well actually, the original squat bulbous grinning greenman, a disembodied floriferous symbol of—what? A net catching the debris of a hundred pagan religions. The truth was: the past was now a Faraway: the green-capped pusillanimous pookah painted along the

20 roads near the school, washed away in a months’ worth of students’ tires’ like an astringent, and the periodic rain carrying who knows what admixture, amongst water’s purity, of what? Acid or...? The blank afternoons in the cafeteria, the old friends, the younger incarnations of the drifting people I knew now to be burdened with unwanted children or criminal charges or debt or death or a quotidian job, that old encompassing cast recasted now into new roles they occupied less comfortably; yes, all truths, if not true: witnessings just, as far removed from reality’s merciless beating instant and today’s always impurer belief as the fervor of the druids.

I thought of how I had visited AHS once, my first winter break back from Kent. Stood after school had let out watching the kids in the cafeteria waiting for parents or negotiating rides home, feeling like a parent myself. In Joanna’s driveway, seeking a cheap and easy purge, I took the tassle from around the mirror and I tried to mangle it. Plucked out the threads, yanked on the

’08 medallion, but couldn’t satisfactorily succinctly destroy it. Still gasping in an intolerable access of feeling, and because I knew me and watching me saw that nothing else would foot me out of this slough but to indulge myself like a fool, I got out of the car with it in my fist and dropped it in the grass, and ground it in past those bristling points and into the soft earth, the rain-roused mud, upchurning and intermingling with my heel thread, metal, grass, mud, into a pliant pulpiness, an impasto: a vile jelly. And to outrun any shame as best I could, I thought distinctly to punctuate this episode and return to myself: I am twenty-one. And then I scraped the mud from my shoe and went to the door.

She, Joanna, always walked into my house, but at hers I always knocked. Joanna’s family kept in and around their house a galaxy of cats, all related and unneutered, inbreeding freely, and as I waited one of the first products of the interfamilial fornicating, Royal, slipped up onto the porch and stared at me with half-closed eyes, a tiny sculpture of ennui. In one of the

21 tiny shrines in me a small cowardice was praying that her parents would not answer the door, and that little voice convinced me that I was not able at that moment to cope with either one of them, either one of their personalities long-settled and like a rock around which my untutored leashless self would fret pathetically. Joanna appeared, opened the door, and I stepped into the bright clean light of the foyer. Cats on the second floor from between the banisters presented flat gemmed eyes, counterpoint to inky Joanna’s, two tunnels a-flood with shadows, the pupil a pool of shadow on the shadow.

“Hey, almost ready,” she said into my shoulder as we held each other, “Go on into the kitchen and wait for me.”

“Okay.” And she up the stairs, I floating towards the voices coming from the kitchen, carrying my tattered grip of anxiety and dread, feeling woefully underpracticed for whatever performance was to be required of me in front of her family. In the kitchen, Ma and Da and two unknowns, standing or sitting around the kitchen table, before them remnants of a meal: a greasy knubbed bone, a dark bread’s dark crumbs, long vague trails of ketchup scooped and gouged through by chicken presumably at fork’s end, glasses filled to greater and lesser degrees with amberish (under the dimmed lights’ ambiance) wine: noting all this: too the faces above them:

Mr. Eckridge’s beard and dark Joanna eyes, Mrs’s damp red lips, the strangers’ clean appealingness. Each of the adults on my approach turned and prepared their welcoming grins

(the strangers’ turned delicately with the expectant hesitancy of those about to be introduced to a stranger) to match my own prepared delighted smile.

“Hi Joe!” Mrs. Eckridge, and she came to hug me. I could feel the spade-shapes of her shoulderblades beneath her blouse.

“Hello, how’re you?” I intoned past Mrs. Eckridge’s right ear.

“Hello Joe,” Mr. Eckridge, pleasant. The other two, a man and a woman, or more accurately a husband and a wife, twittered and chewed vague sounds of welcome. Mrs. Eckridge turned back to the table and with one arm around my waist dispelled for the strangers my mystique: “This is Joe, Jo’s boyfriend. Joe, this is Mr. and Mrs. Folk.”

“Hi Joe,” Mrs. Folk said and extended her thin hand into mine. My thumb’s ball fell right on top of her wedding ring’s swollen diamond.

“Hey: Joe, Jo!” Mr. Folk wittily observed.

“Have a seat Joe,” Mr. Eckridge said. His formality of tone, as constant as everything else about him, made it sound like he and the others were about to scold or lecture me about something I’d done wrong. This was a strong enough tool to pry me out of my fear.

“Joe and Jo went to high school together,” Mrs. Eckridge was standing behind me, hands on my shoulders.

“Oh, really now?” Mr. Folk, hair a sable silvered and tousled, had a face reddened from wine or the mild cold or something else altogether. “So you’ve been dating for a long time then?”

“Well no—“ said myself and the Eckridges all at once, but only I continued as Mr. lapped at his wine and Mrs. fastened her eyes (pale: flat) on me in deference: “Well no—actually we started dating in the, last fall.”

“Oh, so not so long after all?” Grinning Mr. Folk.

“No. Although we had been friends before of course.”

“Of course.”

“And you met up again in college?” practically a whisper this from bejewelled Mrs. Folk.

“No—“ This time at the same time me and Mr. E, and in obeisance to what hierarchy I don’t know he inherited the right to continue: “They go to different schools.”

“So you don’t go to Mount Union, then?”

“No, I go to Kent.”

“Oh! Excellent.” Mr. Folk said, and I wondered was he purposely rhyming or?

“What’s—“

“Would you like something to drink honey?” Mrs. Eckridge asked.

“Oh, no thank you; thanks though. Go ahead?”

“What’s your major?” Mr. Folk gripped his elbows, the hair backs of his hands pressed against the table’s edge.

“Oh, English.”

“Oh! Excellent.” Evidently a stock phrase: the rhyme a happy accident. “And what year are you?”

“Senior, same as Joanna.”

“And what are you going to do after you graduate?”

“I majored in English too,” offered Mrs. Folk. I looked at her and said a little loudly,

“Oh, really? Excellent stuff. Where did you go to school?” I smiled, finding her face so much more surmountable than Mr. Eckridge’s long fall of dark eyes.

“And so do you want to teach then, or...?” In front of his stomach Mr. Folk’s hands open palms-up and churning one over the other, as if he were unspooling onto the table the long fleshy ribbons of his innards, looking for the answer to his question. “Well, I’d like to be a playwright, but which that doesn’t make any money necessariuly, ha ha, so yeah, teach then in the meantime.

On the professorial level.”

“Joe used to be in the plays at Aurora,” chirped Mrs. E, “He was always in plays.”

“So planning on grad school then?”

“Yeah.” Curtly: and then, “fingers crossed,” pertly.

“And where’ve you applied?” asked Mr. Eckridge.

“Oh: at Kent, Brown, some schools on the coasts,” and to add credibility I rattled off a few schools I knew to exist, Columbia, USC, etc. etc. I stared out the window at the night’s rustling wetness. Behind the shifting trees I could make out a portion of a lit window: a body slid across the bright space: from one coast to another.

“How many schools did Jo apply to?” asked Mrs. Folk. To which her husband rejoindered loudly: “He just told us himself how many Beth,” and laughed.

“I think,” said Mr. Eckridge, “I think it ended up being what, thirteen schools or so?” His granitic face softened with kindled affection.

“Our nephew went to OSU, he’s going to be a neurosurgeon actually—“

“Actually it was fourteen, right hun. Because we decided thirteen was unlucky.” His eyes’ brief flash signaled that this was meant unseriously; and unseriousness was as close to a joke as Mr. Eckridge ever came.

“The earlier those kind of things get done the better,” attested Mr. Folk. I stared and nodded and smiled and smiled differently a second later as I heard footsteps coming down the steps. In a fit of carelessness I came out with: “Yeah, I really should’ve applied to more schools.

And earlier.”

“I think the earlier the better,” Beth Folk spoke. The others nodded: Mr. Folk smiled at his chest.

“Yep, we finished all of Jo’s by the beginning of December.”

“We sent the last right around Saint Nick’s day. Ope, here she is.” Joanna made her way to the table, her form reflected in the darkened window, sprent all over with raindrops, trailing down, like latticed ice.

All four adults turned at once towards her. Her heavy upper lip cantilevered just out over the lower. I could smell her perfume even across the yard-and-a-half’s-worth of space between us. Her hair curled just vaguely, long to the middle of the back; the amount of product in it or her own unluckiness the cause I couldn’t say but it was dry, wiring, every attempt to run my fingers through it ended in a progressive knotting into, and ended with one or the other of us extracting my hand from that hair’s snare. Well even so I knew later I would have my run through it again, and her spade-head tongue against mine; knew it with a certainty that sickened me at my own smugness. Joanna may not’ve known: there was a useless innocence about her.

Something had been turned in me that was untouched in her, and from my side an awareness of this was all the consolation I was afforded. Mr. Eckridge ignorant behind his beard. I had bought by trading in currencies that held no value for anybody besides me, currencies coined and valued only within myself, some sort of pathetic liberation. My shoulder was sweated and moistened where Mrs. Eckridge had had her palm planted.

“Hey,” I said to her, “Is Zeke ready to go?”

“No,” she said, “he isn’t back yet. We’re going to have to wait around for a few.”

“No, oh yeah, that’s fine. Do you...?”

“Do you want to go sit in the living room?”

“Yeah, yeah. Uh, when do you think he’ll be back?”

“Soon.” We absconded amongst bright well wishes and nice-to-meet-yous to the vasty living room. One lamp beside the white couch burned alone and nearest this is where she sat;

26 respectfully I sat a seat’s length away, and we engaged in maybe half an hour’s worth of the kind of coasting talk that’s never worth remembering. Watching her, I only stirred when her eyes met mine: really, like two caves. The others had gone into another room to wear away another bottle of wine.

I was a nervous kid, I’ve already said, and there are I guess pockets in my life now where still an influx of that nervousness can occur and send me reeling back giddily into the old ways, the circles in my mind I used to trace incessantly, and for whatever reason Joanna’s living room with its two story ceiling, clean white carpet (Mrs. Eckridge’s hobby horse was to fret over the rooms and redo them every year or so, and this new clean knap was a recent rock of it), the upstairs balcony looking down into it peopled (or, I guess, felined) with the ubiquitous staring cats poised between the banisters like saints in their niches, shook something loose. The night beyond the windows, stained with unseen lamplight, threatened to break. She was speaking:

“And if I was looking, the Sociology program at B----- is almost good enough for me to want to go there more than—“

“Nice.” Being not a disgorging greenman that was as much dust as I was able to shake from my mouth. In my mind I imaged a dry hive hung in my heart’s place. I used to grind up hives with the neighborhood boys with the ends of baseball bats.

“I got a couple of teachers willing to write me letters—of recommendation,” I said.

“Smythe, and I’ve managed to get Ryder even, but I haven’t heard back from Mooney.”

“It took me a while to get mine together. Professor Croft was out of the country at first when I asked him, and then I had to ask Linemen for a second one.”

“Yeah.”

“Here, listen to this,” she said, and unfolded one of the family laptops in front of her:

“’Located in historic Providence, Rhode Island and founded in 1764, B----- university is the seventh-oldest—“

“Hey, listen, I don’t want to hear anymore about B-----,” almost a full-bore snap, I just managing to coat it with the thinnest, least convincingest veneer of humor, scribbling a smile on my face. She laughed indulgently. “Okay. You should apply there though—and not cause I’m going there.” I almost fanged back with “You don’t know yet if you’re going there,” but couldn’t, I knew, rightly do that; even entertaining it as seriously as I was, was a shameful aberrance. For a minute I felt this magnanimous filling pity for her, and a feeling that said O

Joanna tolled, and for a full minute it swelled almost physically painfully, a sort of an agony of growth, a horripilating increase, something dreadful and solid structuring up within me. And I had to laugh, a bleak internal laugh, because here the night was hardly begun and already I was too full of too many things.

Interceding for me was Zeke, entering the living room, preceded by two cats that rushed to rub their bodies along the legs of the table and mewled piteously up at him. A stubbed youth,

Zeke, already he reminded me of the kind of kid I had grown up around, the kind of kid with a blond buzzcut and jean shorts, who I would spend whole afternoons with shooting holes in my blinds with BB guns. Although I guess no buzzcut for Zeke: just a lank brown mat no healthier looking than his sister’s but eyes pale like his mother, thin shiverable ice, the sinewy optic fiber like running cracks through it. And no BB gun for him either, as docile as a summer cloud, the placidity also his mother’s, and almost as fascinated with me as she.

“The Folks are poking around,” he said, “Get it, Joe? Folk? Polk?” And then an exaggerated pantomime of a laugh.

“Hey Zeke.”

“Ready to eat?”

“Are you ready to go?” asked Joanna.

“Yep.”

“Do you want to put on socks,” she wheedled, “or tie your shoes at least?” Zeke glanced down at his undone Converses, tongues a-loll.

“I’m good. I’m hungry. Let’s go. Joe, you drive and I’ll ride shotgun.” Shoed and coated again, we goodbye’d the adults. A game shake from Mr. and another hug from Mrs.

Eckridge, a shake from each of the Folks. “Nice meeting you,” whispered Mrs. Folk intimately, and “Take care and drive safe in the rain, Joe and Jo,” with a wide grin was Mr. Folk’s parting jest.

Joanna did not like, but always insisted on, when it was her car, doing the driving. I was preferenceless actually, but nettled by the pride she took in her insistence. Subtle Joanna never was: pride was as easy to spot as her anger or resentment when she tried to hide it, but when she was openly anything it rang through her body as if she were a struck tuningfork: she vibrated all over with happiness or pleasure or sorrow. The first time I kissed her she bit hard into my lower lip as if she were in the throes of extreme passion, and her body went passionately slack against my own. Her feminism and independence were a show, a firecracker she fulminated loudly and proudly to the constant rapturous acclaim of everybody she gathered around her, family, friends, teachers. Mention Joanna and even Mr. Eckridge’s grizzled block of a face bent into a smile beneath those eyes, those eyes blank and dark as if his skull were hollowed out.

So part of the show today was that she drove, and before she did I had to fish out from underneath the car Rochester the cat, who was too querulous to be wooed by my cooing, and

29 who only budged once I started rolling stones and spraying fistfuls of woodchips at him, on my knees on the wet cement, the dank seeping through to my knees, the smell of gas and under-car- parts mingling with the loamy smell the rain always brought with it.

I had hopes of, since Joanna was occupied with driving, fortifying my relationship with

Zeke, one of my obsessions generally in relationships being to give parts of myself to the family, hometown, friends (though Joanna and I shared some of these things already) of my girlfriends, the idea being, if I were stored in so many different things I could assemble myself much easier than if the onus to rally my character were only on me, but to my horror the two of them begin mutual reminiscing, of family life and childhood memories, Christmases past, etc., which left me completely out in the cold. My conversation was hemmed in to laughs, Oh Reallys, and

Mmhms. Joanna’s family was ingrained into Aurora, her parents were friends with her friends parents, they supported the local business out of personal obligation, dined with teachers. Both

Zeke and Joanna passed radiantly through the grades, comprehensively extracurricular, in sports, band, in the plays, and, whatever the difficulties of their relationship, they seemed to find each other in the past, and to connect as they regaled mainly themselves with the chronicles of their successes. I grew smaller and bitterer. Aghast at my own defenselessness I turned black as the current of their words went through me. Supple jealousy rippled through me, cresting at the extremities of my heart and sounding notes of clean resentment.

Walled off, and then in-kicked an old mechanism of mine: in these exiles I would flash my absurd pride and build walls higher and higher around myself. It occurred to me that maybe

I was the only person I was ever able to confront. I knew, or believed I knew, that the self was only a refraction of a center, and that, in my case, what was refracted was mostly pettiness, cowardice, jealousy; but I also knew that nothing else would light my way; and I believed that

30 even if this was all I was ever able to see, I could still hold it up as a phylactery against what I feared in others.

The streetlamps and traffic lights spilled their colors into the puddles of rain: the scene through the windshield was impressionistic, the confluence of so many colors and so many reflections a bleak messiness, ran like mascara in wanton streaks. Solid shapes lost their edges and bled. It was a long drive through this phantasmagoria to Legacy Village (Zeke had a yen for pizza from CPK). We passed the bulbs and spires of The Cheesecake Factory: every year on my mom’s birthday she and whichever of her suitors around at the time would go there. We affected good cheer and all took great interest in what each of the others was saying, and just to be lavish we’d order an appetizer and even desert in our mad opulence, undaunted by the slight upscaleness of the place. We struggled to find a place to park slugging through the slow jigsaw of the lots.

Inside, seated, I watched, counted, and recounted the bottles on the bar; they wore the light in lambent motley, on their sides and on their slender necks. I looked at Joanna’s slender neck next to me; underneath the pale flesh I could see a forking vein.

“What’re you getting, Zach?” she asked her brother.

“I think I’m going to get the Greek,” I said. Joanna turned to me.

“Well that’s what I’m getting.” She turned back to her brother across the table, nursing a limeade, sullen suddenly.

“Zach?”

“Zeke.”

“What’re you getting?”

“Pepperoni.” The light overhead also parted Zeke’s hair and lit the hairline beneath.

“I guess I’ll get the barbecue chicken then,” I said.

“I figured we could all share,” Joanna conciliatory.

“Zeke, have you been looking at any colleges yet?”

“No. I mean I just turned sixteen.”

“Well you know what they say man, never too early. Maybe if you apply now they’ll take you for being ballsy or think you’re a prodigy or something.”

“Zach wants to be a comedian.”

“No I don’t.”

“I could see it,” I said and smiled.

“But you should start looking, Zach. You could definitely get some scholarship money, I bet.”

“Yeah,” from somewhere I said, “don’t end up with a bunch of debt. I mean I owe Kent something like, well, the each year it was a little different but—“

“You could’ve gotten money,” Joanna’s eyes were twinned on me.

“Could’ve, but didn’t.”

“Why not?”

“Why’d you choose Kent anyway?” asked Zeke.

“I—well I was too lazy, frankly.”

“To look for scholarships, or...?”

