• Prologue

• Part 1, Chapter 1

• Part 1, Chapter 2

• Part 1, Chapter 3

• Part 1, Chapter 4

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Vincenzo Barney is a Vanity Fair contributor. He wrote Still Soft With Sleep for his senior thesis at Bennington in 2018. He is working on a book about Cormac McCarthy and Augusta Britt, a story he broke for Vanity Fair last year.

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I fell into the attractions of that first night. The party was more crowded than the night before. There were three boats docked alongside each other and the darkness could not push us all together into the boathouse. Elvis promised us all that he would be there when he got back from work but only showed for a minute because we were already too far gone when he got back late and tired from the bar. He put little vitamin gummies in my drink and I didn’t even notice him leave.

“You need these. I’m tryna spruce you up. Maybe go for Sandra tonight,” he winked.

I waited for Chris in the boathouse and looked at him in the light. I took in all his contours, his nose, his little chubby kid’s nose, his bad pouty shapeless lips, the future boundary against which he’d go bald, the smugness of such a face over his pink tie. I took his face in as the face of someone who – and he did not know this yet, he was not wrestling with this yet – deserved to be killed. I wondered for a moment if the nimbus of my knowledge was strong enough for him to share in if he drew close but the brightness of the boathouse cancelled out whatever light it threw.

“You’re sitting in a ten’s lap,” he said to the woman sitting on Caleb.

“And what does that make me?” she asked.

“Ehh, you’re a seven.”

It was a middle-aged woman with her friend. Laura told me the woman had just put her husband with Alzheimer’s in a home and she’d invited her over to cheer her up. But she kept pointing at the woman’s friend, twerking in front of Caleb and Chris and now sitting in Caleb’s lap, so I had the pleasure each of the five times Laura told me this story to confuse the Alzheimer’s wife with the twerker, and it seemed more right like that in my head.

“Chill, it’s called negging,” he said. “I’m making you wet.”

The woman smiled up at Chris from Caleb’s laugh, credulous and charmed by what she took for the leading-edge vulgarity of youth. She looked at Chris as the modern end of a long chain of men in her life.

Soon a murmur went through the Boathouse that Chris was taking the party to his father’s yacht, anchored in the mouth of Edgartown Harbor, and the party followed the momentum of this news to the boats on the dock.

Chris was standing on the dock by his boat yelling at the crowd. “Everyone shut your dumb whore mouths. Alright good. Now, I want you, you – sorry Runce, you’re 86’d – you, you.”

“He’s joking Runce,” I heard someone say.

“Alright, once we’re all boarded I’m gonna push off first and everyone just follow slow.”

“We’re never gonna fit, Chris.”

“We’ll go in shifts then.”

The boats were overpacked and I stood on the gunwale of Chris’s boat with my arm wrapped around the teetop. Caleb smiled at seeing me like this and stepped on top of the gunwale on the other side, carrying the small green light of his vape against the darkness of the harbor.

“Chris, let me know if you need me docking,” I said to him.

“Dope. Caleb? Is that you there?”

“Yeah, bru.”

“Cool bru.”

He began banking the wheel left and right, wiggling the boat and trying to shake Caleb and I loose from the teetop. Caleb deepened his armlock around its silver and leaned back playfully in the turns, his blonde head laughing deeply against the water.

“Chris, you’re making us sick!”

Chris laughed and straightened out and drove well in the harbor. We passed the lighthouse and Chris piloted us through the anchorage, banked on all sides by yachts. The sea smelled sweet and I took deep breaths of it, leaning out with my left arm around the crook of the teetop towards the water. I could see the twinkle of Cape Cod across the open Sound and looked off in the direction of where I was born. The moon rippled over the sea along the path home and Chris tunneled us deeper past the sheer walls of the yachts. Each night they had doubled in number as the elite descended on the Vineyard for the Fourth. There was a white Trident with one room over the stern lit a soft orange and what looked like the Christina O and a Laurentia which had just hit the market that spring. Added together we were sailing through a billion dollars. We kept burrowing through the yachts until at the end of the corridor I saw the shift and swing of lights in a titanic black mirror. It was a yacht floating soft and separate from all the others and its sides were black as the sea and mirrory. It had just arrived today or I would have clocked it in the harbor, or perhaps with its glassed sides it bobbed in a state of camouflage. The sides of the yacht were all glassed and so gave off the reflection of the harbor but were trimmed in white and the helm and the upper companionway were white also. The rockerlines of the bow narrowed in white and carried no dark mirror and I couldn’t tell what I was looking at. I could see our lights in the dark glass and Chris brought us deeper into our reflection and then cut us in a circle toward the bow.

“Check this,” Caleb said to me over the heads of the passengers.

The hull was a trimaran. As we swung forward of the bow the great spirals of the twin amas opened up above our heads like large white tunnels darkened by nightfall.

“You come to a fork in the ocean,” Caleb smiled at me.