“For both, I guess. I—“

“All you had to do was search it or something.”

“—I know but still. I didn’t.” A pause. “I don’t know.”

“In one of my classes we filled out like a resume and went to scholarship sites and stuff.”

“Already?” Joanna asked.

“Already.”

“I don’t remember when I applied. For scholarships—well actually some were merit scholarships the school offered me to come to their school.”

“Yeah, I was lucky just to get into Kent.”

“Come on, Joe. You’re the smartest guy,” Zeke hyperbole’d.

“No well actually regardless I did pretty shitty in high school, so,” affecting a schoolmarmish tone, “attend to your academics young man.”

“You didn’t do bad, Joe, you just didn’t apply—“

“Apply yourself,” simultaneously Zeke layering over Joanna’s voice a nasal imitation of it.

“Application the problem or not,” I said as our pizzas were lowered down in front of us by our pristine waitress, “I guess the point is, I got not even a dollar from Kent.”

“But now you do well,” Joanna trying to impress who exactly, or what exactly on Zeke I wasn’t sure.

“Now I do yeah.”

We ate, and still Zeke was mysteriously pouting, and causally Joanna pouted too: she did not change her pleasant blank expression, but her internal lighting was altered. Her eyes, a sable sabled, shifted significantly. I knew her too well, I bleakly noted. Looking at her, and drily observing her various moods with unerring accuracy, I felt as a scientist, if he thought about it, must, when he looks down a microscope at some paramecium jigging in its dish: how uncanny to be so near something and yet separated by a density of distance traversable only by proxy.

Halfway through his pizza Zeke got up to go to the bathroom, and I rose to have a cigarette.

“Mind if I smoke?” No response. “Joanna?”

“Go ahead.”

“Is...that okay?”

“No it’s not okay. You know it’s not okay.”

“Okay well why—“

“You know it’s not okay. You know I don’t like you smoking in front of my little brother.”

“I’m not smoking in front of Zeke Joanna, I’m smoking outside, it’ll be fine—“

“You know what I meant.”

“Listen:” I stopped, stalled. “I’m going out to have a smoke. Okay? I’m sorry.”

Outside I watched a girl’s face puff on a Black, her skin pallored by the light of her phone’s massive screen. My cigarette depleted like a gauge, and something’s rough edges, for the length of its burning, as I watched the cobbles of the plaza shimmer like ore in the light, were ground down and away. Slightly dizzy, I made my way back to the table.

Joanna’s crude ploy to catch the attention and kindle the scorn of an oblivious Zeke, was to sniff discontentedly as I sidled back into the booth. We ate in silence: the crusts now tasted like ash. I tried to occupy Zeke with questions about AHS and what it was like these days, and received uninterested colorless replies. Joanna took the check pointedly when it came and fended off both of our thank yous with coldly polite responses.

“You can drive,” she said and handed me the keys.

The highway: the night sky, the signs flaring up as the penumbra of my headlamps’ light struck them: I indulged a fantasy of travel, that mystery of motion whose rhythm is steady like breathing, as steady and needful too, as long as it lasts, but each side of the road was flanked by familiar landmarks: upon its hill on the left Ollie’s, farther on the Belle Drum Tire Co.’s mascot a-glow; these images netted me back into reality, pricked underneath the gathering roll of my fantasy like caltrops. Certainty unfurled within me: certainty at the listless prophecy of the night’s unfolding: we would drive home, shake Zeke, argue until a less watchful hour, and, after fabricating a resolution we would fool around: yes. These glimpses shuttered down like bars in front of me, one by one. I was curiously relieved.

And that relief flowed quicker and cooler as every second, smooth and precisioned as that hiccupless ride home, surpriselessly came to pass—mainly. Joanna’s rancor was divided between my behavior and Zeke’s: she said she wished I’d set a better example for him, that he had virtually no good influences amongst his friends. And as for Zeke, he failed to find in her generosity the affection she had laid out for him as someone might lay out an outfit for their child. Their bond remained unmodified. The unambitiousness of the Joanna’s enterprise, which

I hadn’t fully grasped, took me by surprise, almost shook me out of my fearless certainty.

I thought of the times when my mom, over the years, would out of nowhere burst into my room and say she wanted to take me out to eat, just the two of us, or say “you know, I want to meet your friend Ben” or Ricky or Bruce or Nate or James or Kyle (I think I’ve remembered them all), or when she insisted on having my first high school girlfriend over to our small dog- smelling house and made all three of us tough steaks and corn on the cob. When I was young and frightened these instances were sunbursts that leveled me with gratitude, but the older I got the more it came to seem that I was doing my mom a favor, indulging her in a way that required,

35 on my part, condescension, and though some ugly desire for connection within us was sated some new distance was actually being born. I’m not sure which side of that bargain Joanna was on that night, if either, but the remembrance was so bright I could taste again the leathery steak in my mouth, my jaw working it as I, and my mother too I see now, worked desperately the awkwardness of that quiet dinner into something stomachable, see Lauren’s (that was her name) agate-colored eyes watching my mom talk about her two jobs and how she waitressed through half a degree at community college while she was raising me.

The stimuli of a resolved argument (me playing the pleader, recanting, apologizing out of that calm windlessness I was feeling) and an orgasm seemed to have kneaded Joanna’s mind to pensiveness. It was tradition, after we finished fooling around, to lie (once I’d wiped myself off: she was paranoider about impregnation than anybody I ever knew) next to each other on our backs. I lay with my foot against the side of my knee, forming a four. Invariably at this point

Joanna would doze and usually leave me to stare at the hillock of her shoulder until I deemed it a good idea to shake and wake her, and then we’d share sleepy gooey goodbye kisses and I’d go home to four or five, sometimes more, hours of wakeful boredom before dozing myself; but tonight she asked me seriously, head turned so I no longer was looking down her ear canal (the same dark pooling as her eyes, with a slightest skin tone blushing in the darkness), why did I always call her Joanna and not Jo like everybody else?

“Because I don’t want people to compare us,” I smiled and said, with what degree of seriousness I’m not sure.

And then I dozed off, or must’ve, half-dozed at least. Irritated by my stubble chafing her smooth skin (she had her arm beneath my head) Joanna called to me “Joe” as I dreamt, half- dreamt, quarter-dreamt...At what point did reality bleed in? And if not dreaming, than what? I

36 saw myself seeing her eyes, those long tunnels, convinced they extended through me and through her. I was kneeling on the quivering delicately folded flesh of her lower eyelid, parting her long lashes (mascara coating my arms and knees) and reaching into her deep still eye, fishing out fistfuls of scholarship money. I dug in soft mud with Mrs. Eckridge’s shoulder blade. And suddenly some sort of discourse was occurring between myself and a group of people I could not see but knew. And the last thing said came from Joanna’s lips, who was there, and of all the people the only I was disappointed to know, a question, the same she had already asked me:

“Why do you always call me Joanna and not Jo like everybody else?”

And I was back on my back, near her slow-breathing form, and I could not tell for the life of me, and was frightened because of this, whether she had in fact already asked me that or if I just had some kind of dark foreknowledge, had already heard asked and answered the question somewhere in that depth, and so out of an uncertainty I replied: “Because I don’t want people to confuse us.” And I smiled.

She couldn’t see but I kept my lips tight shut, fearing that the self-reproach bubbling in me would slip out: to let her see me bleed would be a dire mistake. Somehow I had lost that coolness I had found earlier, and was surrounded only by my biggest fears and strongest doubts, and in all that mire and dark I found somehow, scrounging, as if I had clawed it up out of soil, the small rock-hard evidence of who I was: and I saw my life had been an obscene prolonged squandering, chapters of nothings, an epic of pity, and my prospects infused with a vast bleakness, a sort of hopelessness unbound, as massive and empty as the long night sky, the deepest unfathomablest pool, like Joanna’s dark eyes writ large.

It lodged in me like a bullet. But I held it tight, and knew that my new ritual, as I walked to my car after gluey parting kisses, wounded, was to remind myself with each step that Joanna couldn’t see it.

III.

They were compared or confused, conflated even: often addressed, troublingly, together as one entity.

Like once they stood watching a friend—mutual, of course—playing songs by The Band at the open-mic night at the Uni-Bar, when this girl who had been sitting next to one of the other performers approached them in a businesslike manner incongruous with her heavy boots and myriad piercings. James and Royal were both leaning on the bar and both when she neared watched her behind masks of attempted distant masculine disinterest.

“Hey, are youse guys enjoying the show?” James set out a ledge of lower lip and synchronized a tilt of the head with a shrug of his shoulders, and Royal put a hand on his hip and smiled, to convey to her answers in the affirmative. Evidently somehow involved with open-mic night, she began advertising for it.

“Well, youse know we do this every week. Same time as tonight—do youse play?”

“Yeah,” Royal, “A little, yeah,” James; the former’s hair the color of burnished copper in the light, the other’s always a sort of tour of the most mundane shades of brown: this was a difference between them, one of many that each keep listed in the secret recoiling parts of their minds, to assure themselves of their separate identities.

“I thought youse might. Youse two have the look of the muser about you.”

Royal was at this a symphony of affirmative noises; James chuckled and said “oh”, and looked at the girl, aware of his ego fluttering distantly and of a sort of bemusement he always felt whenever anybody could look him straight in the eyes and say earnestly anything about ideas, politics, religion, or Art.

“So next week you should come and play a few songs.”

“Yeah,” “Yeah—could be fun.”

“Okay?”

“Yeah,” “Yeah, okay, thanks.”

“Thanks,” and she went back to sit next to the other performer.

“Dreadlocks are hot,” observed James to Royal and sipped his Carlsberg.

“You’re telling me.” Royal had an odd way of drinking: would open his mouth wide, bring the lip of the glass over his teeth, tilt and let the beer in, and close his mouth then, biting it off like a solid. Already his cheeks were a little ruddy.

“You actually going to play?” he asked.

“Naw,” James quickly. He grinned: “You?”

“Yeah maybe.”

“You are?”

“Yeah, maybe.”

“Why?” Incredulous, needlessly.

“I don’t know, what do you mean, why?”

“What do I mean?” A sip. “Well, I don’t know.”

“No, why?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know! --It just seems, I don’t know, a—I mean, don’t you think it’s a bit of just an indulgence of your vanity?”

“How do you mean?” Royal’s voice lost all agitation and inflection, went flat completely; James had heard it do this same thing...when? He ran the catalogue of their years together in their mind. He remembered.

“I mean, well it’s really just us here, you know? Like why play for a bunch of people you know are going to clap for you?”

“I don’t know what’s wrong with that,” he said. He paused, and then added with a bit of color: “Plus it’ll make Teresa want to fuck me.” He assumed a comically lecherous face and motioned with his head towards the bartender, who wore a loose t-shirt with the sleeves cut off and sides slit open over her clubbing clothes, tonight a tube top leopard-spotted and riding up over her body, which had a density of sexuality that frightened James a little bit: everything fell about her: her breasts, her ass, her long arms, her eyes and lips, with a final gravity of desire that was unargue-withable. (That tone of Royal’s earlier, he remembered. He had heard it through the thin Leebrick walls last winter: the voice Royal used to handle heavy things, to parse out

Beth’s problems or to commiserate with his mom, yes, over the phone over the death of a distant relative)

“Man, her boyfriend would be on you like stink on shit. Look at that giant Norn Irish brute. An ox. Looks like he’s working on math too; and you know how much the clean logic of math inflames the desire to kill.” He finished his beer, fished around in his pocket for a pair of pound coins, and tried to draw by concentrating on her Teresa to him.

“Naw, man,” Royal said and flexed, histrionic. He too finished his beer, in bites. “Feel like my face is all red.”

“Cause it is.”

“Yeah. Your ears are all red.”

“Really?” Distantly this and looking at the bottles behind the counter.

“Maybe I could get into Alba’s pants.”

“Man you think fucking highly of yourself.” James turned towards him.

“How is this thinking highly of myself?”

“It just is—“ his voice lapsed stupidly in a dry gulp; he continued “—it just is. I don’t know.”

“It’d be fun to play in front of everybody, is all.”

“I’m not saying anything about it being fun or not but—“

“—then what’s the problem?”

“—but you’re not going to sit there and tell me that that’s why you’d play?”

“Because it’s fun?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah but you just said you wanted to do it so you could fuck Teresa, and Alba.”

“James Jesus, I was kidding. You know that.”

“Yeah. Fine.”

“Okay.”

A break. Their friend finished and went back to the booth where the rest of their group was. Royal watched them. Teresa brought them two more. After a few minutes he said: “Are vanity and pride two different things? Two different sins, I mean.”

“Are they two different sins?” James had his back against the bar now. “I’m not sure.

Pride cometh before the fall.”

“Vanity of vanities.”

“Saith the preacher. –And all is vanity. ALL.”

“I think they’re different.”

“Guilty of both.”

“Who.”

“You—and me. Teresa and her goon too,” pointing with his chin superciliously over his left shoulder.

“I’d be proud to fuck her.”

“It’d be in vain. Lightweights are terrible lovers. What’s that, your third pint, O Royal of the Red Face?”

“Fuuuuuck you.”

“Here, let’s go chew our damp gold Carlsberg over with the gang.”

“Okay. That from something?”

And that was towards the end, actually. In retrospect each found it easy to pinpoint the instabilities of the whole thing, when strain began to show and all those purportedly eternal bonds began to slacken and reveal themselves for fantasies.

In fact, to Royal, each memory he had of the years they knew each other came to seem like a symbol, a stitch in an intricate pattern that, had he thought to read it then, would have

43 revealed to him this final destination: each minute of those four years was a gear moving this machine to this termination.

For instance: James coming into his room sophomore year, before Ulster, a piece of paper in his hands.

“Hey,” he said, breathlessly.

“Hey.”

James was sporting a full beard in those days, growing it out through the winter after he left Cara and through a good portion of the spring. The first time he broke up with her, actually, he had done the same thing, shaved off the beginner’s beard he’d had then, fashioning it into a mustache and little patch on the chin in a sort of nod they thought to musketeerery, chivalry, Don

Juanism; and so to drive the point home they called the look ‘pico de gallo’, which lent it, they both agreed, the exact suavity aurally it conveyed visually—but.

“Can I read you something, real quick?”

“What is it?”

“Just a quote I found.”

“Yeah.”

“’I am convinced now more than ever that there is emotional entropy, that each of us has a personal entropic field that dissolves our strong youthful feeling and reduces all our relationships to an indistinguishable, even rubble.’”

“Nice. Who wrote it?”

“I did.”

Royal hadn’t really understood the purpose of this sort of ruse at the time, understood it not much better now (although the weirdness of James’ relationship to Christy made it somewhat

44 clearer) but thought how strange it was that that had happened at all, and moreover that he was now thinking of it—or rather, that of all the things he could’ve thought of, sitting here at Rosie’s in the fall of his last year, having just thought he may’ve seen James, that came to mind. Such a small detail.

“What are you two’s plans for the weekend?” asked Emily across the table. Under the table Sara held his hand and he yanked his attention away from the familiar-looking back in line at the store and focused it on Emily, the vague squinting exoticism of her upturned eyes and high cheeks: also Tiffany next to her. And he answered mechanically—but pleasingly, too, he hoped.

He was finding this performance, being a Boyfriend, more and more insultingly farcical. The hiss and clatter and bustle of Rosie’s, the low gurgle of the fryers, the screech of spatulas across the grills scraping away accumulated congealed brown mess, the pert click of isosceles-bladed knives against the chopping boards; and over this the raucous chatter of the early Thursday night crowd, the gussied up girls, the long fratboys hanging over them like pale willows over lakes, the couples bickering or muttering to one another, the group clowns running through their routines desperately-cheerfully: tonight: and he? His own pleasures awaiting tonight, movies with Sara, boring but this relationship still new enough that even as mundane an activity as movie night was illumined with the brilliance of its novelty, “like how cave paintings are as revered as a Picasso, even if they’re simpler”, said James once, on the topic. Just even her hand in his like now was a fulfillment. He looked at her sidelong and saw beyond her their reflection in the window glass, featureless, shadelike. He could feel even through her heavy coat the warmth of her, her breathing. How long really had it been since he’d been with a woman, in any way? Well, a while. In Ulster rarely. And James meanwhile had taken over there Nelson’s sentiments to heart—but.

--And anyway it couldn’t have been him, and anyway it wasn’t epochal or anything,

Royal had just seen him a couple weeks ago, down at the Zephyr; had bummed a cigarette off of him, social smokers both. They had smoked on the banks of the Seine, at a cafe over escargot, in a preplanned fit of Gallicism; their two days in France they’d intended to spend in as stereotypically French a way as possible. James bought smut and Baudelaire from the bookstalls along the river; the nude on the cover had reminded Royal of Beth, and he remembered now thinking irrationally then that he hated James—and so, then too. So.

Tiffany and Emily had broken away from them on the way back to Johnson. They walked through Risman plaza over that giant heated K.

“This plaza’s haunted by the spirit of that ugly old fountain,” he said.

“Oh, I always liked it actually! Haunted.”

“My dad told me that architecturally it’s nothing special. Once they filled it up with a bunch of soap, actually.

“Really? Who?”

“Oh, I don’t know, but they did. And it was windy so the foam got blown up in big like clouds, you know? Flying and landing all over the place.”

A laugh. “That’s funny.” In front of the MACC, watching the parking lot lights shower unsparing brightness over pockets of cars.

“Everybody always parks around the lights,” Sara said.

“Afraid of the dark or something.”

“Afraid of getting murdered on their way back to their cars.”

“Nobody’d murder professors. They got such a pathetic life as it is.”

“No, but remember that student who wanted to kill his professor?”

“Oh.”

“And also why would the professors park here in the visitors’ lot?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Geez. Royal. And anyway murderers don’t care.”

“Yep,” this facetiously, “it’s a terrible world we live in.” It was funny, because by all real standards he barely knew Sara, yet here he was content to sit next to her in front of the

MACC. Hardly caring to say a word. The uninspiring vistas. That first social barrier, he thought of a sudden, that was the tenderest intimacy; the farther two people proceeded into each other’s hearts, the more sanctums desecrated, the more rituals created, the less really one was invested in the relationship; and it became a fixture, a machine of no surprise, as opposed to this, he felt now as if he had stumbled accidentally into Faery, so light was his heart in its cage, so clean he felt.