“Jesus Christ,” I said back.

The symmetrical amas were so tall they looked like we could have driven under them straight through from bow to stern, all three-hundred feet.

“Watch your heads,” Chris smiled, and he pushed us gently into the starboard ama.

“He’s just kidding,” someone said. He was not and the women on board began shrieking and begging Chris not to go under and their shrieks were cupped by the hull and echoed down on us in flat dying murmurs. But the hull glowed white and the reflection of the waves wiggled in light blue above us on the steel and the sensation of tunneling quieted everyone. I ran my hand through the reflected ripples and my fingers came back slightly greyed. I turned round and saw the follow boat hesitate outside the entrance and then come through gently. Man had put a tunnel across the ocean.

We came out the other side involuntary as a dream and Chris swung the center console softly to its portside against the tender. I leapt up to the tender and Chris reversed the engine gently and put it in neutral and I steadied the boat from the teetop and began to tie us off at the cleats while the other boat turned in patient circles, packed with moonbright faces.

“Don’t bother bru, I’m going back for the others. Enjoy yourself guys. Caleb will show you around,” said Chris.

I helped some of the women off the boat and pushed Chris’s boat off the tender and he floored the engine back toward Mayflower. The other boat came along and I helped dock it and unload its passengers.

“What is this Caleb? What kind of fucking yacht is this?”

“It’s called a Gidal. Frank had it commissioned.”

“Jesus Christ.”

Caleb led the way and we climbed the moonbeam up the staircase to the bottom floor deck. We walked through the outdoor seating into the lower living room which stretched so far I could not find the far wall. The living room of the yacht was as big as the main living room at Elvis’s house in the city and had the same low tables and furniture and gold trimming. It smelled the same and we walked its entire length through a narrow hallway to a spiral staircase curling a glass elevator.

“Jesus Christ.”

“He’s here somewhere,” said Caleb. An edge had gone out of everyone’s drunkenness and we moved like hushed children. Caleb and I and a gaggle of others climbed the stairs quietly and as we curled toward the top the faces of women in the elevator sped past us smiling in the glass. I felt suddenly dizzy and nauseated and needed to be out in the air. We got to the top deck and walked through another long white living room and I just about gasped for air when Caleb slid the glass slider open and I ambled into the darkness with the others. He gathered wine and put on music and we all began to talk again out in the air, slowly at first, hesitantly, like children waking up and trying for their voices, as if the maze of the yacht had tampered with the timbre of our throats. We were at the top of the mirrored sides and I looked over the side at the darkness of Chappaquiddick. Somewhere buried in the half-mile between here and Cape Poge were those other bullets. I felt the urge to dive and swim ashore. My body asked for the exhilaration of freefall but when the music came on I turned and went back to the party.

There were large sofas and tables and a heated pool and I took my shoes off and put my feet in the water. Caleb was giggling to himself and brought me a bottle of rosé.

“Blows your cock clean off, right?”

I looked down at my lap and patted my pants and smiled at him. “It’s gone alright.”

Hours dropped clean through the night and the top deck of the yacht was packed with everyone from the boathouse. The second boatload had brought all the Gavins except Elvis and they had brought the edge of the party back with them.

“What’s Caleb talking about over there?” Serena asked Laura.

“Could be anyone’s guess. Last I heard he was measuring in knots.”

“I heard him saying something about how millennials are the crux of something, and how all men will be wearing makeup in thirty years because society is cyclical or something.”

“Sounds like he’s already planning his excuses.”

I had finished the bottle of rosé when Laura put a half a bottle of white in my hand.

“Oh no, I don’t think I can,” I said, leering and smiling in ways that are only endearing when everyone’s already drunk. I put my left hand on my chest, swearing a gentle oath. “I’ve had too much I think.”

“It’s the summer! You deserve this. You’ve had a tough winter. Adam, you deserve it.”

“I don’t know.”

“Adam, you love life, you live life. Enjoy where you are.”

“Ok. Ok,” I smiled.

I put the bottle to my lips and drank very steadily. Laura hugged me and put a hand on my chest and I went quickly looking for Caleb’s vape pens and saw him with a cowboy hat on, smoking them both while dancing his way out of the living room onto the deck:

I don’t know what you heard about me

But a bitch can’t get a dollar out of me

No Cadillac, no perms, you can’t see

That I’m a motherfucking P-I-M-P

“Caleb man,” I said, pulling one of the vapes gently from his mouth.

“Bruh, I have actually figured out the perfect position to sleep in and not mess up your hair,” he said.

“No.”

“Yeah man, I’ll teach you.” I took a drag of his pen. “Where’s Elvis?” he asked.

“No clue man. I can’t believe he’s missing this.”

“What’s up with him?”

“I don’t know man, he doesn’t really like it I guess.”

“Like what? Us?”

“No, I mean, I guess it’s just not really his scene, all this…”

“Wealth.”