And all ephemeral, he knew, doomed to—but. Yes: doomed, that was the right word: make the memories now that when it begins to collapse we have relics to rely on, to convince ourselves that we believe, have always believed and been committed.

And so, billowing out like a curtain bellied by wind, he unhooked his hand from hers and placed it around her shoulders and stared at her profile—aquiline nose down and incongruously out of a heavyset face, imperfect skin mottled by the wind’s finger’s incessant fondling, chinlength hair curving under her chin and glossy glossy glossy—until by dint of concentration he drew her eyes to his and kissed her. His tongue at her lips found hers and at that impasse they grappled, limbless. Suddenly the night was suffused with a smoky scent, hung it seemed from star to star like bunting; from where it came he had no idea but knew it before, on other nights, like this: and a rill of pleasure from between his shoulderblades raveled down and out of him.

At the door of Johnson: “I’m sorry I have to get up so early. Otherwise you could come up.”

“No, it’s okay. I really have some work I should do anyway before I go to bed.” And the awkward fumbling. He kissed her goodnight and, without surprise he noted that the unreal realm he had been moving through sealed itself off from him. He made his way back, taking the path behind the Honors College, past the basketball court (there’s the bench where...), past Taylor

Hall, through the memorial parking lot. The lighted bulk of Centennial A loomed to his left; smokers leaned on or stood moodily under the arch leading into the quadrangle. He proceeded along the walk, towards Tri, alternately illuminated and endarkened, Royal and counter-Royal, as he walked under lamp, shadow, lamp...

Royal had a little project he worked on from time to time. He and James had variously called it The Matrix, The Grid, The Tangle, The Net, etc., but now, consulting as he did nobody about it, he called it nothing. Basically on his Mac he had accumulated a vast repository of photos of artists: of novelists, painters, architects, musicians; ordered alphabetically and democratic in the extreme, excluding nobody he had even graced with a passing thought or heard the most fleeting description of over the years. And occasionally, without knowing exactly why, although its primary purpose was to furnish him with a source of new material for the background of his computer (which he changed obsessively), he would open up the folder and study, for no more than ten minutes or so, this gallery, entertaining the idea with enough prophylactic self-consciousness and ironic detachment to save himself from realizing how fervently and to what extent he believed in it, that he was searching for some common thread amongst them all, some something, a line at the mouth, shadow across the face, that might be found in all these portraits and so reconcile that inchoate mass into a resolute whole, an answer;

48 bind Dawn Powell pretty at the beach to lean lupine Joe McElroy, and both to Frida Kahlo, and all three to Bougereau, and...

Stared; stared; grew bored; quit.

He stared glumly at the clock: 11:18. He brought his Mac over to the bed, and lay down with it on his stomach. He found a site to stream TV and watched an old sitcom. In this episode, the oafish husband wanted to do something that disappointed his wife; she allowed him to do it, but, so guilt-ridden was he left by her attitude that he slunk back to the house and apologized— whereupon she yelled at him and told him to go back. She wanted, Royal realized, to have her anger, something that she could hold so much easier than gratitude or repentance: there was a real value in that anger, so tangible. Perhaps it was the late hour but in the darkness, face and chest illumined by the laptop’s bright unblinking eye, his mind thrilled to feel the perspicacity, the truth of those emotions—how real it was! How acute and understanding one comedy writer, though estranged a thousand thousand times from beauty or art, displayed himself to be!

He closed the laptop and laid it on his desk; stripped off his hoodie, pants, undershirt.

Peeled off his clammy socks. Crawled into bed and watched the ceiling. Drifting to sleep, he heard a sound like distant thunder and a chill held around him.

IV.

It was late, past midnight, when he fell in, completely by accident, with a handful of people whom he’d been in high school with, and it was later still, past one or one thirty, when he actually realized that they were old schoolmates, a discovery that caused some internal discomfort to sift quietly out of him, or at least through him, for he had been staring at the three faces expectantly, waiting for the dawn of something, the drawing-up out of him of some fact that would reconcile their otherworldliness and bring them back to a place he understood. Truth was he saw his life recently like a series of omens, and the three faces, their individual ears and eyes and lips and teeth, were symbols intimating, oh, only the usual: death, doom, or deja vu— things that his mind had crudely ran, with its thick fingers, into a sort of impasto, each intimating the others—and feelings, it has to be said, he’d felt many nights previous, as he threaded his way through the teeming knots of night-people choking the sidewalks, drawing giddily like sliding blinds back and forth across the streets, clinging coolly like barnacles to the brick sides of buildings and of the bars and tattoo parlors, the closed bank and food co-op; or as he had stared intermittently at his hands, his drink, the profiles of others degree along the long bars; he was able to shake the feeling one way or another, of course, either through deliberate self-saturation or through sheer raucous debauchery, the usual late-teen-early-twenties assholery, either method’s efficacy being a pristine 100%, and each reaffirming his belief in the passing of all

50 things pleasant and otherwise, and each leaving him, at some quiet point in the evening or early morning, for just a second or so, with a feeling similar to that which one might have had after arriving at a funeral in disguise; but this passed.

“You say you went where?” he said.

“Aurora. High School?” said the one nearest him in the booth, a balloon of a face whose features seemed to operate via some sort of internal pneumatic system, each part inflating in tandem with the deflation of another.

“That’s where I went! Jesus.” He wiped his hand on his jeans and sent it across the table to each, even though they had been together for an hour and a half.

“Graduated oh-eight?” asked the second as he took the offered hand.

“Yessir.”

“What’s your name?” asked the third.

“What? Oh, Jesus, my name’s Richard Still.”

“Oh! Shit man, I remember you! Stephen Rims,” the first said, his cheeks lifting like twin dirigibles and drawing a smile taught between them.

“Oh yeah!” he turned smiling redly to the second and let his expectant silence ask the obvious for him.

“Troy Limner.”

“Yeah—wow, how weird is that, and you guys have been going here since high school?”

“We had History of Rock together,” the third put in, “Joey Caldwell. I sat in the back.”

“Oh, okay, well, jeez, I can’t believe you’ve been here since freshmen year and I haven’t seen you guys around once.”

They caught up, reliving a few shared memories, Still pretending to remember much that, quite frankly, he’d forgot. They each had another beer, and as they left just before two, there was a bit of a confusion between the three as to who was picking up the tab, Limner insisting that

Rims had agreed to pay, Rims definitely remembering Caldwell saying ‘my treat’ at least twice,

Caldwell trying to kowtow the other two to split the tab between them, haranguing in his needling voice which, if it did not actually exist somewhere in Still’s memory banks, had already managed to squirm its way in and a make a place for itself there with oleaginous familiarity.

Outside the bar, the evening had torn itself to rags. Few cars slid past as they walked back towards campus, and from some indeterminate quarter came high shrieking laughter.

“Looks like it’s getting a little light out already,” observed Limner.

“Can’t.”

“It is. Look over there.”

“I think that might just be the streetlights against the sky,” said Still.

“You ever wonder if they’re actually like, stained by that light? By the street lights, I mean? The clouds,” Limner crooned. Still noticed Caldwell’s lips moving but the three of them met and wove through a group of girls at the corner, and whatever he said was lost among their several voices. He was hazily astounded (rope-muscled) at how much (ankle’s reddening at the tip of the shoe) desire was kindled (like marbled pillars some of them and others tanner) from a moment’s glance. He was aware Rims was asking him something.

“What’s that?”

“What dorm?”

“Oh. I live at Towers.”

“College?”

“No, Tri.”

They made their way up Main, passing between houses. The front lawn, unkempt and pockmarked, was strewn with beer bottles glittering sullenly, cardboard beer boxes flattened and tattooed with muddy bootprints, red cups crushed or fissured, and cigarette boxes with droplets of moisture caught between the cellophane and the cardboard.

“What’s going on up there?” Rims leered.

“Ever been to one of these?” Limner asked, Still presumed to him.

“No. I thought you needed to bring girls?”

Still’s big secret (concealed from whom, he can’t exactly say), and the one that occasionally reveals itself through naïve comments like that, is that he really isn’t all that au courant with capital C capital L College Life. He always had a gift for. Well, he didn’t seem to have any evident or pressing at least moral qualms with shedding old selves like a snake does skins. Without really knowing it he had achieved a sort of desire of his. He seemed to have worn down all the rough edges of his character, so that he could be deposited into just about any situation: an innocuous rock, social currents just ran around him. The result is that he finds his way into scenarios that aren’t strictly speaking something Richard Still is in to, but because he doesn’t seem to stick out in any way, he fits in. Aware of this, he had always figured the momentum of the semester would cast him onto the shore of a frat party at some point or another.

They approached the foot of the porch. Thin Limner was the first to thread his way in, his foot the last thing they see before his hand is cast up to the surface, gripping a cup triumphant, by the wave of human bodies. Still seemed to be able to insinuate himself further into the knot only via collision, each smack or clatter of his body against another propelling him

53 a little further into the center, the wood planks barely visible beneath his feet. It was only when he stumbled over the threshold of the front door that he realized he’d overshot his mark. A blonde brushed past him and slid neatly into the crowd. The inside of the house was white, full of mellowed shadows and lamplight. Voices drifted towards him from various sectors. The music died inexplicably for a moment and in a moment of fancy Still imagined himself at the center of some manifestation of a secret, a secret that spoke no language but revealed itself through a convergence of many things on a single point, this point in this particular instance being the shuddering mob of bodies, the three valent classmates, the drifting voices, the whole knotted chiaroscuro of the house, its obscure ambiance, and the hysterical nothing of the night beyond, all centered, in Still’s mind (in a moment of egoism not uncommon in him) on himself; keep murmuring, he told the voices; shadows and light, stay around me so; remain faceless and stay still, Still. But somebody on the porch managed to find and join the plug he’d tripped over with the scuffed extension cord his foot had disconnected it from, and the music filled the void it’d left, a void that Still’s fantasy had apparently been occupying, because it fled the scene almost faster than he could register it at all. Everything shuddered back into the rut of motion it had been running itself through all night, as planned, and Still searched out the bathroom.

He ran his hand over his face. In the mirror too. His hair too long by a few weeks. He looked at himself sideways in the mirror and ran a hand over his neck. He wondered briefly if he were destined, eventually, to become a parody of his self, as he aged. “It’s good some of us die young, or all humanity would amount to would be the billion deaths of a billion caricatures.”

Outside nobody was waiting.

Upstairs, he poked his head into a room and found two guys sitting and standing in front of a laptop. Two bottles of beer were sweating rings of moisture onto the desk.

“Hey,” said Still, still distant enough apparently to not mind being forward, “can I have one of those?”

“I drank out of mine, man. Lookit this.”

“I don’t mind drinking out of one you drank out of,” Still said sententiously, “What’s this?”

“Music video. You watch Adult Swim?”

“Sometimes. What is it?”

“It’s a music video,” said the other, breaking his silence.

“Oh.”

He watched. Well, a brief and inexplicable jealousy for everyone ever photographed, ever videotaped, for every portrait built up on canvas out of thick and textured paints or roughed out in charcoal, the permanent shadows of small scuttling things and leaves folded up in rocks.

Feeling something pull somewhere.

“She’s hot.” Observed one afterward.

“Yeah. Hey, thanks for the beer,” said Still, grabbing one and making for the doorway, wincing, expecting to be collared or harassed or something but, when he reached the door and turned around, saw that they had restarted the video.

In the hall he sipped at the lukecoldish beer and listened to the subharmonic throb of the party on the deck. The disembodied voices still found him, flitting in and out of his consciousness like insects. Another door down the hallway was closed. Still pressed his hear against the door and, hearing nothing, tried the handle. Inside, the lights were off, and Still could make out the shadowed bulks of two beds, one on either side of the room. Directly ahead of him was a curtainless window that let the streetlamp light deep into the room in circular bands of

55 diminishing luminosity, the dimmer enclosing the brighter, like a diagram of the churning spheres. Still could almost hear the music as they thread their immensities through empty space, sonorous and from other worlds, the lowdrawn throbbing whalesong.

He sat on one of the beds and watched the street outside.

Still the Chronicler, ultimately. Because that was what he did, and why he had purposely

(albeit without fully understanding) ran his character down to such an innocuous nub: chronicle.

Catalogue endlessly all the minor variations from one thing to another, storing their specificities like evidence for some byzantine, interminable court case. Ever since little he had stockpiled every tic, mark, superficial nuance of everything—to what end? Well to the only end he had ever envisioned for himself; maybe an end like something that terminated in some sort of indictment that would ring out a peace for him in all the ceaseless unreignable churn of his life?

Still blinked. That; maybe.

A girl staggered along the uneven sidewalk. Bronze skin, orange lamplight, blacksequined purse. Know the name of: blouse, keyhole cut. Shadows pooling: in the cleft between her breasts, under her eyes and over her cheeks, in the ear’s catacombs, in shallow stains along her legs pumping in their pumps. Evidence. Still a Chronicler.

Guided by a gentle horror, he reached out and tried the window, found it locked, found the lock and turned it. Then, trying again, the window gave without a sound and let in all the sounds of the street: the hopeless lights of the streetlamps and the sad ground shit ground into the ground by foot- after footfall.

Well no: no hopelessness in that light, and the only sorrow amongst the ash and the punctured empty cans was his own. He removed himself and saw the things again: the streetlamps: the sidewalk, and refuse. The roof sloped away from him and he reached his hand

56 out and felt the rough surface of the shingles. And that was no good either, these things without him. Without him, what a falling out: it was as if he were the outermost ring ringing in all the endless concentricities of everything in his mind’s endless arms and if he disappeared that whole infinity would fall and shatter like glass. He stuck out a shoe and flirted with footing for a moment on the incline. Some kind of pressure that held things together. Well, for? His other foot out and firmly planted too, he sat bent-backed between the window and its sill and had a horrid ignoble thought that if it closed suddenly with force he would be cracked, dead, folded right along the top of the pelvis, Jesus. Nobody had noticed yet. But for its own sake only and nothing else. He swayed and instinctively knelt. He crawled towards the right edge of the roof, where the trees came nearest. On all fours towards the shadow-greedy trees in the night. He swore that one of these days he’d learn the name of a tree or two. Birch, sycamore, maple, elm, yew: let the words take root in his mind. There is no sake except for to be not dead. One foot over the edge.

“What’s that?”

The voice was fuzzed with drink. The other over. The drop? Oh not more than twelve feet, so. Still, still, breathed the scent of the nearby leaves and the smoke from cigarettes and the faintest hint of something cold coming in the air intermingled.

“It’s somebody.”

“Somebody’s on the roof?”

“Are they trying to kill themselves?”

“I see his fingers.”

To believe that maybe what if everything were a syllable of your own name.

“Is he going to jump?”

“It’s, like, twelve feet.”

To be fleshed and boned with acceptance.

“What an asshole.”

Remember: this will not last.

“Who is it?”

Still let himself gently off the edge of the roof, and landed with a thud on his feet, hard enough that he was bent into a half-crouch. Somebody screamed too loudly and everybody started laughing. Amongst the voices above the music he couldn’t hear any of the three he came with. He made his way down the rumpled lawn and to the sidewalk. All the way up and down the street the streetlamps glowed serenely, and lights from signs and the headlights of cars in passing came together and bled into one another and colored the night in a sort of benefice.

Still pointed himself campuswards. He walked along the edge of front campus, past the

Circle K, the Long John Silvers and Taco Bell, the Continental Grill. After White on his right he adjusted his angle and made his way up the hill, between Verder and Dunbar, past Prentice. He felt an ebbing. What had, twenty minutes ago, ran through and through him now was sneaking out of him. Nothing had changed.

He was swallowed up, as he walked, by small clusters of friends walking, swallowed up, naming their attributes, and distilled again into a solitude. He could feel the clutter of reality filling him again. The catalogue of our desperation. Still: for its own sake. And the truth: there is never anything not familiar and that there would come again a time when light would spray in beams from his fingers and his head would tumble with jewels.

“So it came to pass that the old king like all before him became feeble and weak and knew even in the softness of his failing mind that the time drew near, and so many hours he spent in the Morning and the Evening Consultations looking into the faces of A’liél, so many hours indeed that often he left the Morning Consultation when the people of the palace, all its thousand thousand attendants and the courtiers in their regalia, and the people of the city met for their

Middle Meal, or drew the Evening Consultation on and on until the weak sun began to lift the night away on invisible hands, and so it was for many months, and the old king moved in this sleepless labyrinth of visions and all but neglected matters of the State, until one morning a face of A’liél turned something new and clear and troubling towards him and in a panic the king called in his advisor Bal-Qu’azar and had with him a colloquy and then, with his spirits calmed, proceeded to the throne room and against all the precedent of generations called his youngest son the Prince Paracelsus before him.

Now this Prince Paracelsus wore his hair long and wild in the ancient fashion and though, as the youngest son, he was owed no education, the astrologer Grilim had taken to him in his early years and had taught him as he would have taught his own sons or the students drawing their maps of the stars in the observatories. And so Grilim had made known to him all the

Accepted Arts, nor was denied to Paracelsus the histories of the old religions and the agonized existence of cults and the horrors in which the Pure Religion was rooted.

And so Prince Paracelsus was bid come and arrived before the king. And the king, who, as all the precedent of generations dictated, had not seen his youngest son since the Birth-watch, as he looked upon the Prince, even addled as he was by age and the heat of the midday sun through the high windows and the heavy robes and perfumes of his office and the long ravages of time and its endless catalogue of anger and regret played ceaselessly day after day upon the heart and mind and face, still as he eyed the young and strange and dark and wild-haired young man before him, he could not but be taken aback. And yet still he said in calm and regal tones

You are my son the Prince.

And Paracelsus bowed and said I am, my Lord. And the old king nodded and bid him rise and proceeded then to the business that filled his mind, what he had seen in A’liél’s shining faces, and he drew from his side the sword and placed its point on the floor before him and said

Paracelsus, my son, the endless faces of A’liél have lately shown me what I have long known, that my time draws to its end. I am old and do not grieve for it. Yet too does it show me that of all my sons it is you who will be king, and this troubles me. You are the youngest son and as such never schooled in statecraft nor been called to battle on the wastes in my retinue.