“Yeah.”

“And what everyone is because of it. And what we’re all doing with it.”

“Yeah.”

I watched the green of his vape glow a few inches from his mouth. He looked at me thinking.

“Yeah man. Tell me more. What does he say about it?”

“I don’t know. I think that the majority of these people are just not his bag, man.”

“The majority of these people are not his bagman. I see. Hard to find a good bagman.”

I laughed. “He’s a different guy. I dunno. He’s someone you’d never in a million years know grew up so close to this kind of environment, or in this environment, actually. Or, maybe that explains perfectly why he is the way he is. Cuz he grew up knowing what he didn’t want to be. I dunno. He’s just a bit beyond it.”

“So, why are you here then?”

My lips smacked in uncertainty around the rim of this question. Chris came up putting his arms around Caleb. “Where’s Elvis? You guys afraid to lose at beer pong again?”

“Bru, we’ve beaten you 3 times,” I said.

“Hey, you ever call Elvis ‘L?’ Call him L. That would be cool.”

“What an idea you have there, Chris.”

“What’s that game again? I wanted to show it to my brother. What was it, Foo She Me?”

“No, Shi Foo Mi.” Shi Foo Mi is rock paper scissors in French. Elvis and I would do it fast, “Shifoomi!” and then throw our hands up and groan “awwwghhh” at the end like we both had lost to eachother. Shifoomiaawwghh. Chris tried to Shi Foo me.

“Foomoo she-me ahhh!”

“Yeah, good one man. Almost there.”

“Get that pussy out here and we’ll wax you guys at pong.”

“Wax us?”

I looked at Jamie, suddenly standing next to me and smiling like a little boy.

“Wax, bru?”

“Bruuu,” Jamie shook his head.

Chris walked away Shi Foo Meing every girl he came across.

“Bru, this boat is like a trap house,” Jamie said.

“Trapped iz bru.”

Jamie and I did our satiric handshake where we flexed our right biceps and touched elbows together. We made it up the night before as a satire of the frat horde and I had forgotten all about it until now. It had been such a success that many of the frat guys had begun using it as a greeting. I was in the tunneling state of drunkenness now where you suddenly remember the previous nights of drunkenness. You start remembering the things you have to be drunk to remember, like when you lay down to sleep at night and suddenly the dream of the night before comes back to you out of nowhere.

“Bru, have some of this.” Jamie handed me a plastic jug of dark ‘n stormy. “Finish it bru! Chug it!”

I did and then we went out to the bow where his girlfriend was being cornered and lightly touched by Runnsler.

“Call her, Jamie.”

“Serena!”

Serena flounced away in relief and Runnsler did not register she was gone for quite awhile and stared off where she’d been, and then slumped away.

“Hey, Mark is ripping a J, let’s get a hit.”

“Oh sure.”

Mark G.F. was the boyfriend of Elvis’s sister Michelle. I didn’t know what the G or F stood for, but the family always referred to him as that: Mark G.F.. Elvis and I often spent afternoons at the beach in June before I’d met Mark thinking up names for the initials, even though Elvis knew the real ones: Mark Grantham Forsythe, Mark Greenwich Finkledorf, Mark Gerald Farley. Mark G.F. wasn’t a frat guy by any stretch, but he was holding court wealthily with them all, a Bud Light in his hand.

“I mean, Jesus really hit his peak at 33, he didn’t really do much after that,” he was saying.

“He was ripped on the cross though. He had abs I didn’t even know existed,” I said.

“Yeah yeah yeah! That’s the workout we should all be doing. Crucifix abs!”

“Cross Fit,” I suggested.

Mark laughed and I took the opportunity of his good humor to inquire about his joint.

“What is that joint saying, Mark?”

“Oh, take a hit my friend. It says Pats fans smoke for free.”

“I’ll take a few lashings of it. What’s this strand called, the Spear of Destiny?”

“Ohh, you have some praying to do before bed tonight my friend.”

“Bro, let me get a hit?” Jamie asked, making a silly fake frat face.

“A hit? Oh sure.” I started coughing. “Careful with it though. The sheer size.”

Jamie pulled and said through the smoke, “I wish we had a boat. My dad used to have a Regulator.”

“That would be sick.”

“Yeah.”

We made our way through the mass of people and went inside the living room and found Caleb sitting with his two vapes going and the older woman’s friend dancing for him again.

“Bruh’s! This night is in my top five nights of the weekend. Hands down,” he said.