And Paracelsus watched the sunlight cast in lambent tones the face of his father and set glistering the facets of A’liél, and he bethought himself of the mad poet-exile X’anc’t and his vision of the statue in the desert of a beautiful king in a magnificent throne caught and held in a column of divine fire. But his father was only an old man stooped and beaten down by the years and chased out of his happiness like a thief out of a house. The Prince, through his pity, said the

Histories, my Lord, are not unknown to me. Grilim the astrologer did see to my education in all

60 the Accept Arts. True it is that I have never known the wastes or engaged in mortal combat, but nary a week passed that I did not spend hours training in the barracks with the soldiers.

The king in his seat behind A’liél shifted and he said Still does it trouble me for in all my years as king and in all the thousand thousand consultations in the mornings and in the evenings, never did I question the visions in the blade. And yet this most recent vision does trouble me, for never did I doubt that your brother the Heir Apparent Flamel would after the funeral fires had brought me back to ash sit on the throne and wield the sword of generations. Though your brother Cardano be a master of statecraft, yet is he as a child in the body, frail and weak and womanly, and as well the middle son whose righteous lot is a distant dukedom, and truly Flamel is a strong man and a good general who is not blind either to the intricacies of statecraft, and each morning during the latest campaigns in the wastes did I even see him humbly consult the stars and by this know that he is a pious as well as a strong man.

Paracelsus who had been secluded from the life of the Court and from the campaigns in the wastes had seen Flamel but rarely and never had a word passed between them, and the middle brother dark small Cardano was to him a complete stranger. Yet the Prince possessed a proud heart and, when he heard this praise lavished on men he knew not and whose accomplishments besides his own he had little regard for, a dark twist of jealousy coiled in him and aloud he said Would that I had been given the chances my brothers have had to prove myself worthy in your eyes, my Lord.

And the old king said not a word and a silence in the great hall gathered and the frightened attendants in their rows eyed now one man and now the other and felt the feverish beat of their hearts beneath their brocaded tunics and flesh and muscle and bones. At last the

61 king said True it is that your lot as the youngest has differed from that of your brothers. Yet this law comes down from the generations before us and must not be questioned.

And the king spoke truly. Yet it must be recorded that before he had summoned the

Prince Paracelsus to his throne room he had consulted in his perplexity an advisor about the nature of his visions, and this advisor was named Bal-Qu’azar and he was a one with a twisted and a corrupt heart, and a godless man and one with no faith either in the state or the line or its sword of generations, and middle son Cardano knew this, and knowing also that his father the king was troubled, Cardano did come to Bal-Qu’azar, and showed him many glittering jewels from the wastes and cloth of most delicate cut that pleased the advisor greatly, and said to him that if only he would, when the king came to him, lead the feeble ruler to move against the visions he clung so dearly too all these riches and more would be his. And as Bal-Qu’azar’s resolve did wither under this rain of riches so too did he see that the king’s hobbled will gave under his storm of advice and consolation, which bit into the soft stuff of his faith and wore it away as long ago the howling winds of the world and all the ancient rains had powdered the mountains of the plains into the profound expanses of the dusts of the wastes. And so now before his youngest son he sheathed A’liél and said I do not doubt that you have been raised passing well and as my son are as much above the common run as the spires of the Central

Citadel do tower over the rest of our kingdom, yet true it is that you are still the youngest and so unfit to rule. In matters of statecraft you know nothing save what may be found in the Histories, and you have never known the life even of a soldier of the lowest rank. I say again that you are not fit to rule, my son.

And Paracelsus said My Lord, with such an edict you move directly against the visions in the faces of A’liél.

And the king said I have been troubled much by these visions and I have spoken to trusted advisors, and it has been confirmed that to move against A’liél is in the long history of our line not without precedent, for our ancestor the king Abilem was not pleased with the visions in the faces and did take it upon himself to shift the future away from what the visions showed.

And Paracelsus knew that the king spoke the truth but knew also, and had known for many years, though until presented with the sight of his deluded father did not know how to speak of what he knew, which was that truth was not to be found in facts but in motive, and that one may speak the truth and still turn it to crooked purposes of deception and make the truth a lie and useless. And he knew from the Histories that king Abilem was moved for reasons far darker and deeper than the simple caprice of an aged and enfeebled mind that moved his father now.

Yet he kept what he knew he could not say within himself and stood silent and sullen before the old king and awaited his dismissal. Yet did his father too remain silent and so again the two strangers found themselves each locked in looking at the other, until at last Paracelsus impatient and distempered asked Given my Lord’s decision I do wonder for what purpose he has brought me before him this day, against all decorum and precedent, unless it were only to apprise me of the destiny I am being denied.

And immediately the Prince knew he had spoken unwisely and knew by the passing shadow of anger across his father’s face that the ageing king knew it as well, and for the length of two long breaths a new silence filled the air of the vasty chamber, and the attendants in their rows said brief silent prayers for the body and the soul of the Prince. Yet at last the king in measured tones spoke, said You are angry. And true it is that to many it would appear I wrong you. But if you let the heat of your youth’s anger die down you will understand that the choice I made was not made lightly, and made with no intention other than to do what is best for our

63 kingdom. And as king that is my duty and my right to make. Before this day the last I had set eyes on you was during the Birth-watch. I know nothing of your character or abilities and so you cannot accuse me of making my decision in a fit of bias. Indeed, true it is that I find you in almost every way to be better off than any youngest son of the king has right to be, and truly has

Grilim given you more than I had ever expected or wanted for you. You were conceived under inauspicious stars and I had never heard such screams of pain as those drawn from your mother the Queen in releasing you into the world. And as Grilim brought me along the corridor towards the birthing room I had ominous thoughts such as I had never known. For reasons I cannot explain the night your mother spent in labor I was drawn to the works of a blind exile poet whose name escapes me. Ever I had found little use in the works of the state and of the exile poets, discounting such frippery as a kind of madness not fit to squander one’s time upon, and truly the monstrous precision of this poet’s verses was a kind of madness and in a sort of despair I realized that what I read was what he had drawn out of himself with that same agony of your mother bringing you into this world, and that he had birthed in ink hard-drawn as blood and twice as precious out in the desolate ends of the exile’s wastes his monstrous loneliness for all to read.

This dark thought clouded my mind as I neared the birthing chamber and I was loath to sit even the brief Birth-watch of the youngest son and I know that as I looked down upon you in your sickly newness and saw how weak you seemed, how already wasted by the world’s demands, I thought that you would not be long for this world, and because I did not know you this did not cause me sorrow. And truly my son I looked hardly at all upon you during the watch. For all the horror of sound that brought you into our world you made not a noise all the watch long, so that I could not be sure even then whether you lived or were dead.

And as he spoke the king’s eyes were fixed on a distant angle of stone in the long chamber and fixed intently, and as he spoke his voice rose and fell with the even rhythm of sleep or trance or the chant of the Last Mourner and Paracelsus knew that his father had found the past again and was lost within it, and he knew that this was the disease of the old and the infirm and so he waited and weighed the words the king had said as one would weigh a handful of jewels, reckoning their worth. For above all else did Paracelsus excel at remembering, and at unmasking a man’s words and finding their true motive beneath, even as he perfected his own masks. As a boy he had watched Grilim with delicate tools fall upon pinned fragile insects, opening their chest and unspooling their innards and chipping away at the delicate crystal of their paneled wings until all that was left were neat and little piles of organ and limb, which he would then circle around with an open notebook before him writing in his cramped hand his arcane notes, circling and peering like an insect himself. And ever afterward did images of those pinned and opened creatures appear to Paracelsus when he spoke to others and made his knowledge of them and filled all the high halls of his mind with their evidences.

At last the king’s mind fell back to the present and he looked down at his third son and said All this is only to say that I am pleased the world has offered you a fate brighter than that I had such portents of so long ago. Yet still is it not right that you should rule. You are more along and more developed than ever I thought you would be yet still are you half-along only, and fit only for the portion allotted to the third and youngest son.

And Paracelsus said If this be so then why have you called me before you so suddenly and against all practice and decorum? I am the youngest son, and from the day of my birth to this I have been treated as such, and you have decided that my future will move along in much

65 the same fashion. And so it puzzles me why my Lord has requested an audience with me to share what shall surprise none.

And the old king said Well do you ask why I have summoned you today, for truly is it against all the decorum and policy for the youngest son to see his father privately and to draw his attention away from the endless businesses of the state and the rigors of ceremony. Yet as you have rightly said to act against the visions of A’liél is a matter of grave import and delicacy, and as it involved your fate in this world I deemed it necessary to impart to you the reasons for my decision, which I believe I have done.

The Prince Paracelsus could see the king was lying and though young and impetuous still was he prudent enough to know that for the moment it would be best to hold his tongue and he said only I understand, my Lord, and I thank you for so doing. In all things are you wise and just and guided by your selfless love of the state.

And though these words did seem right yet the Prince’s manner of speech did give them a dark savor and the king noticed this and frowned and dismissed his youngest son Paracelsus from the chamber and watched the strange young man who had been such a frail and sickly baby and who had weathered his inhospitable first night of tenuous life in complete silence, and who had now grown to a man’s height and yet who was still so strange and so foreign, and the king knew in his heart what he had needed to meet the Prince to confirm. With a frown still troubling his features he rose and, followed by his retinue, into the private chambers he went, where awaited the godless Bal-Qu’azar.”

--So, (verb?)the first chapter of the first book of E.C. Grayling’s Paracelsus, Prince of Mars series, which Smythe had discovered when he was sixteen or so. Discovered in the way that we

66 always remember discovering something precious in our lives, be it a book or a movie or a person, that gets sort of inlaid like a jewel on to the most permanent part of our minds—or as close to such a discovery as Smythe had ever made up to that point in his life, probably less exalted and revelatory than the term usually connotes, which is actually part of a much larger question for Smythe, what a one-time and now possibly-dead friend of his Christy Wagoner called quote unquote troubling let-down of everything, “every single thing” Christy would say with his usual excessive emphasis, and what most people including now Smythe when he wasn’t feeling nostalgic would probably call just plain old disappointment, but neither its plainness or oldness mitigating really at all the fact of its painfulness.

But discovered, the tatty old paperback, a yellow-spined Del-Ray, amongst other books in a box of things he was given to sift through, taking what he wanted, by his aunt after her son his cousin had died under circumstances that even today as an adult Smythe isn’t sure he can fully explain, but that were finally boiled down to a suicide by the newspaper reports and the alchemical reductions of gossip. Smythe hadn’t yet come to that point in his life’s confusion where he had any light so to speak in his lantern to guide him, and so had, harmlessly, been swinging the thing around in the dark still, and so the book, which he took mainly because the old fantasy cover art pricked some tender part of his brain, sat on his shelf for two years when, having discovered literature, he began to recognize some of the names beneath the blurbs on the back cover: C.S. Lewis, Jack Vance, Robert E. Howard. And it wasn’t until after he graduated from high school that, one hot evening in, he picked up Paracelsus and read for the first time “So it came to pass that the old king...”

One of the problems with communicating our obsessions is that our rules for appreciating them are written in the language of our own minds, and nobody except ourselves is anywhere

67 near indulgent enough to take the time to learn it. And even though Smythe, who knew everything but not actively (“all knowledge is within ourselves from the off, but in passive, latent form; it needs art or people or other sacred stimuli to be kindled into usefulness within us,” said the philosopher Aylmer, in an interview and later on in an essay (he had a photographic memory for anything he himself said), feeling a little more of a mystic than usual), he tried time and again to convert girlfriends, parents, relatives, professors, to Graylingism, even one Christmas going so far as to bring up to his obviously-never-quite-recovered aunt the fact that evidently her deceased son had excellent taste in fiction, and she was polite enough not to cry or make a scene and appreciated the sentiment behind the discomfiting discussion, but definitely wasn’t interested in making a foray into early twentieth century fantasy literature.

It was always the problem of articulation that haunted Smythe: once he discovered how full he became from literature, he knew it was his duty, his calling, to somehow bring this fullness to others. Oh yes, calling: well, Smythe, who came so circuitously to art, and who always felt, as he moved within it, like a distant relative at a wedding just grateful to have been remembered and invited, never had the same self-consciousness that plagued, say, Christy, or even James, or even James’s Lucy, and so talking of it never made him blush at his own audacity like those three hypersensitives might’ve. But this articulation: it was so that every paper he ever wrote for any class was a trial, an agony as he ransacked himself to get that light in his brain to shine on the words in front of him. Freshman year on, every paper he wrote: dense, cryptic, sometimes twice or thrice the length asked for but not in the precocious way Christy’s papers always went on and not even always first-rate from a scholar’s point of view (more than once when he had Dr. Guilty for some mid-level writing intensive course, the doctor would read only about halfway and lazily put it down and give him a B), for reasons funnily enough that his

68 professors, when put to it, couldn’t always articulate, and so at the end of these papers would be vague, useless commentary: “Quality of thought is present but direction needed,” “Voice is strong overall but difficult to determine your thrust/point,” “Ordering of paragraphs is decidedly whimsical.”

Perhaps not surprisingly then he was a favorite of Dr. Ryder, who also seemed to have a similar problem of not being able to present what he knew in anything other than a single massive indigestible tangle, and for whom he wrote, in English Studies, his first paper on

Grayling. And it wasn’t long after getting that essay back he asked Dr. Ryder to be his thesis advisor. His topic? Fantasy as technique in E.C. Grayling’s Paracelsus novels. Ryder agreed, even though he wasn’t especially qualified or learned in the topic at hand, partially because he liked Smythe and partially because he knew nobody else in the department would be able to serve him better. The following summer Ryder read the six Paracelsus novels in about a month, sitting on his front porch.

“What did you think?” asked Smythe when he was next at the professor’s home. And

Ryder, who was loquacious while teaching but in conversation abrupt to the point of bluntness, said pronounlessly “Stilted. Artificial. Long-winded,” and sniffed, and maybe disappointment would’ve set in on Smythe if he wasn’t still so happy just to’ve got somebody to read the books; he had developed a sort of paranoid fantasy about them, that they existed only for him, that he had literally willed the books into existence somehow without really knowing it.

And he realized that though he looked through the books constantly, pulling quotes and building his book (and it did end up being a book-length undergrad thesis, which impressed his entire committee at first until they had to wade through the jungles of his verbiage; it can still be found, twice as fat as anything else on the shelf, wedged between a study of Jane Eyre and an

69 exegesis on page-marbling, in the Honors College library), he hadn’t read them all through since that fateful summer before he came to Kent—it was possible that he had misjudged their quality; after all he had once been thoroughly seduced by the Dragonlance Chronicles, “Sturm’s sun set,” etc., so after graduating he reread them all and, in one of those flukes of grace he had never been trained by experience to either expect or pine after, found them to be even nobler and more beautiful than they had been the first time around.

Beautiful: noble. Two more words that Smythe used without irony. He looked at the theatrics of his peers, of his friends, and later on his students with indifference when they went on and on about capital A art; he didn’t even know how to respond. Christy capitalized the word with the look in his eye alone. Even so then it must’ve been a mask. And Smythe knew his own attitude was a mask too: but this was a Passive Knowledge.

And this lead to a disappointing break between Ryder and Smythe, and when he returned to Kent for his MA in the fall he was prepared to fall into a long game of academic oneupmanship with the old man, but instead found out that post-thesis Dr. Ryder seemed to have little interest in speaking for or against Paracelsus, and no other professor save for Dr. Guilty, who only wished to pester and pontificate, came around the grad student offices enough for

Smythe to forge any sort of intimacy with him which was a shame, because although he hadn’t known, after getting his BA, much of the post-graduation angst he saw his peers taken with, when he returned to school he did feel lonely and, briefly, too big or maybe strange for the campus, and the connection would have at least seemed to help.

Smythe was given a few College Writing courses to teach and, although deviation from the curriculum was not encouraged, neither was it strictly disallowed, and in any case nobody really paid that much attention anyway, so Smythe was free to assign whatever he wanted to his

70 classes and assigned them the first three books in the Paracelsus series. The students bitched and moaned, especially when they heard how little their friends in other sections of ENG 11011 were required to do, but that wasn’t the problem; what was an issue was that the Paracelsus books had been out of print for many years, and the bookstore was unable to supply them, so students were forced to scrounge online for copies.

He recognized faces in the halls of Satterfield, students of his milling around outside Dr.

Cote’s office and refusing to meet his eye, and one day in his inbox an email from COTE,

LEON, re: Meeting, requesting that Smythe come speak with Dr. Cote about his classes.

Smythe, hardly surprised, sat and watched the mild Dr. Cote watching him above his thin rectangular glasses.

“...several students here bemoaning the, ah, we can’t supply the several texts you’ve assigned for your course.”

“Yeah well, I did make sure there were copies available to order online, and I sent them several emails before the semester began to let them know what they needed to do.”

“Is there any particular ah reason why you’ve assigned this particular text?”

“Particular reason?”

“Any merit—ah, is there any specific merit in the books?”

“Yes, well, I do believe that—“

“—you’re familiar with the texts, correct?”

“—that—yes, I wrote an undergrad thesis on them. Dr. Ryder was my advisor.”

“And he didn’t respond to the texts in the same strong manner that you did.” Smythe recalled the strange placid friendship between Cote and Ryder, how both little men would

71 sometimes sit on the memorial bench outside Satterfield and chat in tones that gently rasped like riffled pages.

“Yes, well, he never did like them in the same way that I did. But, I think he enjoyed the work that I did on them.”

“Pseudo-biblical.”

“Pardon?”

“Dr. Ryder said ‘pseudo-biblical.’ About the books. The prose, he presumably meant.”

Smythe blinked. “They’re of merit, I promise you. And besides they’re super-cheap online and really even the three volumes together come to only like 500 pages, and as far as the students go...” As he spoke Smythe looked up and saw that Dr. Cote’s eyes above a rictus grin were directed just above his head at some point behind him. And he realized surpriselessly that were it not for an obligation to the department Dr. Cote would not have bothered to intervene.

This knowledge came without color to Smythe and he continued without a stop in his defense.

When he finished, Dr. Cote nodded above the steeple of his laced fingers.

“Well. As it stands there haven’t been enough students complaining to warrant a change, or to warrant my requiring you to change, as long as you’re aware of the situation and are still convinced...”

Convinced: he stayed convinced all through his MA and his PHD; his dissertation was on the Paracelsus cycle (as he began calling it), and every day on the way to his office he passed the glass case outside the English office and saw, between a study on Dreiser and a novel, his 400 pg. study, the only scholarly treatment of the Grayling books that he was aware of.

This story played out in his mind one afternoon as he reread that first chapter of the first book. He saw out the window students making their way to and from Satterfield, behind their

72 own masks, looking conscious and pitiful in their carefully chosen clothes, in the amazing strain they put into not walking like fools. Lachrimae Sartorum, Christy had pig Latin’d. Well, Ryder was at least partially right: that first chapter, stilted. But each chapter, as the weight of

Grayling’s world accumulated and became as tactile and real and significant as—

“Dr. Smythe?”

At the door of the office stood Trevor Grinning, junior, British Literature TR 9:15-10:30: pompous, talkative, hair in a bowl cut the same pale color as his skin, and eyebrows too.

“Yeah, Trevor, hi, come on in. Have a seat. What can I help you with?”

“Yes. Well, as you know, I’m an Honors Student. I was in your Honors Colloquium last year, remember?”

“Yeah, and is it Brit Lit now with me, or...?”

“Yes. As I said, I’m an Honors Student, and I’m about to begin work on my Honors

Thesis, and I need an advisor. Immediately I thought of you. You responded so positively to my writing that I think we would work well together.”

“Of me? Well. What’s your subject?”

“I am going to explore the nature of the portrayal of religion in J.R.R. Tolkien’s work.

Christianity as expressed in the realm and religions of Middle Earth, is the tentative title.”

Grinning smiled. His hands were folded neatly across his lap and one leg was crossed over the other. Grinning, Smythe recalled, had written a poem in heroic couplets about the Flood. He came before the class for his presentation and said: “I’ve chosen to write a miniature epic poem about the great Flood. I’ve chosen the heroic couplet for my form because it is the form I feel I excel most noticeably at.” And then he read the whole 300 line poem to the class, and the last line Smythe remembered was “Dance in the raindrops,” which Smythe didn’t react to but which

73 caused James, in the first class he had with Smythe, to snort out loud with laughter, and this was the inception of a feud between the two boys that, much like the poem, Smythe had no feeling one way or the other about, except that he always had liked James and found Grinning to be obnoxious in a distant sort of way. Later on James asked him what he thought of the poem (this was months later), and Smythe had said “I thought it showed effort,” and James had snorted then too, although his face reddened.

He realized he wished it was James before him now and not Grinning: “I’m not sure I’m the best qualified for that sort of project. I mean, to be honest I’ve never even read Tolkien, nor am I any sort of expert on Christianity or—“

“But you’re the professor of fantasy here,” said Grinning in a flat tone.

“I don’t know anything about fantasy though?”said Smythe, baffled.

“Well, but you teach those Paracelsus books.”

“Well yeah, but. I mean that’s the only fantasy I really have read. And frankly I don’t read it as fantasy, you know, I read it as literature.”

“Yes but Dr. Smythe certainly you realize that this does not mean it’s not fantasy?”

Smythe fidgeted. No, he didn’t want to be Grinning’s advisor, but that wasn’t what irked him; he knew from the start that he’d capitulate. It was that remark, the “but you’re the professor of fantasy here,” that got him, upset him in a vague way. Who was to decide that? Who came up with it? Too, there was a wistfulness in the phrase that Smythe knew probably no one else saw or cared about.

“All I want, Mr. Grinning, is to make sure you’ve got the absolute right person for the job. I mean I’m a new professor, not much experience with theses, all that. Why not try Dr.

Ryder? He was my advisor when I was an undergrad—“

“Dr. Ryder and I have extremely contrary views on most literary matters,” said Grinning and his cheeks rouged. “May I ask what you wrote on for your thesis?”

“I wrote on E.C. Grayling’s Paracelsus books.”

“Those that we read in class.”

“Yeah—well the whole cycle.”

“A cycle of fantasy novels,” and Grinning’s face insufferably suffused suddenly with triumph.

So, capitulated, and no surprise there, of course. It was more exasperating to be around

Grinning at that moment than it would be to see him weekly in the future (although Grinning made the meetings bi-weekly, and they often dragged on for more than an hour as he proudly went over his pages line by line with Smythe). No surprise. Smythe passed out of his office that evening after listening to Grinning outline his project for thirty minutes, saw Guilty with his bulbous big jellied eyes focused on something on his desk. He parted with Grinning in the parking lot after the pale kid promised him that he’d send him an abbreviated list of resources he’d already read in preparation for the thesis. Not the kind of colorful characters he’d thought he’d find at college in his boyhood fantasies nor those that he’d read about in campus novels.

Well, the new campus novel wouldn’t be anything like Lucky Jim anyway would it? The new thing: more baffling. And his character: well, Smythe was always, let’s face it, a kind of person partially erased: something at some point had rubbed a certain part of him away, even if that something was only blind chance. He realized that when most people interacted with him, his personality was such that their minds became mirrors, holding him in their attention and thoughts only as long as he stood right in front of them. Truthfully: any impression ever made on any other soul?

But was it even a question of impressions? No, it was a question of control. He wouldn’t be upset necessarily about not impressing anybody if he knew instinctively there was nothing impressive about him; but always that part that filled up when he read, he was convinced that was wildly worth something. But never any control over what he could show to others. Things inside him excited him: but why didn’t any of these things or the things outside of him that excited those things within him ever make their way to others uncorrupted? And instead all that anybody ever did when they met smudged Smythe was fill in that half wiped-away part of him with whatever easy fantasy or belief they chose.

Now remember Smythe wasn’t blessed with self-awareness and lacked all the easy defenses of irony. And so he asked himself these things, straightly, clumsily, and he did not blush and suddenly the avenue of the esplanade as he walked seemed to widen and the sky vaulted up and something huge and clumsy and bitter rose out of him and danced silently away.

Why the switch to Grinning here? How long will this chapter/story be?

In his dorm Grinning types away at the first draft of the second section of his opus on

Tolkien. Already the thesis is longer than the Honors College reasonably expects from its undergrads. His confidence is a smooth well-wrought set of rails on which the thoughts slide directly from some shoddy realm of his heart to the page. He thinks of Djuna Barnes and

Hemingway who spoke so poetically about writing and bleeding, and he’s convinced that what he’s spilling is a sacreder ichor still.

VI.

The sad story of Christy Wagoner, if it were ever completely told, should shake the ambition out of anybody.

Well, whenever I think of Christy first I always think of how when we sat next to each other in an American Lit class he would lean over and ask to borrow a pen, and I’d give him one and watch him as he chewed the end all class long and then offer the thing back to me with no expression of awareness or conscientiousness on his face. I think this sticks out now because it was the only time I can recall where Christy didn’t seem to bother playing the game of himself; and this is a phrase I’m not going to stop and explain.

I’m almost hesitant to say more about Christy. He had an obsession about leaving some kind of legacy here at Kent even at the end when he hated the place so completely that it crippled him. I worry that by putting my pen to paper I’m just going to feed into that legacy, because even though it was never the one he planned to have, still people here, especially those of us who came back as grad students this fall, talk about him in the whispering tones people use when they know they’re not telling the truth about, but making the fiction of, a person.

And really I almost committed the same sin and got rid of that last paragraph. I think if I just keep my pen going here (first thought, best thought) at least occasionally I’ll shake myself

77 out of fiction and into truth. The legacy thing anyway is pathetic, here at Kent, where nothing except ennui grows and that grows like ivy over everything.

So Christy. We met in my freshman year, our freshman year. The freshmen had come a week earlier than the returning students to be lowered gently in to campus life, and we were all given this manila folder with our keycards and a map and an itinerary in it so we could teach ourselves to manage our own time. And so one of the things I had to do one of the days was meet in this gymnasium in the MACC and get together with some other students and they had like these stations set up around the gym that represented collegiate responsibilities, classes, meetings, graduation, the idea being to simulate the four years we were on the cusp of beginning there in a condensed representative sort of way, and I was in a group with Christy, or rather just

Christy because we immediately had a rapport we could tell and we decided it would be awkward to try and get together with other strangers with whom we would not probably be so lucky as to have any immediate connection. We decided that this wasn’t an appropriate simulacrum and that a more exact facsimile, although how we thought we knew this not having even begun I don’t know, (but we were right anyway) would’ve been to have like a maze that you crawled through blindfolded and occasionally people would lean over the sides and smack you or pour shit on you or try and get you to go in the wrong direction and things like that.

There’s a weird period when you first get to college, or at least when I first came to Kent, where I was desperate to find a maintain a group of friends I could shore up around me against this oceanic loneliness I was feeling at the time. Early on I missed the safety of home, even if I understood what a farce that actually was, but that’s a different story, and what I’m trying to say here is that I made sure to get Christy’s phone number as we left the gym, and we stayed in contact over that first week and by the start of classes it was decided that we were friends,

78 although I know I still surprised Christy the first time I referred to him as my friend. I was pining over some girl or another and I said “Sorry you have to hear all this stuff over and over again. But I need to be able to bounce these kind of things off of a friend,” and his face reddened and became serious-looking.

This face reddening thing, that was a real thing among the people he fell in with. Their names aren’t important but I was always present at their gatherings even if it was tacitly acknowledged I wasn’t one of them, and what they mainly did, early on at least, was they would talk about Art and their faces would go red at the cheeks like they were ashamed.

Shame or no, we have to keep it in mind because it’s integral I think to what happened to

Christy—which, by the way, I’m still coming to terms with myself. I’ve felt this persistent fullness about Christy, and I knew that one day something would shift and I would open up and pour all of that out and be done with it.

Another instance of this shame: once after a get-together Christy and I were walking back to his apartment (this was junior year), and I said “You know I don’t know why you all always go so red in the face when you talk about books or painting. Or like you can’t even talk about your own play ideas without blushing,” and he looked at me and nodded and said “Yeah, I know.

Well but that’s exactly it: talking isn’t doing,” and then he paused, then said “Anything that isn’t doing, isn’t doing,” and looked at me with portentous eyes and I laughed. Part of the thing about

Christy is that he never took himself less than seriously, and he knew this, although I don’t think he actually knew this or what a deadly thing it was, or he would’ve done something to change it.

He was too earnest and not smart enough to realize that you can’t keep your earnestness out where the world can reach it because it’s too tender of a thing to be handled directly by anyone but the owner.

So that occurred when we were a little older. And I don’t know if it matters but Christy had brown hair, was of what they call middling height, a face that wasn’t ugly or prepossessing.

When he would argue he would argue with this insufferable superior smile on his face, looking as exalted as a saint, and I just wanted to kill him every time I saw it. He sang well and had a good strong voice and although he called himself a playwright he wanted to make it clear he wasn’t an actor, he wasn’t in the theatre program and he didn’t audition for a single thing in his four years, although his undergrad thesis was a play he wrote and directed, to the complete bafflement of most of the English department. When we were freshmen he dragged me to everything that was put on at the Music and Speech but, gradually his interest dwindled, and by junior year he had, more or less, stopped patronizing the program’s productions at all. He also never read any new plays, and really not many older ones either, dismissing them all as

“Basically a load of horseshit,” a judgment he extended democratically to most books and painting and film and music as well.

I don’t know why I keep feeling the need to establish my credentials: I want to keep listing all the specificities of Christy, to pile up all the useless heartbreakingly particular things I remember about him. But that’s vanity, my vanity getting away with me. What all those details mean to anybody is only this: to prove their existence to themselves and, by extension, to others.

Do you see, I’m not saying anything about Christy when I tell you that his accumulated shed body hair clogged the drain once a week or that he galloped down stairs favoring his left leg every single time, all I’m saying is that there exists somewhere in the world a creature named

Gary Rich-Townes who has the capacity to contain within him, just like you do, a thousand thousand such observations, piles of them all over my mind, and that somehow this is integral to my existence and the meaning of my existence.

I know Christy, and I mean know him in a clinical way, like for some reason I was given some important faculty and can understand him. And because of this his weaknesses and strengths lose their negativity and positivity and just jigsaw together to form the unique object

Christy Wagoner in my mind. To catalogue my useless observations is to direct my attention away from the difficult task at hand, which is excavating all this feeling Christy left fossilized within me.

So. Through everything, even that last semester when he sported the most indulgent, useless scholarly nihilism I ever saw, he never did less than excellent in his coursework. Early on, he was insufferably precocious and aced everything because he turned in flamboyant, needlessly long papers to his professors. But later everything came last minute and half- or even quarter-assedly, so that he was convinced when he got things back still with As on them that this proved his belief that “The system is broke, Gary, just a real and pathetic farce,” and justified his faithlessness in his professors. Well this is the kind of shit he always said and, true or not, what he never realized as he ripped himself up over it was that what was really wrong was to let it hurt him so much. And by that point I was sick of his wounding indulgence.

Oh: this precociousness. That sort of precociousness that any half-way intelligent kid comfortable with his useless ‘outsider’ status develops because like everyone else they’re slavering at the chance that comes with college to reinvent themselves, Christy came to Kent with it, and charmed professor after professor except for Dr. Guilty who’s an asshole anyway.

He sought a mentor and, though he charmed them, none were active enough in their interest in him to make any sort of a connection. He was constantly rebuked. “They’re all so much colder than I’d been led to believe,” he said at lunch one day at Eastway, “You’d think they’d like to get to know their students.” “I think they probably don’t think of us as people worth knowing. We

81 move through here so quickly and there’s so many of us,” I argued halfheartedly. He looked out the window at the spring foliage and said “Yes but four years is a fucking eternity.”

In particular there was a grad student who taught Christy’s Art of Theatre class who he really tried to impress. This was Christy’s first (and, as it turned out, only) theatre course. At the end of the semester the students had to write and perform small ten minute plays in groups, and Christy, as was his way, charisma’d over his partners and wrote the whole thing himself, and it was this elaborate thing with self-aware stage direction and characters stepping out of the story to talk with the audience and deconstruct their own performances and so he thrust this complexity upon his unsuspecting partners and after it was over when the grad student teacher had no option but to give Christy an A and yet: “Yeah, Christy, you’re a smart kid. But it was kind of the Christy Wagoner show.” Which was true: the character Christy played had all the most complicated lines, the most obnoxiously meta jokes, etc. But he never meant to steal the show, per se; he only knew that if he let another student play the part it would’ve been shit—I mean, it was still shit, but it would’ve been that atrocious shit that comes from no care and no imagination.

But that was the end for Christy in terms of trying to connect with professors. And when he was a senior he had this whole huge stormy embitterment where he was convinced they were worthless, were people who couldn’t do the things they taught, again and again he went back to that line of Brendan Behan’s, that a critic is a person who knows how to get there but can’t drive, only of course he said professor instead of critic, and he never attributed that quote, when he recited it at parties and bars, to anybody, which isn’t to say he wanted people to take the phrase as his, but only that he wasn’t there to point that kind of thing out to others who were more than capable of asking or finding out themselves, which he always meant to be taken as respectful,

82 which doesn’t mean that it ever came across to others as such—but this was the way Christy constructed all of his ploys and habits, by filing away in his mind the intended symbolism of his behavior without telling anybody else, and then when they saw it differently and, usually, in a bad light, he could be hurt in the grand theatric way he was always so good at mustering. But for all the histrionics he did believe in his hurt in the same way he believed in his earnestness, which is more dangerous than being hurt or being actually earnest, for everything is idealized and impractical, and instead of feeling a certain way and letting that feeling defend itself from disbelief, you have to actively, aggressively convince yourself and others that you’re hurt or sad or happy or horny or whatever. I found this element in Christy repulsive, because I found it in most people, my dad in particular was an all-time grand master at this sort of thing, and I found it doubly damning in Christy because so much else about his character good or bad was at least uniquely his.

And you may have noticed some contradictions within this piece so far. But you have to keep in mind I don’t know what I’m about to say really much better than you do. This problem isn’t mine alone anyway and you can’t deny that. And anyway, trying to pin down a personality is like catching ghosts in a mist.

Christy never explained how he got to Kent in the first place or how he was paying for it.

I assumed he was getting through on scholarships, but I know now that it was loan money almost completely: he’d never had a job in his life and his family, though they didn’t opt to help him any through school, made too much money for him to get much of a Pell grant. His dad, with whom he was not on good terms, he spoke of him darkly and called him a miser, held the purse strings; his mom, he said, was paralyzed, and so I had these very vivid images of his parents, two gaunt and differently broken people, and his house, some giant gothic clapboard the color of

83 corpseskin. Well, we decided to take a trip down to Columbus and we needed to stop at his house to pick up some clothes and things. “Finally meeting your parents,” I said, “Just like a new girlfriend.” We drove out to Hudson. This was spring too, and it was just beautiful, an early warmth made everything explode into color; the roads were lined with dogwood fat with clusters of bunched petals, and in front of his house, not a gothic nightmare but a harmless suburban confection, a cherry blossom tree wept itself leaf by leaf towards nakedness. The breeze was constant, fresh, aquatic. We went into his house and I was surprised to find, descending the staircase in apparently perfect physical health, Christy’s mother, an attractive woman of maybe fifty years old. And she blushed a little and said “Oh Christy honey, I didn’t know you were stopping by.” “Just for a second, mom,” he said, and we sidled past her on the stair. Well: of course before we passed her I was introduced to her and she told me to call her

Ella. His dad though I didn’t see. When we got back in the car I turned to Christy: “Christy, I thought you said your mom was paralyzed?” “I did say that,” frowning. Maybe an hour or two later, near Columbus, I said “We’re going to pass this Harley Davidson place on the left I’ve always liked the look of,” and Christy said without affect “She was still in her pajamas. Did you see? It was one o’clock in the fucking afternoon.”