It was long past American midnight when we were back. I made my way up the stairs that led up to Elvis and paused where the light shone down on the top step and the divets in the old wood sprent across the floor like hurried Arabic. I felt Her for a moment with me on the steps, and then I remembered looking up at Her sitting against the wall on my bed speaking Arabic on FaceTime to Her sister. I was listening for Her voice. I had tunneling deep enough to get there and gasped like I’d caught a breath I’d let go of. There was winter in the breath and Her voice was in it too. I breathed it in deep and Her voice was in me. It had been always been there, it hadn’t gone anywhere. It was still there in my ears and I listened to it. I listened to it laugh. She opened Her eyes and looked at me and they were living and blinking but they contained a secret of midnight that couldn’t come into me yet and I felt the inner space of this secret coming high over the surf of several mornings. It was like stepping into the same slipstream twice and there were many turns of beach on the banks of the slipstream I could not see around, many channels I’d not yet crossed.

“Ah, Boy George! Bed with Elvis already?”

“Ah, Laur’,” I said, turning to her on the stairs, “you and your brood have taken all the beds in the house. You know that.”

“What about the blow-up mattress?”

“A blow-up mattress? The sheer size of it Laura. I mean come on, who do you think I am?”

“You’re right. It’s not a bed fit for a king.”

“It’s not even fit for a prince.”

“What about the fifth floor? You could have a delicious sleep up there.”

“I’ve never been up there.”

“What? Do you wanna go? I’ll take you.”

I thought of Elvis’s half-unspoken rule, the way he had looked so ashamed in telling me I was not allowed up there but not why..

“Nah, I’m chilling.”

“Are you alright? Your voice is a little hoarse.”

“My voice is a little horse? Come now Laura, how much have you had to drink?”

She cackled at that.

“I’ve just been yelling a lot. You know how Chris’s yacht is.” I rolled my eyes.

“I sure do. Well, why don’t you come out to the porch,” she gestured.

“What’s out there?”

“A little rosé, a little Connect Four as they say.” ‘As they say’ was a new one.

“Connect Four? The Hell’s that doin’ out there?”

“I was playing with Ally, keeping an eye on the boats from the porch, making sure you all got back ok.”

“Ah. Well, I guess a round couldn’t hurt.”

I followed her out the door into Mac Demarco’s “On the Level,” trying for Chris’s father’s yacht. In my blurred vision I saw only its white trim, the body of it invisible, floating in its reflection against the darkness of Chappaquiddick.

This could be your year

Make your old man proud of you

Forget about the tears

On the level

Then it went into that very simple, two-note synth line like a trance. Almost on cue, Laura slipped into a New Jersey accent.

“Did you know you have a New Jersey accent when you’re drunk?” I asked.

“Oh sure. You know I grew up there before my dad got promoted and we moved across the pond, as they say.” The Gavins had lived in England for several years, the source of Elvis’s great slang and the hysterical English characters he slipped into.

Laura poured me a glass of wine which I gulped down like water.

“They do say that one actually, about the pond.”

“So where are you from originally?” she asked, refilling my glass.

“Ye Olde Cape Cod, as they say.”

“As they say, of course. Wowwww, so you’re a real native!”

I knew she was picturing a house like her own instead of what it really was, a cottage.

“You’re lucky. I feel so rootless. I miss the early days in New Jersey. I didn’t really like England.”

“You know, I can do an accent too. I’m Ahdum and I’m from fuhking Yawmith, Mass. I love Mahk Whailbehrg, Mahky Mahk. I’m a grade A fuhkin’ dooshbag, and I love the Sahwks. Go Pats!”

“Yawmith! Oh my God that is spot on!” She laughed. “I love Boston so much! You know, Michelle and I went to BU, and so did Elvis for a term. Ughh, I wanna live in Brookline so bad, that is my dream. I just wanna find some guy and whoever it is has to be ok with moving to Brookline because that’s where I want to live. It’s such a real place. Did Elvis ever tell you about his term at BU?”

“A little bit.”

“It was only a month actually. It was his ‘rebellious phase,’ as they say.” She added a finger twinkle to this new phrase.

“Yeah.”

She started telling some story of holding Elvis one night when he was drunk and on drugs and talking in a different language like he was a baby and I asked her not to tell it because it didn’t feel right hearing it from someone else.

“I just wanted to say,” said Laura, “I read somewhere on Facebook the eulogy you wrote for your girlfriend Ajjul and it was so beautiful.” Her name struck against the inner design of my mourning, tugging against the vanishing point around a silver bend of beach I could not lift my leaden legs to walk. “You sounded like you were 40 years old, the things you said and the strength and perspective you had. I loved the line about remembering someone in a way that, when you’re in a situation where you don’t know what to do, it’s their voice you turn to, mixed with your own.” My arm was open along the back of the couch and she laid down into it. “You know when you just know an old soul? You’re just someone who’s been here for so long. I remember Elvis telling us about it, when your girlfriend was first missing for all those days, before I knew you or knew who you were, and I was just crying it was so sad. It must have been so hard for you. And so hard for you to say those words. Elvis told me you were the only student who spoke at Her memorial.”

“Yeah, no one else wanted to,” I said drinking now deep from the bottle itself.

“That’s so sad.”