You’ve noticed Christy and I both had issues with our fathers—is that part of what made him such an appealing person to me? No. I pride myself on this: that I treat people based on their own personalities, and nothing else: looks, family, economic situation, that all means nothing to me. Listen, the first girl I ever thought I loved, the first long-term girlfriend, was pretty fat: not many people would’ve found her attractive, but I fell in love with the fullness of herself she gave to me, how there was not a thing I didn’t know about her. I was in love with a completeness, and part of my infatuation with everybody I know is the game of collecting all the

84 pieces of themselves they leave strewn about for me. So I never found in Christy’s problems a sympathy with my own. We never talked about things in that way—or, at least, I never did. He monologue’d about his like he monologue’d about everything, of course, but that’s not the same thing as commiserating; Christy never commiserated with anybody except himself.

But on the subject of the first girlfriend, I spent one summer and a semester living with her in an apartment in Eagle’s Landing. I saw Christy less frequently than before, but no joke, he sent me solemn emails every day or two keeping me au courant with the goings-on amongst the group and gravely apprising me of the mistakes I was making and the entanglement I had fallen into.

But this was another thing, Christy never spoke on a single topic from experience. He was convinced that he didn’t need to participate in anything because he could see through it all: it was a convenient trick because with his pronouncements he was either right and you couldn’t help but be impressed, or he was wrong and you didn’t think about it again—and all this he would admit to you, he had speeches on the simplicity of his tactics prepared for such accusations—and that, that that that, was the Christy-est thing, don’t you see? This notion of everything being constructed. In a way he never got close to anybody because he spent so much time making these sort of social constructions to simulate connectedness in a more perfect way than would be possible if he were playing the game honestly. If say you confronted him on the speaking from no experience thing and he gave you the speech you’d be warmly sparked by the sensation of something significant being achieved, convinced you’d connected when in fact, if you looked at it, you’d see that all you really got, because he constructed this speech to make you feel a certain way, was an affirmation of your apartness from him.

Which begs the question what did Christy get out of it? I think for a long time he got a great high from seeing all the artifice he’d worked so hard to create, built off so many generalizations, so many stereo- and archetypes, go off without a hitch, unfailingly, like as if he’d figured out the Rule to humankind which, like the algorithm that solves a Rubik’s cube from any point, can be applied to any person any time and work. But why it ended up wounding him and leaving him so disappointed and empty was because it simplified things too much. By appealing only to all the big clumsy things that were the same from person to person, our starving egos, our embarrassingly bare need to connect, our barely submerged crippling doubts, he was making only surface sparks. He mistook these superficial things to be the unknowable deep facts about who we are. And so led by this seductive misapprehension he lost the faith that kept him going so brightly before.

And that’s where the collapse happened. Senior year he got black and cross and he took to drinking with the same obnoxious old theatricality that he approached any mode of self- expression. He talked about theatre constantly, and conversely had stopped writing altogether.

Suddenly he had his crew of intellectuals over every night, or we’d go out to dinner with them or to a bar and, as I was leaving, he’d tell me he was going to stay for one more drink or another half hour, and not end up getting home until the early hours of the morning. It was as if there was something in the apartment that he was trying to avoid. I’d come home from class or work and I’d find him lying on the couch with his computer balanced on his chest, and I’d ask him what he did that day and he’d say, “Oh, this and that. Read a little.” And this happened many times but once, I don’t know why, there was the strangest pity I’d ever known, this warm pity, opening like a clenched fist inside me, and I was so uncharacteristically enamored with what I

86 found inside of myself that, and I didn’t realized this until Christy sat up redfaced and hissed

“What?”, I was laughing.

I mean, do you understand? Not slightly happy even and giggling uncontrollably and full of warmth. See again Christy’s mistake. What a gloriously ambitious blind Christy he was, and what a brave soul and what a weak will it took to convince himself he’d solved our question. We were both baffled. I stood there colored in one of the strange infinite shades of feeling that showed how rudimentary and useless Christy’s system was.

Maybe that was the realization that drove Christy in shock or fear deep into something he didn’t have the will anymore to crawl out of. He never applied for grad school, his undergrad thesis, a play he wrote and directed, shambled out onto the stage, it started out strong but spiraled into vagueness at best half-finished, the audience only his thesis committee, myself, and his mother, who laughed inappropriately and stood up clapping every time the curtains closed.

This is the secret history. What happened after, the summer and all that, anybody who’s concerned knows already. The legacy, carried in the heads of a handful of people who only find it interesting and don’t use their hearts to handle it. I feel nothing about that one way or the other. What needed to be shown, and what only I could show, is shown: what’s most important, please to remember: the years of howling and, before he came crashing down, all the beautiful flame he twisted and writhed in. There was beauty in all the wrongness of Christy’s constructions, and a beauty in the way everything collapsed around him. Christy believed in what he did, acted on the lie of his total faith, on the engine of his bared desire, and this openness, the pathetic visibility of all his wants and needs, led to his dismantling. You can’t look at anything directly without being consumed by pity.

Use but do not follow his example—I can’t, at least. I don’t have the courage or stamina for such a thing. An hour lived with my honesty turned out to the world like that would drag on for ages and leave me ravaged. Four years would’ve been a fucking eternity.

Just: I envy him.

VII.

The alarm, with unfeeling suddenness, began its beeping. Awareness seemed to bleed into him through his feet, rising through his body to lift the dark veil beneath the dark veil of his eyelids. Scattered gray morning light snuck around the drawn curtain of his tiny room. He groaned and lifted himself up on his arms, aware now of the needful throb of a full bladder. His thoughts organized themselves after the languageless ordeal of dreams once again into English.

—Hmmunnh. Clock. The sad crystal numbers; the pointed edges. What would I do without it. Could sleep in but: ten o’clock, sane hour, shouldn’t be complaining. But am. But do. Always do. If not this. Something, always. Always wake up early, too. Always around seven; why? Go back to sleep or…? No, must’ve. Couldn’t have not because the TV, different show, or did I dream that? Is The Golden Girls on this early? Over summer, watching with her, after work and my tired body like a ragdoll and I could only count the hours anyway till the next shift. Five in the morning, then. Like getting up in dreadful night. But all the money, lucre, in flowing. What then? Driving around with. What now?

Barefooted on the linoleum, and he gathered his towels, wrapping one around his waist and throwing the other over his shoulder, as well as, count with me, shampoo , body wash, key card. Check: check: check.

Still have a lot left. Have been showering every day too. But it used to go by like. Used all one. Hard to believe I ever didn’t. Shower. How could I go to class that way? And thoughts of others as, as, as? Well. Let them judge. Always on about the judging, she was. Always how it was unhealthy and how I shouldn’t but she did too, didn’t she of course she did and now what does that amount to now, now that it’s over and she can think of herself what she wants. Let her.

Let her. As, as, as.

The bathroom was humid: condensation fogged the mirrors and made the metal frame of the shower door go pale as if with frost. He laid a towel on the floor, threw the other over the metal arm that pulled the door, turned the lock. Hand on the wet handle and a choke and a hiss.

The water fell out thick and ropy and thudded dully on the floor, on his back.

Back into his room, his eyes fell over the shelf above his desk, laden with books, and the ramshackle shelf above that, and the several piles on the desk itself, leaving little room even for his slim laptop. Wrappers from cough drops, many ripped or torn in a moment of agitation or fidgetiness, others twisted and linked together into small necklaces, were scattered over the area, as were pens and pencils, empty water bottles (some filled with more wrappers), a couple of wrinkled syllabi, course packets, and a roll of tape. By his bed, on a leather suitcase he used as a nightstand, gathering dust: Blood Meridian.

Judge Holden. The pale whale. Moby Dick. Or, the whale. Or, the Evening Redness in the West. What happened last night?....across the Nacogdoches? Where is that. There is no God and we are his prophets. Mistaken. Couldn’t believe I thought it was from. But why? Certainly there must’ve been a reason. But now gone. O lost now. But there? But everything connected, but irredeemable. The pastor said in the movie with his riven nose like a crag. A nose like pumice. Grendel. Grendel. Not now but then, high school, senior year, fat, couldn’t even

90 comprehend. Half. Can hardly now. Oh be gentle: half? Maybe not. Understanding. What was it Gass—to say, now I understand Kafka is a conceited and foolish remark. I understand nothing. Let me be without conceit. Not bloody likely, as they say.

He shrugged on his jacket, hefted his bookbag, and, checking his pockets to confirm all the essentials—phone, wallet, pens, key: check, check, check, check—were in their correct places, headed to the elevator. And everyday began like this, or close enough; and what to make of that? These: those: O forget not the endless endless lives of all the people. Look at them and remember: you, your pursed fat face, be a symbol.

But time, the worrying like there’s not enough of it. And it is fleeting but maybe it is just too much because think: we waste, wasted away, and already nineteen and doubts and regrets and wake up with long dragging marks across my secret selves like because I don’t know why. I don’t know why but there would always be regrets even if we flamed out in a day like a fly or like the bugs in the poem—that poem…..how many years ago, and how many times do I think about it? Rather die in beauty but: not feasible because, because think of all the people who don’t, of the old and the pale in the hospital and the small shrunken feet and he, he looked so small in the bed and so did he and I miss him and would he approve, eyeing me know approve?

If, of course, the fullest story.

The sun, climbing its shallow winter rise, was addled by clouds that congealed around its pale circumference. All around Tri, snow from the weekend’s storm stood in piles—up against the cement pillars, in darkened slurries over the cement plaza, in long faceless stretches over the rising field, where a brown patch here and there was the only testimony that, in a different season, something lived and grew there. He made his way up by Eastway, the cuffs of his jeans already soaked through. Up the slope behind the Student Center he went, and under the archway

91 near the gym annex, up the stairs around the side of Lake, and out in front of Johnson. He looked up at the building, and through the windows at the lounge on the first floor.

There. Like put up a plaque. Here lies. But no, not the end of the world, no great loss.

He eyed his murky passing shade in the window’s warped reflection. Hello. Yes stand there like that because what now? You’ll not again. Say goodbye, wave goodbye because those romantic shadows were chased out by dawn a long year a year long ago. Gone and receding down the road and swallowed by the shuttle just in front of which you constantly. Searching fingers of fate. Help! Help! Another Day. Emily. Dickinison. What were you like and what shook you.

Your eyes like pale hurt and the plain face but the mysterious Master found it. Or maybe: high arched eyebrows, plainfaced shot unlike the Woolf. Woolf, with your pockets full of stones and that note I read on the internet who put that there callous bastard but it cuts deep and I wish I would’ve been there. But no. Pockets of rocks and the dank bottom of the lake. EH and JKT and and O others but we must not fetishize. (Possibly Burton, on a stool in the library) And even after he wrote and it was no balm or not balm enough. That book. Written to balm. Read it to mourn. The first time but even that was no balm or not balm enough and the only thing I could do was break it. Lip piercing, now. Like and dark hair and a lip piercing and the nose piercing I used to know and still was surprised at. And what would that be like to kiss? And who knows now those lips?

Yes, predictably, a ragged thunderbolt of pain shuddered across him as he exited Stopher and descended the steps to the art building. Coming out on the other side, he looked out over the empty white field, with the slope stuck with dead trees, barren arms held up in supplication. We were here yesterday. What did I say, looking out over that? What was I reminded of. Oh: that rainy night.

—I feel like, if I could just see everything that ever reminded me of her, I’d be better off, you know? Like I need to see it all and get it out of my system, get all the memories out. A sort of purging.

—Purging?

—Yeah. This is like a penance or something.

—Penance? But you did nothing wrong!

He nearly slipped on the path to Oscar Ritchie, taking the back stairs slowly and with his hand on the railing, his shoes still slick from his walk.

Inside the class the window looked out onto a dead cement wall.

Feel like I forgot—coffee. Fuck. But what of. No, my head. Sinus? No. Coffee.

Caffeine. Life blood I said. She said I said. How’d she know? The storms, about the storms.

When I was. And the green sky with the howling wind but it wasn’t green sickly gray like it gets when a storm comes, and dad said when the tree flips upside down then I should worry and mom laughed but was it a real laugh? What was she thinking? What was he? Why does our son look at the sky like that. Why isn’t this marriage working. I wonder when I can meet up with my mistress. No he wouldn’t have said it like that but he did it like that and it was storming that night too, lightning and the lamplight staining the strobing sky orange like a nightmare, painted.

But no vividness now. Me clutching the banister and screamcrying. But what. How could he come back to bed and act like it was. Did he not know that I. But no. Not important now but

I’ve forgiven but what about her, does she ever wonder and what was that like was it heartbreak or was it already too late and long gone. Was she surprised? How long did she go before she realized she misread him? But. Did she? Who’s to say. Not I. Not me. Me. Head hurts. And when was the divorce people always ask me like I know but I should know and I’m not always

93 sure I do but it did happen and did it change me people ask and of course it did I was ten for fuck’s sake but not important but no regrets can’t. Not now. Krapp’s Last Tape. Beckett. No regrets but. How true. True. Has to be. Is. But haven’t read it. Read some of Godot in his room first semester and back when things were simpler, and what else was I reading. Don

Quixote. Still on my shelf. Still has the bookmark. Part two. Part the second, second part and I talked about it with her that night we met in the darkened Halloween night and out on the streets big milling knots of people and the night breathing hysterical and cans of beer rolling in the street and when people drove out of the lot people would bang on their windows in their costumes like homunculi sneering and jeering bleary-eyed and half slipping and half-frozen on that frigid night even she wasn’t dressed for the weather, gave her my coat came down to her ankles and her wig pink wig gave me left on the collar that night bright strands on the collar.

Smelled like a cigarette, must’ve because earlier smoked my first one. And bitter metaphor the night although I was thrilled with nervousness and she played the strings of my heart one by one—something like that anyway. And anyway I saw him but didn’t want to talk even though he wanted to talk sorry I’m pursuing her should’ve said should’ve stayed could’ve avoided it all no wait. Can’t regret. Shouldn’t. Am who I am and nothing unfortunately will reverse it but remember wouldn’t want it to anyway. What else could I do besides what I did. Was. Stupid word. Whatever happens is all that ever could happen. And so drawn along by strings unseen fingers of Fate and followed her around and she talked about Don Quixote but I don’t know if she ever read it now—you just don’t appreciate Don Quixote, she said to him as we all walked and he laughed and I didn’t know he was wearing a costume. How did I find her in that crowd?

Her eyes, bright and shining and of course rimmed with makeup of course and did I notice the rest of her of course in her costume revealing, slutty? no not slutty but sort of and definitely

94 revealing but her eyes, her eyes, like something driven straight through you. No. Not for the life of me. Head hurts.

When class let out he went out the back way, retracing his steps through the art building and going towards Smith on the Esplanade. People slipped and slid over the soaked cement; a few bundled up sat on the vents near Olson. Like they were doing that night. That night though there were those men with beers in their pockets too that accosted us and she came back to tri and we all sat around and I guess she was slightly drunk but not like later when, God that night, what awful—the tree I remember up against the building flaring like bronzed fire stained by the lamplight orange.

The planetarium in Smith was crowded and the air heavy with moisture escaping from damp hair, hats, shoes, and boots.

—Be nice if classes were cancelled.

—Yeah like we’d be so lucky.

—He’s calling me again, said a girl in the row ahead of them, her teeth unnaturally white against her orange skin. Her eyes were sunk in pools of mascara.

—What’re you gonna tell him?

—That I’m in class and call me later. Over the weekend we…

—Alright, good morning everybody—or, I guess, good afternoon, began the professor, about to be, anyway. So, today we have a lot to cover—and yes, the exam is moved back to next

Tuesday. Next class’ll be our study session and that way we have all of today to devote to

Newton because he really deserves it; without a doubt the greatest—well, the most influential scientist of all time. Really groundbreaking stuff, folks…

The lights dimmed overhead. In the front of the class two women signed the lecture to a deaf man. The professor’s voice, confident and relaxed, hovered over the continual static of shuffling papers, scritching pencils, coughs, side-conversation, sneezes and coughs, the occasional polite giggle at a little joke.

Roller girl over there, what’s the name, Saucy something or other, looks like she rollerblades, but what’s that really like are they paid? Guess it doesn’t matter. Dirty warehouses must be and groping goggle-eyed fans like all hyper-sexualized like what is that like the knowledge of knowing that. That fantasies every day. Maybe not for her in particular. But maybe. But I don’t know. Is she good was it everything she hoped for roller derby?

Disappointing? Is it not always. What ever. Lives up. No. But you can’t keep talking like that like nothing ever but has anything ever no I don’t know if it has but maybe books yes your reading like it will save but it might but it isn’t exactly like I hoped is it I don’t know it might be.

Could very well be. Want it to be. And either way, or anything spectruming between, always.

But the night when she told me she loved me and I and my cheek against hers and I staring out the window the skipped party like I thought it was all over that part but if only I knew but my cheek against hers like our knees interlocked, and pulled my face away and she cried and the tears dark with her mascara or eye liner whatever it’s called and she said she hasn’t felt this way in so long is that what she said because so long? Like it had happened before because I certainly never felt that way before but of course him and her and who knows how many others but still it was different for her I hope I know. Because you know people says things all the time like it wasn’t a big deal she might not’ve even said it I don’t know anymore because what happened then, frozen-framed, like bas-reliefs but I remember her and that night the night, I don’t know the night hooded in innocence. But even then pregnant with its unraveling.

Like what are they talking about? Blond beach blond look at that. Orange. Gross. But her body. But I can’t. Wouldn’t. But if given—no. No. But her Facebook millions of pictures like that one girls I bet some in dresses like it’s prom all over. And oh, well if meeting her then.

Wouldn’t have been able to keep our hands off each other, she said. Breathed it in my ear. And but she’s gone many times. The pictures. In dresses, black, makeup long hair like I always liked. Not with me. With him or with him. With him. No I don’t want to know can’t but then at sixteen she said it, sixteen she wrote, lost, at sixteen she said…..I can’t. I can’t. Not with me.

And it’s back what left me. Like this. Him. Sixteen. Him. Jesus.