“They couldn’t do it. Or thought they couldn’t. They were still so crushed by the weight of how dark it was, because She was such a…” I became aware that my mind had shut off, the silver dimmed, and my words were on their own. “I don’t know. I don’t know... And they said things like, ‘She doesn’t exist anymore, so I can’t say what should be done. I can’t say what She would have wanted for a memorial. How can I speak for Her? I only know my version of Her.’ And I would say, ‘So just tell everyone your version of Her. Say something.’ One friend actually said to me, ‘I had a lot of feelings for Her while She was still alive, but She doesn’t exist anymore, so I really only care about the people who are still here.’ They couldn’t see the answer, how they should be going about it. That that wasn’t the way to honor Her. They were lost and trying to intellectualize their pain. They were overthinking their pain and not just feeling it. She would have told me just to feel it. Feel every inch of it and feel every turn. Let it have its course. Be angry at Me, love Me, cry for Me, feel Me, feel Me go, feel Me come back. So, I did what She would have told me. It was Her who saved me from that dark hole. It was some remnant of Her voice still swirling in my heart that caught a bit of light and told me to let go into those waves of grief to get through. But they, all the others, they rejected Her and accepted only Her decision to leave, as if that’s what Her life was. As if all She added up to was suicide.”

Laura didn’t say anything for a while.

“I’m so sorry Adam,” she said gently into my chest. “It’s so sad. I wanted to drive up for the memorial but I figured since I didn’t know you yet I shouldn’t. But we were all here for you, even before we knew you very well. We were all feeling for you. Elvis told me what an amazing person She was.”

I remembered the memorial, held at the beginning of Spring Term two months after Her death, Her body already gone in the earth of Palestine, arriving on Christmas day. She had converted to Christianity but She was buried Muslim. The instinct to bury comes on its own: you love this body and you look at it as long as you can but She is not in it. But how much is She not in it? Is there still a feather of her soul lifting off? Is there still a feather now? That’s what your eyes looked for: the ultraviolet. But you know it is not right to see what happens to the body after so many days. That is too much knowledge of the body. The memorial was the day. The day I lost It. When the clarity exhaled, soundlessly. Walking from the memorial in the two-degrees Fahrenheit cold I kept inhaling, trying to find it again in absolute zero, to hold on to any trace, but it had let go of me. I looked at my breath in the air. Then the loneliness without the clarity, holding on as long as I could to any wake of the feeling. But it was back now. A dark wave was coming over me now and I was passing through it. It was back.

I had the wine in my hand and drank it steadily and then passed it back to Laura.

“Did you have any idea She was gonna do that?” she asked.

“Um.” Um I said. Um I ummed. Um was the sound my mouth made when it pronounced the thoughts in my head that were not um. “No. Not really.”

“Do you know why she did it?”

Laysh. That means why in Arabic. Laysh? Laysh, Adam.

“It’s very confusing when it happens. You ask yourself ‘Why?’ to death and you’ll never really know why for sure, just make all these reasons why in your head. She was missing for four days. They found Her car at the quarry the first night but couldn’t find Her body and I knew as soon as they found Her car there what had happened. But then it took four days to find Her, and they didn’t tell us about the note until then so we all just thought, maybe She is alive somewhere and we’ll never know what happened to Her.

“But it was a week before Christmas and a thaw came and melted the top of the quarry. She jumped straight through and that night the cold settled back in and froze the hole over Her head. The sheriff told me She was lucky about the thaw, because otherwise She could have broken Her legs on the ice and froze to death. But She was smart, and I think She saw the melting snow and felt the thaw and knew it was Her moment. I don’t think I realized I knew this until just now. That must be it.

“When it first happened I had no problem talking about it, because you sort of discover things about it by talking and feeling the first words that come around to shape it. Like just now about the thaw. But it’s hard to talk about it now, so long after. It feels like every time I access it it dulls a bit. Every time I tell it it feels less pure and I feel like I’m tampering with the memory. It changes it, it shapes it in some new way that is maybe not pure and not honest. So I keep it buried down where I know I can’t damage it. But then I lose it. Like a bullet deep in the body it moves around on its own if you don’t fish it out and I can’t get a grasp of it sometimes and become very panicked.”

Laura looked up at me with my arm around her and I saw her father’s face. Lying in the frame of her face was the face of a man I had never met looking up at me. The face from pictures lying all about the house. The light illuminating all those exact gene sequences. She kissed me with dawn coming up slow and freezing there in the sky, pinkened orange like it would never leave and the sky sitting there cleanly against Chappaquiddick without the blue of what comes when things freeze.

Her lips were not right. Did not fit.

The next day Elvis and I had off work and we’d planned a beach trip to Great Rock Bight in Chilmark. When I woke around noon he was not in bed and I found him downstairs at the kitchen island eating a bowl of cereal.