—And the thing is that gravity isn’t in anything, y’see, it’s between everything, everything from these two pieces of chalk to the farthest particles circling each other out in space. And it’s a web of interconnectedness yes hard to believe, guys, but we’re connected to everything else, in a sort of network and whenever, whatever we do, any motion or gesture affects, infinitesimally, every other thing in the galaxy.

The clouds were scattering slightly, moving ponderously towards the west in heaps like a strange tumble of stones, a toss-away trick, an indifferent god’s flaunt. The walk to White was a slow drudge through the frigid landscape. Melted snow, intermixed with the coarse salt, some blue, that had been scattered intermittently over the sidewalks, seeped in through the leather of his shoe, chilling his socks. White Hall squatted unassuming over its parking lot, behind it the main road, the small rectangular windows catching and reflecting…nothing in particular.

On the third floor he sat with his head cradled in his hand.

Same chair, down the way, we sat. Last. But then. Head hurts. And what does she walk like that for? Did something. Surgery. Surgery certainly. Surgery. Impromptu surgery could perform, like a doctor save for degree, ex-doctor, ex-priest, judge. The judge. There is no God

97 and we are his prophets. But he didn’t. But he might’ve. I said it. To her. Eyes like empty slots. God terrifying. And what of the kid? And the end. But no but couldn’t. But the jakes.

Jacques. All that Shakespeare. But did it? Not so easy. And what did I read like then? When we. But now, what do I do now? How do I now, probably more, certainly, and probably I need it more. The thrill when I was younger, like the thrill when we were younger. Like we’re old now. But we are God I feel so old sometimes aging and dying like anybody else and I saw the entropy eat away at us see it eat at everybody watch the degradation look at my parents. But any exceptions? But any I hope so but what about your books? Yes what about them. Ageless.

Been here before you. Here after. What now, when it happened, that night over the phone, I had asked. When I was younger wanted my coffin filled with them. Bury me in a library. And in a pinewood box and let the dirt weight itself through and let the worms and pressure and time wear me and them down to soil, humus, let it intermingle and—no. I don’t know. When I die I. What now I had asked myself. What now? The answer was as it had been before. Read. But I never finished Quixote either. When I die I.

After class he took the stairs up the side of Engleman, where his mother all those years ago had lived for however many semesters it was she attended Kent, back when they were deluxe singles and girls only. His feet slapped on the cement stairs and over the parking lot where snow gathered on fenders of cars and lay around the raised characters on their license plates; black ice lay sunk in like shadow. He went by Dunbar and Prentice, through the archway between Centennials, and out into the fields before Tri whose grass, green and full in the late summers and springs, was now pocked and torn, brown and feeble, with black halffrozen mud in great swathes like scars across it. The sun sank, the clouds just beneath it tearing themselves into

98 bloodied rags, and those in the dimming east falling through the subtlest shades of gray as if the young night’s first encroaching fingers were turning them to lead.

And she’s gone. And it’s over. And how did I. Do I. And I was reading Quixote then.

And There is no God and we are his prophets I said. And so now. So now I think of those words and that book. And the patterns I feared came to pass. Vico and his cycles. Cycles are all one can hope for. If only a circle would connect its points. Draw the end of its infinite points here.

Cycles and the recognition of those cycles. It would be a starting point for me. Circles within cycles, spirals, going down, staircases, going down, down in the depths, Dante, till the frozen three-faced demon and then what. Or was it three-faced? And then upwards? And then upwards, Dante, nose like a beak, stern Milton, Milton and his statues by the paths, gorgeous statues in the garden. And we less than stone. We soil. Humus, human. Adam and Eve. Eve,

Eve with her golden storm of tresses perfect Eve, Eve with hair that falls according to laws other than our bleak own of gravity.

The rotunda, as always, smelled of cleaning product whose chemical components far overpowered the weak citrus scent meant to disguise them. In Rosie’s a few people sat at the counter, where the lights overhead would be reflected dully, as they always were. Outside the day drew closer to a close and through the windows beyond the booths everything blue as if submerged. He went into the bathroom. Above the urinals was a board with a square wooden frame around it, and both were coated in a thick white paint like the kind used to paint over cinder bricks in schools and other public buildings cheaply and quickly; all over this board were the marks and messages of people: “I was gonna get laid, but then I got high”; another was the letters of a frat, next to which someone had drawn an arrow and added “roofies then rapes girls”; another person added “true dat”, and finally, someone wrote “its better when they fight it”; “Who

99 is the Watchmaker?; the Devil and Good are raging inside me”. Across the whole board were great gashes like clawmarks. Above this a bar lamp blandly shone from behind a plastic screen with a honeycombed pattern run across it. Its light was caught in the small pools of urine cupped in the bottom of the urinals.

Someone thought to write this. I read it.

The elevator opened onto his floor and he made his way to his room. The window overlooking the parking lot was reflecting orange lamplight from below. He slid his battered key card through the lock and it clicked obligingly. He looked into his room and flicked on the light; half of the overhead lamp was burned out but even so, the room was small enough that it made little difference. He dropped his bookbag on the ground in front of his dresser, kicked off his soaked shoes and slid them under his bed, and took of his coat. The cuffs of his jeans were rigid with salt. He noticed on the leather case his copy of Blood Meridian. On the shelf, plump and red, was his copy of Don Quixote. Next to it were two books of hers that she had given him: a

Collected Tales & Poems of Edgar Allen Poe, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

See. Just like that. As if it were all part of a pattern I can’t read. That night, so long ago!

I can’t even. Now is not the time for mourning. Cast my nighted colors off. What now, I asked myself, when I hung up. What now? What ever? As always. I’ll finish it now. There is no

God and we are his prophets. And I was reading it then, and I’m reading it now, regardless.

Always am, something. And she the O most heartachingest first. But how different. But how stranger. And so too these sights because they look the same but aren’t—those two places, at those two times are not the same. And people. Things recede and return and are never the same, never, not once, don’t cling too closely to a thing because you will only be rent the more when it’s carried away and swept back a different thing and alien to your heart.

100

VIII.

He lay with his head cupped between her crossed legs on the narrow bed, staring out the window, the curtain half-pulled back, at the walk past the Centennials lined with lamps glowing white and catching in fits of differing shadow the one or two walkers making their way along it, at this late hour. Taylor Hall on the hill with its band of lighted windows, undoubtedly still full of BARC students in their hives, and then beyond the night sky, stained orange along the broken horizon by unseen streetlamps but higher up, at the farthest away point in its bend, an inscrutable gray: ash.

“I think I’m drunk,” she said.

“What.” Incredulously he.

“No, really—“

“There’s no way—“

“—really, no, I think I am. Like my eyes are, my vision’s moving too fast for things to catch up.”

“I think it’s psychosomatic. Has to be.”

“No—really.”

“After two beers?”

“Yeah but I’m not used to drinking.”

101

“Yeah but even so, I mean. Two beers is not enough for the lightest of the lightweights—I mean, even Royal—“

“I’m drunk.”

“You can’t be—“

“How do you know?”

“—you can’t be. I mean I believe you feel drunk and I believe the feeling is valid, but, chemically—“

“Then how am I not drunk?”

“—chemically”, drawing the word out in repetition, “I don’t think it’s possible.” He had turned his head up and inward and he spoke into her stomach.

“Listen, I’m slurring my words.”

“You’re making yourself now, slur your words.”

“I think you need to admit you don’t know what you’re talking about. If I say I am then—“

“Okay—“

“—then I am. Okay.”

“Okay.”

“Why are you laughing?”

“Nothing. Hey. You’re cute, come here and kiss me. I like the way your face looks from down here.”

“Mm. Your breath is warm. Your whole head is warm.”

“It’s gigantic.”

“You do have a big head.”

102

“It’s cause I’m brilliant.”

“Oh, my brilliant man.”

“That’s right, girl. Come here.”

“Alright, boo.”

“Breath warmer on your bare skin?—“

“—stop!”

“—hm?” Mouth full of flank.

“Mm.”

“Here. Stand up.”

“Okay.” Her quick readiness and willingness: admired. Too the long body, alienlimbed, the long hair: cataract. Lips and neck, at the shoulder, bones whose names he didn’t know, all beneath the skin a riddle of bone marrow sinew muscle he couldn’t name from another, but—the hollow at the base of her neck above the sternum, knows that: a thumb there now.

“Lucy...” he attempted to coo with as little self-consciousness as possible.

“Mm.” His hand at the lip of her jeans, and even now ambling downwards a seasoned veteran still the trepidation, so best just to rush—

“Wait, I have to use the restroom.”

“Okay.”

“Can you give me your key.”

“Yeah—here, I got to go too, I’ll swipe you in.”

“Okay.”

“There you go.”

“Here.”

103

“Here?”

“Here, come on.”

“We’re crossing that line? From whence, I should say, there’s no going back.”

“Oh. Here, turn off the lights.”

“Your voice is so echoey.”

“...”

“I feel like I need to remark on it to make it less awkward.”

“Aw, is it awkward?”

“No, not really. Just talking.”

“Nervous.”

“No, nervous, not—no. Flustered.”

“Flustered.” Flush, the hetal hiccup of the handle depressed. “Not too flustered to take your turn, I hope?”

“Here.”

“Okay.”

“Keep the lights off.”

“Okay.”

“Well, hang on, on for just a sec, so I can see where—okay, yeah thanks—off!”

“...”

“...and any minute now I’ll—“

“Shush.”

“Okay...”

“...”

104

“Okay.” Of the handle depressed, the hiccup: flush. “Finished. Let me just zip up—in

Northern Ireland I once caught my dick—oh.”

“Mm.”

“Hey.” He crossed in the dark his arms over hers, wrapped around his chest.

“That was important to me,” she said, so seriously. Were he not in the dark, and not— was he too?—but couldn’t—but known to, to reel around barely soused.

“Come on.”

“Okay.”

“Lucy.”

“No, keep the light on.”

“Light on?”

“Yes.”

“Okay so lights for fucking but not for pissing, huh?”

“Exactly.”

“’Exactly.’ Ah, I get it. Here, take this off.”

“Your turn. Stay even.”

“Even steven.”

“No my name’s Lucy.”

“Har har. Humor and sex. Tell your friends.”

“I like laughing during sex. I like a lot of talking.”

“Hey.”

“No implications of lovers previous, it’s the rule.”

105

“Oh, right.”

“I like this scar.”

“It’s not a scar, it’s a birthmark.”

“Whatever it is.”

“Everyone thinks it’s a scar.”

“I’m the first to see it.”

“Right—ah.”

“Mm. Oh. Maybe the curtain. Poor people probably sick of seeing me getting so much action.”

“Hey, no partners previous—“

“I only meant you—“

“—I know, I’m teasing. Come here.” She kicked the covers back. Her pale limbs webbed the narrow bed. She reached around for and held the blades of his bare back as he neared, felt the hair beneath her hands that she knew, to her, when she saw it, was to her always patterned like a pair of wings.

106

IX.

So it wasn’t long after that first post-grad summer that Christy decided to take a trip south—and ‘south’, when he repeated it to himself, the word, ‘south’, he may have realized underneath his understanding, bore no relation to the direction; his goal wasn’t any particular point, but only to commit himself at last to a motion instead of suffocating underneath his burden of inertia.

And so one May morning he came downstairs with a small duffel bag filled with clothes, a toothbrush, a bottle of shampoo, and told his mother that he was going to visit some friends in

Columbus. She nodded and smiled and wished that he’d be safe and to call her when he got there etc. etc. He went out into the breezy morning and threw the bag in the back seat, which had been slowly accumulating graded essays, rumpled useless syllabi, pages ripped from calendars and planners, notebooks closed, filled, agape like the mouth of someone gawping at the sun; accumulated to the point that the backseat was now basically unsitdownonable. From the back of the near empty fridge (inside again) he scrounged a few water bottles and then, leaving through the back door (he had had a sudden sure fear that if he were forced to interact with anybody anymore before he left it would shake him out of this strange fragile state he was in) got into his car and drove off.

107

Not having consulted any maps or turned on yet his GPS, Christy drove by memory: the plan, such as there was any, was to make his way to Cincinnati via Columbus, if only because he knew he knew how to get to Columbus for sure. And he was fairly certain that, once he arrived in Cincinnati, he’d eventually break the border into Kentucky and, from there, didn’t know what would happen.

The sun had been on his car all morning and it was a furnace inside, so he rolled all the windows down and let all that loud velocity in, felt it muss his short hair and listened to the papers in the back flip and cackle and rustle. He became pathological about looking into passing cars; he would match the speed of cars in neighboring lanes just long enough to get their face clearly for a second. He never smiled or waved, even if they waved or smiled, but knew he needed their faces like a kind of fuel to keep himself from pulling off and turning around, which his stomach almost physically made him want to do.

Nearing Columbus an hour and a half later, Christy stopped off at a rest station. He stood in the tiled lobby and savored the sounds of shoes on that tile, watched the made-up weathermen and women mime at him in front of maps of the US on the flatscreen TVs hung in the corners: look at the fronts, the highs and lows, the green rashes of precipitation pulsing across the states.

Well, and there would be a kid whining too, wouldn’t there, and some vague-looking father in unflattering khaki shorts negotiating with him with an ignoring face. There would even be,

Christy admitted, somebody with a less coarse soul, somebody with a preening ununderstanding aesthete’s soul disdainfully aware of its separateness from the commoner run. He went over to the foodcourt and purchased a breakfast sandwich and a coffee, and sat for a few minutes watching the spider’s-eyes bubbles laze around in clusters on its surface.

108

He arrived in Columbus no later than 11:00. He didn’t spend much time in the city city, but went cruising around in the flatter areas where the city’s tide ebbed into suburbs, eddied out into shopping malls and clean boring apartment complexes. At one point he passed the

Budweiser plant where, years ago, his father had used to come with his buddies once or twice a month and take the tour, pretending they hadn’t ever been there before, thrilling every time they made it through unnoticed by the tour guides (there were only three or four people who gave the tours) and got the free sample of Budweiser at the end of the tour and, what’s maybe weirder, taking another equal though differently thrilling thrill in a sort of showmanship, wherein throughout the tour they’d ask the most pertinent questions at the most appropriate moments, raising their voices during the lulls they knew, say, Martha took as she explained the temperature at which the beer was kept at such-and-such a time was, but never in a self-aggrandizing sort of way, only ever to make the tour guide’s job easier and to make them seem more learned and interesting than, for the most part, they were, although these frequent encouraging tours made each of them think that maybe they were good at what they did after all and so they all became, marginally, more interesting on the whole for about the length of Christy’s dad’s two year stay down that way—but of course this was all years and years ago and Christy reconstructed the story from a little worn nub of a dim memory he had of his dad once telling him this story at some point, or some variant thereof at least, and as he passed the plant now he wondered even if they gave tours anymore.

By around, oh, 1:30 Christy was done with Columbus, was decided he was done, and got back on the road towards Cincinnati. Now that was a much longer ride obviously and Christy drove and realized he’d never driven so long by himself before. The fatigue wasn’t getting to him but the silence was. As he drove, bands of static would pass through the frequency he had

109 and so he fiddled with the dial. Each thing he did that whole trip, no matter how mundane, was like this, that he noticed it so fully, so heavily, that he could not but be in a sort of feary awe about himself and the world; things, even the little detail like his partial memory of his father, were saturated with significance, fell heavily against the walls of his mind like a drunkard stumbling, and made him nervous. And this nervousness is what he found he was able to fuel himself with those long hours where he wondered was he really even doing this and was it really anything important and was he not just ultimately a fool.

There was, to Christy, always something steel-and-red-brick-feeling about Cincinnati besides that parts that were actually steel and red brick—the bridge that fed into Kentucky and the rich dilapidation of the city underneath the bridge, the tenantless brick buildings slouching in the gentle hills and near the river. He knew immediately that he was in love and that there was a geography in his heart perfectly suited to this place. He thought he’d like to come live here. He had a fantasy of finding a job and a tiny hole to live in, and of eking out a living in this place.

But he knew that if he came back to live here someday it would be to live in a city other than the one he found here now.

On a hill on the outskirts of Cincinnati he found a hotel. It was on a hill, and the street wound up between the hill and a shopping center: the glow of a Wal-mart sign. The familiar colors. He took a pleasure in the sameness of strip malls, the way it helped him to settle down; it was as if he’d exploded his home so that he could find a fragment of it anywhere. This was not he knew a noble thought, but he thought it anyway and hoped that he could believe that his realization of its baseness saved him at least in some critical way from that baseness. His soul walked on stilts.

110

He parked and waited patiently in the small lobby to be attended too; a group of women, all lumpy, dowdy, and vaguely related-looking, all in hoodies and malformed curtaining jeans, rattled by with a gleaming luggage carrier filled with what appeared to be at least a year’s worth of belongings.

“Have you been helped sir?”

“No, I haven’t, thanks.”

“Do you have a reservation?”

“No actually, but I’d like to have a room, if that’s okay—can I do that?”

He had attained this sainted feeling where he didn’t care if he looked like a fool strolling in and booking a room, a room with two kings in it to boot. He grinned dreamily at the desk clerk and put forth a few opinions on the beauty of Cincinnati. And he got up to that room the first thing he did was strip off his clothes and masturbate on each bed. He breathed in deeply the cheap smell of the blankets, felt their heaviness on his body. He watched the daylight through the curtains blush from gold to rose-gold. The sound of traffic came distant, and through the walls he could, if he just concentrated, hear the goings-on of the people pent up in their rooms around him: a honeycomb of privacies.

He paced.

At long last he took a shower, brushed his teeth, combed his hair, used the complimentary mouthwash (he let towels drop wherever), and put on a clean set of clothes. He was thirsty and hungry and decided to grab some food and hit up a bar if he could find one. Being at a bit of a remove from the city proper, he didn’t want to make the trek back into it at this time of day, and so he drove the streets around the hill and found, in a tiny shopping center, a pizza place. Inside he ordered and waited patiently for a whole large pizza, which he took outside ate three slices of

111 contentedly on a metal picnic table. He knew the dark blue of the sky from the countless sunsets he’d seen in his life before; he liked the glow of the signs of the strip mall, glittering before him.

There were these things in Christy’s mind that he was beholden to. They were places, or rather images of places, that came from some deep part of him and struck another deep part.

He’d always had these, but only realized, as he grew older, that the place wasn’t important in and of itself; what mattered, and what he was identifying, was the feeling behind them; they were necessarily only in that they gave shape to this emotion in a way that nothing else seekable ever did. And somewhere along the line, he’d made that critical mistake, of believing these places to already exist; he didn’t realize it was his job to bring them into reality; he was convinced they were already out there, waiting for him. And so he found place after place in his life that he thought would bring him to that feeling and let him stay within it, but found, each time, and each time learning not a thing (or if he was too heartbroken to acknowledge the lesson) and falling for the next one immediately. He was enslaved, and he believed that he was chained to something outside of him. What he was coming into contact indirectly, what was contained beneath these places, what he would find under them, stripped of their specificities, was not a reflection of himself but himself. He did not know this. He watched the blues settling into black in the sky and the glittering band of the strip mall on the near horizon, and instinctively he felt for the feeling in the scene before him, stretching out his mind’s hand farther and farther away from what it actually wanted—himself.

He got back into his car, throwing the leftover pizza in the back, and drove around till he was able to find a bar. He preferred something with smoky air and heavy greasy wooden benches he could put all his upper weight on. Up and down the serpentine roads, passing and

112 repassing the hotel on the hill, until at last on a whim he pulled around back of the complex where he’d had the pizza and found a tiny sports bar called LaGrange’s.

Inside the air was heavy, dark, and familiar. The lights were low, and against a wall a pinball machine and a jukebox glowed luridly. What patrons were there seemed not, moving not at all; only the silent bartender moved back and forth, pouring drinks (never more creative than what was on draft) and collecting money. Christy stared at the bottles of hard liquor, the way they shimmered wetly even in this umbrageous place. He took a seat at the bar, one stool away from a man with long hair, a few days’ accretion of stubble on his face, and a nigh empty glass in front of him. The man did the cursory glance thing when Christy sat down. The bartender didn’t even speak to him, only made eye contact and raised his chin inquiringly.

“Uh I’ll have a Miller Lite please.” As he waited, Christy turned and stared glumly at this inheritance he’d driven so long to find; he felt tired, cramped. The man with the long hair turned towards him.

“You watching?”

“Pardon?”

The man gestured up towards the TV. “You watching this shit?” On the screen a golfer tugged on his pants and knelt down on the green.

“Oh, no.”

“Don’t like golf?”

“No.” Christy took his sweating glass in his hands. “No but my dad does.”

“Can’t stand this shit. Stupid.”

“...”

“And expensive too. Rich man’s sport, really.”

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“Right.”

“But not a sport.”

Christy gave the guy a smile and turned his attention fully on the glass in front of him.

One of the bodies at one of the tables shifted in the dark, but said nothing. For a few minutes everybody sipped and sat quietly, until the man, kicking his feet juvenilely against the stool, said:

“Yeah but hitting a tiny little ball into a tiny little hole. No sport.”

“Maybe not.”

“Yeah. And over miles.”

“...”

“Miles of grass and fields and trees and shit, wasted. Think of all the land you could save. Turn it into like, houses or something. What’s that guy, turning all those dunes into a resort somewhere like in Ireland or something. You heard?”

“No.”

“You know the guy. The guy! With the toupee all the time, and that hot model from like

Switzerland as his wife, you know.”

“...Donald Trump?” A shot in the dark.

“Yeah! Yeah, Donald Trump. So he’s buying up all the dunes in Ireland and flattening them out.”

“Oh.”

“Well, all the ones that are where he wants his resort, you know? And the rest’ll be kept

I guess probably as like decorations or something.”

“Mm.”

“What sports you like?”

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“Oh. I don’t know. I mean, to be honest, I’m not much of a sports guy.”

“What do you do?”

“Well. I’m a student. College student.”

“College! Here at Cincy?”

“No. Kent.”

“Kent. Right. The shootings right?”

“Right.”

“What’re you studying?”

“Oh, I’m studying English.”

“You want to be an English teacher?” The man laughed, as this was apparently a joke.

“No, actually I wanted to be a playwright.”

“A what?”

“A playwright? Write plays?”

“Write plays...” Christy had once written a play (well, the a part of a play, at least) in which the main character, a really-obvious Christy facsimile named Lucien Brine, was put on a sort of trial, in which every person that was in his life, ever, testified against him and he was given a thorough, humiliating, personal interview by the judge who, at one point, asks Lucien what he wants to do with his life:

JUDGE: But why, why do you act the way you do?

LUCIEN: Because, I have to in order...

JUDGE: In order to WHAT?

LUCIEN: In order to make...Art.

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(Roundly peals of laughter)

And this scene came to his mind as the man looked at him and repeated himself: “Write plays...” Christy got a sour anticipatory pleasure, and awaited the man’s censure. Instead he turned back to his beer and said “What kind of plays you write?”

Christy’s canned response: “Good ones, I hope,” with a demure little smile.

“No but like what’re they about?”

“Oh. I mean. Different things. I had this one where this guy was put on a trial, and—“

“Trial for what? What’d he do?”

“—well, he. Nothing, really?”

“Well he had to’ve done something, right?”

“Well it’s more of a metaphor, you know? For how like, the agony of living is a kind of trial, you know?”

“I guess,” the man said, sullen. There was a long silence again. “Say, what’s your name?”

“Christy?”

“Yeah.”

“Like the girl’s name?”

“No, not like Christine; Christy. It’s a boy’s name.”

The man chewed a dirty nail. “I went to college too. I studied up in Toledo, actually.”

“What did you study?”

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“Journalism.”

“Hm.”

Christy finished his beer. The bartender down the bar a bit looked at it out of the corner of his eye. His whole body ached; his eyes were heavy with fatigue and beer-drowse; he had basically not any inclination to buy another beer and really on top of everything else didn’t need to be spending the money but, and this is the truth, from the angle he was at he saw the bartender’s phone receive a text and light up on the shelf beneath the bar; for some reason the thought of somebody somewhere caring about the scruffy, silent man made him want to weep; instead, he ordered another beer and satisfied himself with a fantasy of his minute act of pity reverberating out in great magnanimous beautiful circles throughout the shabby bartender’s life.

He smiled to himself over it.

Still glowing he turned to the long-haired man and asked him what he did for a living.

“Oh, I’m between jobs these days. I used to work for a newspaper. Before that I’d write technical manuals for the army.”

“Technical manuals?”

“Yeah, like how to assemble and fire this or that rifle, things like that. Last one I did, was update an old guerrilla warfare handbook.”

“Wow.”

“I probably writ like near a hundred books, overall.”

“Wow.”

The man wasn’t actually, Christy didn’t think, beneath all the hair and accrued stubble and behind the sort of masking effect of his baggy dirty clothes and yellow teeth and dirty nails, probably all that old, maybe in his early forties—younger, at any rate, than Christy’s fifty-two

117 year old mother who in her immaculateness looked ten years this man’s junior. Well, age was such a farce anyway, Christy always thought so: his one and only real love affair had been over the internet with a forty-five year old woman.

“Yeah. So like I’d have to read up on whatever it was and then write the book out for them, and make it simple enough to understand, so that, you know, a soldier could like understand it pretty quickly.”

Christy, who knew nothing about guns even if he had fetishized them in his youth, imagined this man, whose talked in an English so awash with particles and dangling bits of phrases, trying to articulate in a clear and concise way the process of assembling a sniper rifle or the fineries of guerrilla combat. And, oh, worse still, he started imagining this man in school for journalism of all things; did he say he graduated? He said he was between jobs. Christy felt dirty thinking about this, but he wanted to take this man’s life too into his hands. He wanted, really above all, to move among these poor and these shabby people, to touch them and glow amongst them like a god. He wanted his arms to be long enough to envelop them all, and for them to know, he wanted to tell them over and over again that he understood them. There was not a thing about them that was a mystery to him. He felt dirty thinking this, though.

“Once though—and this’d be good for your plays—once, I had to write an article—this was when I was writing for the newspaper, now—about this guy who had set his sister on fire.

Well, he was living with her out in this house that was their parents, right? So, I don’t know, they fight or something, something along those lines, and so he goes out to the garage and gets the gas for the lawnmower and a zippo and he comes back into the house and just covers her in this gasoline, right? And then he just, sets her on fire, man.”

“Jesus. Did she die?”

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“No, actually she didn’t. She ran outside screaming, because I mean with all the gas she just went up, you know what I’m saying? And so she runs outside and falls in the grass which is wet enough—this was early in the morning, actually. He had probably come home from drinking at like you know seven or eight in the morning. So there’s dew, which helps. And a neighbor was going into her car to go to work and she calls 911 instead of getting water or helping out in some other way. But the sister’s panicking and she just rips her shirt off and her pants, she burns her hands but nothing else too bad, her hair was short, didn’t catch.”

“Holy shit.”

“Yeah. So the cops get there, etcetera, find him in the house and all, she’s screaming crying, taken away, and they arrest him. And he has the gall to say she deserved it. I mean. In jail, for sure, if he says something like that, and he says it. It was a big deal around there because he was like the town asshole for a while and everybody had something to talk about. I wrote the story about it.” He burped.

“Jesus.”

The man blinked, smiled, and looked back up at the golfers on the TV screen for a bitter instant. “So what—“ A dark form emerged from the shadowed booths and came up to sit at the stool between them briefly to order a beer. The bartender took its rumpled bills, poured a Miller

Lite, and handed it over. The form retreated back into the shadows.

“So what are you doing down in Cincinnati?” the man asked again.

“Oh, I’m just visiting some friends,” Christy said.

“Me too,” the man said and smiled again.

Christy smiled too but his interior rang out in emptiness like a bell. Calm previously, a few minutes into the silence a sudden horror bled into him and for one breathless panicked

119 second he couldn’t even think through the fear enough to know he was scared. He poured beer down his throat, in case that was what was wrong, but still felt not at all better. He went to the bathroom, in case that was what was wrong, but nothing. He came back, sat for just another second, and stood up again.

“Well, hey, it’s been nice talking to you,” he said, feeling like glass.

“Yeah, you too buddy. What was it? Christy?”

“Yeah, Christy.”

“Christy,” and you’d think he’d offer out his name, but didn’t; instead just a grimed hand.

“You take care now.”

“Yeah, you too.”

The night, oh the night, this same building’d night everywhere; the strip mall laying like a bracelet across the way, the hotel on its hill, the streets and the color of the streets under the lamplight, which also hid the true color of the night sky; Christy was a tuning fork that resonated at the pitch of this sameness’s poetry, everything finding its echo in his soul.

But even in that purity of epiphany he couldn’t shake this horripilating fear that gave him a physical headache. He tried masturbating again in case that was what was wrong, nothing.

Eventually he found that if he laid himself out flat on the bed and let himself half-sleep with beery lids he could slid underneath the panic. Eventually he was even calm enough to turn the

TV on and watch a show about a pawn shop. Eventually, even, he was calm enough to sleep.

Christy had set an alarm for himself early enough that he had time to partake in the free continental breakfast; sitting alone and watching the TV above the fireplace in the dining room.

The dowdy women passed by and sat at a table near the window, their lumpen forms framed by the pure beauty of a cool spring morning. They ate and didn’t say a word to one another.

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Back upstairs, Christy packed his duffel bag and made a final sweep of the room before he left. Back in his car, he set his GPS for Louisville, KY. He swept down the hill and out of the strange little valley, back onto the highway and, eventually, across the Roebling bridge, deciding as he did so that those buildings along the river looked much more sweetly sorrowful in an evening’s light than in the pristine glare of noon. Before him and behind him, framed in his rearview mirror, other cars were arrayed like gems along the road. He breezed into Kentucky without any of the epochal state-crossing feeling he despite everything still, he realized, more than half-expected to feel.

He was not long on the road, somewhere near Florence, when he pulled the car over.

Guilt, sudden and clear, marched through him. He thought about his mother drifting around the house aimlessly. Of the long-haired man at the bar cursing at the golfers. His father in his den formidable and empty. His pure and flaming jealousy of James and his bright-eyed Lucy that had chased him out of the Zephyr one night. Christy got out of the car. He looked up at the sky.

He had parked just beneath the Florence water tower. The red-and-white stripes pleased him:

“FLORENCE Y’ALL.” Well, that’s exactly it: not guilt, but jealousy, all along. He realized it dully: he was not, could never, express his freedom; what consumed him was jealousy for something that, like that ghost-feeling embedded in the images in his head, seemed so much of the time beyond his powers to approach directly. No: not a journey, this: but a flight. He checked his wallet and thought about money and ached.

In each play he’d ever half-written always one character would, at the end, glow with an epiphany. Christy wrote these scenes and never once thought that he was writing basically fantasy. Abandoned now in the desert stretch of a real realization he felt nothing at all; even the facts of his profound foolishness, his leaving town and spending so much and telling no one,

121 even the lying to himself, he faced with the cool aesthetic distance of true knowledge. He didn’t want to speak. He understood himself for a moment as he thought he understood all the people of the world who earned his pity. Bored: empty: vain: broke. Too smug in his belief that he understood to go out and learn.

He sighed. Back in the car and turning around at the next exit, he made his way northward again. The drive he expected to be a seven hour slog, and he wasn’t sure he knew how to get home, but somehow, without even thinking about it, he was on the right road, nearing home, flying home like a true-shot arrow.

122

One across from the other, they sat, he directing his beams across her right shoulder and she hers where, were he looking her in the face, his eyes would be. The weak winter sunlight already was failing, was smothered all day behind the curdled clouds which, earlier looking up at them getting into the car with his Dad, he had wondered didn’t fall out of that thin, watery, cold atmosphere, but had just broken out somewhere a few inches above the horizon into a little tear, a scar of sky, a consistent pure blue like held breath, and from its one eye was sending its own beams lancing across what distances to illumine the full-length windows at the front of the

Starbucks, showing all the millions of hand- and nose- and face-, ruddy windchapped cheek- prints across them, and to expose the stray single hairs at all angles standing away from the rest of it, down the long curtains of it that framed her face, disturbed by any little breeze: the pockets of cold air that bellied in with the customers’ coming and going, their bodies shifting in the chairs, the breath of his conversation.

“I gotta go soon,” she said.

“I’m in a quandary,” he said.

“What is a quandary?” she asked. She watched his eyes above his thick red cheeks as he turned them towards her.

123

“A situation. A problem.”

“Mmmhmm. Tell me about it.”

“Do you think I should go to this New Year’s party and sit around with people I don’t like?” He was young enough to say something like that, something so nakedly pretentious, without clothing it and making it decent in a robe of ironical self-awareness. His eyes didn’t flutter, his mental equipoise did not in any way totter with the unbalancedness of his words. And she was too young too to need to cultivate the decency to accept his attitude and his point; it still was coming naturally.

“Whose party?”

“Christian’s.”

“Christian...?”

“Christian Pesale?”

“Oh.” A pause. “I don’t know.” Another pause. “It sucks to hang around with people you don’t like.”

“Yeah—“

“Because you shove back your deepness and then shallow it up to have fake fun with people.”

“Exactly.” Satisfied: undisappointed. And: “Which is what I don’t want to do.”

“Okay. Well. Here’s another option: which is, perhaps, let all of that go, and see if you can like these people, have a chance at a good time.”

“True...”

“Can you let it go?”

“I thought I could earlier. Hell, if I get bored I can just leave.”

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“Sure!”

“What’re your plans? Hope I’m not abandoning you?”

“Oh—no, not at all. Fancy party, I have to go home and get dressed up and all that.”

“Oh. Well then I don’t feel bad at all! Have fun.”

“That’s definitely the plan. Anyway—“

“Anywhoo. Feeling less worthless today?”

“Much so.”

“Sounds like it. And—“

“What do you think of Clara—“

“—I’m glad. What?”

“What do you think of Clara Brissom?”

“I don’t—“

“Oh and did you get my email?”

“—I don’t, I probably did, I didn’t check. And I don’t know. I was just thinking the same thing, as a matter of fact...What do you make of her?”

“She unburdened her soul to me last night.”

“Yikes.”

“No: good one.”

“You just unravel people, don’t you?”

“Yeah, that’s the latest. I make people cry a lot.” Her lids fluttered briefly. Her smile always had something elusive in it. “I’m getting bigheaded about it too.”

“That’s not a bad thing really. What was on her soul?”

“Like look at me. I can see you for who you are.”

125

“That’s true. But you didn’t at first. And of course I didn’t see the real you either. Until, that fateful night...”

She laughed. “Yeah, it was very rewarding.”

“I always knew Clara was deeper than most people. But for some reason I never felt really compelled to dive that far. Although we used to talk a lot.”

“So I heard.”

“Somehow that makes me uncomfortable. She was talking about me. Briefly, I hope?”

“Here and there. It was mostly a Claudine thing.”

“Jesus, she’s everywhere.”

“Hang on. Bathroom, be back quick.”

“Okay.” She got up and went to the bathroom at the back. He idled, pondered the color of the checkerboard pattern on the table in front of him, picked up the ridged cardboard sleeve, which he had earlier shucked off his drink, and began to tear it, first at the seam where it was glued together and then into strips, strips into little bits, the bits into a pile...

“Okay,” back, “I can’t really tell you the Clara stuff. It wouldn’t be very goodfriendish of me.”

“Wasn’t very goodfriendish of me to ask. But.”

“But.”

He looked up, said nothing. With the sides of his hands he shaped his pile of scraps into a line.

“But but but.” She said.

“But but but what?”

“Nothing. Just making noise.”

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“Got it.” His hands outstretched were swollen, short, stumpy, with tapering fingers, so different, she noticed with a vague triumph, than her own long ones, with their tight bulging joints like little stones under her skin, between the muscles and bones. A car pulled up in front and she recognized in silhouette the shape of her Dad’s head.

“That’s my Dad.”

“Oh, okay.” They both stood up. He put on his puffy jacket, unflattering.

“Goodnight. Give Clara a chance, if you can. She’s a worth-it one.”

“Okay.”

“You need a ride?”

“No no no, my Dad’s on his way. Thanks. Have fun tonight.”

“You too.”

“See you next year.”

“Bye.”

“Vale.”

127