All the furniture had changed. The old couch and chairs and low tables they’d had forever had been swapped for a new set and the Gavins looked brand new against their new colors. There was an aftershock in the mood I had missed, and I could tell instantly that Elvis’s mother had had the old furniture changed against their will.

Laura laid on the couch with the rest of the siblings and their partners watching TV, all of them looking hungover, Monty windexing the windows, which I found intimidating. I was terrified of getting anything dirty in front of him, especially now in the new clean of the décor.

“Boy George, I am never drinking again,” Laura said.

“You said that yesterday,” Elvis said.

“I know but I really can’t do it. We’re all going to Menemsha to sober up, and not to the nude beach at Gayhead you two fools. I need the sun as they say.”

“As who says?” Elvis asked.

“Oh Boy George, are you coming or not?”

“We’re Great Rock Bighting it,” said Elvis.

“Looks like you’re rocking a great bite already,” Laura said.

This jarred Elvis out of the mood he’d fallen in, and he laughed into the milk of his spoon. Monty left the kitchen and I could hear the vacuum suction sound of the balcony door opening onto the harbor.

“New furniture?” I asked.

“Yup,” Elvis said moodily.

“Let’s not go into it,” said Michelle.

“What time you thinking of going?” Elvis asked, pivoting conversation.

“Oh God, whoever knows as they say.”

“I need a bathing suit though, as they say. I think the cleaning ladies robbed mine,” I said.

“No one says these things,” Elvis said.

“Boy George Elvis, get with the program as they say,” Laura laughed.

“Anyhow, as Monty says, these cleaning ladies need to go,” Elvis said, laying his spoon down in the emptied bowl. “Laura, we need to all sit down with mom and tell her. We need an intervention. I haven’t seen three crucial pairs of underwear in over a month. So pointless. And this furniture. She didn’t ask us once.”

“Do you wanna do your own laundry Elvis?” she asked.

“No, but…”

“I just need a bathing suit,” I chimed back in.

“Give him one of Dad’s,” Michelle said, not turning from the TV.

Elvis didn’t say another word.

We got in the Porsche Cayenne about an hour later and Mark G.F. drove. Grenadier Flooxin, Grenald Floptilt. The names had become more unnatural in my head. Michelle and Elvis sat in the front with Mark Gasper Fulp, and I sat in the back next to Laura and Sandra, with Jamie and Serena squished in the trunk. The sunroof was down and the sun shone on Laura’s phone so that it reflected full into my face and I had to look away when she spoke to me. We had been drunk enough the night before that I was able to pull away gently and we could close it behind us if we wanted as something that didn’t happen.

We waited in the driveway of a friend of Laura’s in the bitter cold of the AC. Her name was Lonnie and she walked to the car with her makeup running and a beach bag over her shoulder.

“Laura, I don’t know what to do! Oh, hi Adam,” she said to me, getting onto Laura’s lap. I didn’t recognize her but must have met her in the boathouse. I recognized her overpowering perfume, settling into the car.

“Lonnie, I’m so, so sorry. What happened? Tell us.”

Lonnie let out a long sob. Sniffled to collect herself. Gorin Flinttopper put the Porsche out on the road.

“Tony Shaloub. You know how he’s malnourishing Fanny.”

“Of course.”

“Well, he sent a letter to the house revoking my visitation rights for him earlier this week. And, and we went to these lawyers today and basically no one will take the case, he’s paid them all off! And the last time I saw Fanny he was being kept in this horrible old barn. You’d think Tony could afford something a little nicer.”

“He’s such a monster!”

“I know. I know…” Lonnie sighed, wiped at the darkness under her eyes. “I should never have sold Fanny to him. He was the best pony when I was a little girl.”

The road took us deeper into the island from the traffic, where the trees touched over us. These were the first roads I ever really took in with Elvis those first days of Shaloubless June.

“I just don’t know what to do!”

“Lonnie, you have every legal right to demand Tony Shaloub feed your horse better. Weren’t his ribs showing when you last saw him?”

“Just about!”

“Don’t give up. Why not try lawyers in the city?”

“No, no one will take my case. Tony must have paid them all off too.”

My ear caught MVY on the radio as fealty was sworn up and down in the car against Shaloub, how overrated Monk was, pacts to never watch anything of his ever again. I put on my sunglasses and watched Elvis from the corner of my eye.

“You guys hear about this? Monty was talking about this all morning.” Mark turned the volume of the radio up.

“Rosie Hallet was camping alone when she was struck by a stray bullet,” MVY said.

“Someone shot a little girl?” asked Laura.

“Didn’t exactly mean to. The bullet fell out of the sky.”

“What do you mean fell out of the sky?”

“Someone shot a gun up in the air a few nights ago, like they do at Mardi Gras, and the bullet fell and hit this girl camping. It happens all the time when you shoot a gun in the air, the bullet has to come down.”

“Oh my God, that’s so sad,” said Laura. “Where did this happen?”

“On Chappy, a few nights ago,” said Mark.

“What?”

Elvis’s head was cocked and leaning now into the center of the conversation, but I couldn’t see much of his face. Just his left eye with his iris darting in and out of my line of sight. I felt a pang of panic, and a widening between Elvis and I. He was now leaning toward the space between us and I wasn’t sure I could meet him in the middle of his innocence. I had to handle him gently into this.

There followed an argument about which beach to go to as Laura recognized the road to Great Rock Bight. In an effort of diplomacy and levity Mark Greenlocke Flaherety brought a quantum mechanical theory into play where every possible action and choice is simultaneously played out so that, actually, regardless of where we were going now in this version of reality, in some alternate universe we also went to Gayhead, or Menemsha, or State Beach, or to the Edgartown Bridge. That, in fact, we performed every possibility and every outcome, and so every outcome was actually connected at the moment before the decision, so all the points of departure were one, yet we only got to experience this reality where we decided to go to South Beach.

“So, another Laura is at Menemsha right now, eating a lobster roll, and another is at the Edgartown Bridge, jumping? And that’s the parallel worlds theory, as you say?” Laura asked.

“Right.”

“Boy George. That doesn’t exactly solve the problem of me not getting to go to Menemsha.”

“But it raises very interesting prospects about Nietzsche’s bid for the Eternal Return.”

“Oh sure, and what’s that again?” asked Laura.

“It probably wasn’t really a theory he actually believed in, but the most interesting aspect of it is the question of having the courage to live your life over again. Would you choose to live your life over again, every decision, every moment, even moments as simple and small and meaningless as this right now. And every pain. Would you choose to live it all again in the same exact order? Which really was all about making people aware of their lives, and having the strength to accept every sequence of it, the totality of it.”

“And the sheer size of it too,” Laura said, looking out the window.

We walked the long steep path through the woods and Elvis and I fell behind when there was an opening in our group.

“Adam. That’s Chris who did it, isn’t it?”

“It must be,” I said.

“Chris killed a little girl.”

“I know. I know.”

“What the fuck.”

I didn’t want to tell him his prints were on the gun. I wanted to let him introduce this himself.

“Fuck man. He’s gonna get nabbed.”

“You know he’s gonna snake out of it,” I said.

“What?” he paused and bit and chewed on his top lip. “Fuck, you think?”

“They’ll trace the bullet but you know his father will get it swept right under the rug.”

“But he killed a little girl. He’s such a fucking idiot. Such a fucking asshole.” A rage was coming out of him now. “It’s disgusting. With this stupid fucking gun shooting it randomly into the air like a fucking loser, and now a girl is dead.”

“He is a loser.”

“Do you think he knows? How did he seem last night?”

“Smug as ever. He couldn’t have known last night.”

“Jesus Christ.” Then a warp came into his anger, a pause, and he grew pensive as we approached the steep stairs at the end of the trail and he saw himself around the warp. “My prints are on the gun too.”

“They are?” I asked.

“He threw the gun to me. Is that enough for prints you think?”

“Oh, right. Yeah, it could be. I don’t think there’s a five second rule.”

A feeling of guilt closed in the space between us. Whereas with Elvis there was shock and awe, an anxiety now briefly trembled him out of our shared sense of self, and a guilt at my fingerprints not being on the gun rushed into the new space.

“It’s alright. It’ll get sorted,” I said.

“Yeah,” Elvis said. “Shit. Ok, yeah.”

When we were down on the beach Elvis tried to get me alone to swim to the big rock, but everyone wanted to come and we swam in a group to the rock out past where the water is cold and you can’t touch the bottom with your feet. It was high tide and hard to find the foothold at the back of the rock but Elvis went first and led the way. It’s not the easiest climb with your feet and hands wet and the holds can only fit your toes. You had to get your two feet on the base fringed in kelp, and then you had either to put the toes of your right foot on the first hold and cross your left foot underneath and trust your weight transfer and your wet toe grip as you pulled up with the left foot, or start with the left foot and pull with your arms and trust your right foot to find the second hold in the balance. It was tricky and there was some fear involved and Laura and Michelle and Lonnie stayed back with fears of sharks at their backs and swam frightenedly to the beach.

We stood for awhile joking and smiling in the sun and the sun felt good on our wet backs.

“What are those?” Jamie asked, pointing out at the distant islands across the Sound.

“That’s Noman’s Land,” said Mark.

“Wow.”

“No, those are the Elizabeths,” I said.

“Ah.”

“Are they?”

“Yeah, they go all the way to Wood’s Hole.”

“I can’t believe it about that little girl,” said Serena.

“Yeah it’s mad scary to think you could be chilling on the beach and a bullet just comes falling out of the sky,” said Jamie.

“It happens every year at Mardi Gras,” said Mark.

“How far can a bullet travel?”

“I don’t know.”

“I guess you never think that it’s gotta come down.”

Everyone dove one by one, like children doing half-tricks. But Elvis and I stayed and watched them swim back. We sat and hugged our knees.

“This is really fucking me up man,” he said.

“I know. It’s horrible.”

“Should we tell the police? I mean they have to know. They could trace the bullet.”

“They could be there at Chris’s now,” I said. “I’m sure it’ll peter out to Laura.”

“Yeah, true. I guess we can’t know yet.”

“But you know they’ll never be able to nail him,” I said.

“Come on.” This anguished Elvis and he rolled his head and looked back at the beach. “Then we’ll have to say something.”

“But your prints are on it,” I reminded him gently.

“So?”

“Maybe Chris could try to use that against you.”

“How?”

“Try and distribute the evidence of culpability. Scare you,” I said it, but I hated to say it, and I realized I was distributing the fear of culpability by thinking ahead into Chris. “Keep you quiet. He could tell you he’ll deny it was him to the police. Caleb’s prints were on it too. Pressure you and scare you.”

It hadn’t happened yet, but I started to wonder when Elvis might resent me for my prints not being on the gun. We let a long silence pass. The mood between us shifted several times, went through freefalls and relevelings. Brock lived up here in Chilmark and I thought of him. I reached for his mood through the silence and then I thought of Rosie. Her death had opened up a heaven overhead. It had tugged Heaven a little closer. I wondered if Elvis could see it too.

But something in me braced. My old muscles felt a tremor and I could feel something coming. When a death weighs enough it puts a hollow in the fabric of the world and things caught at the rim start falling into the hollow. Coincidence picks up as the world adjusts its balance to the new rim pulling down on it. Winter was back in my mood. It was not a wave I was feeling now but the trough of one pulling against me.

“By the way man, I forgot to tell you, you were making a lot of noise last night.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah, you were having some nightmare or something.”

“Really? What was I doing?”

“I don’t know, you just made some like heaving sound, and you didn’t say any words, just made these sounds like you were struggling or trying to get away from something.”

“Really.”

“Yeah, you don’t remember any of it?”

“Nope.”

“Just a pitch-black sleep?”

“Not even that.”

“What do you think that’s all about?”

“What?”

“When you go to sleep and it’s all pitch black. No dreams.”

“I don’t know. I don’t think it’s ever really truly pitch black. Even when it looks like that.”

“Could be though. We could just be going to sleep and the mind turns off.”

“I can’t imagine the mind ever turning off. Though it’s felt pretty close to it this week.”

“Yeah. It’s been an interesting week… and then my mom changing all the furniture this morning… I don’t know, I was thinking… Adam, I…” He directed a small, sad laugh into his chest. “Well, I had this vision that maybe we could get outta here again. Away from everyone.”

I smiled at the thought which events had already lifted us beyond, and showed him my smile as it turned sad.

“Not now,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said, looking off at the Elizabeths. “Not now.”

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• Prologue

• Part 1, Chapter 1

• Part 1, Chapter 2

• Part 1, Chapter 3

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Vincenzo Barney is a Vanity Fair contributor. He wrote Still Soft With Sleep for his senior thesis at Bennington in 2018. He is working on a book about Cormac McCarthy and Augusta Britt, a story he broke for Vanity Fair last year.

⚬─────────✧─────────⚬

World was in the face of the beloved,

but suddenly it poured out and was gone:

world is outside, world cannot be grasped.

Why didn’t I, from the full, beloved face

as I raised it to my lips, why didn’t I drink

world, so near that I could almost taste it?

—Rainer Maria Rilke

Keep those tears hid out of sight.

—Mick Jagger

⚬─────────✧─────────⚬

The last crossing of my shift we picked up a statie from Chappy and he rode alone on the ferry. I let him and Jill talk alone at his window and kept my eyes on the glitter of the harbor and the impatient center consoles trying to cross my path. I had driven my strength up the high vertical wall of my fatigue and the whole shift at the helm of the ferry passed as one vivid hour. But now as my body neared the end of its mission the bottom began falling out and I felt the possibility of collapse. After the statie drove off and our replacements boarded the ferry I stood Jill a drink at the Atlantic.

She told me how Rosie was in her tent past midnight nudged into Cape Poge and how a light rain had come and I remembered that rain as a soft mist on my face the night before and she told how the bullet struck her softly in the rain. She had been found by a beachcomber this morning with her hands around the rim of the entry wound in her forehead. It had gone straight through whatever dream she’d been having, whatever fantasy or memory she’d been playing with and coloring, and she’d had enough time after being shot to put her little hands around it, feel the dream draw away through her fingertips. I thought about that under the surface of Jill’s conversation, how there was enough awareness and curiosity in that second to probe one’s fatal wound.

It was here Jill cried and I stood from my stool and hugged her. If for the last few months I’d been unable to cry while awake I knew as I choked my own tears back now I’d forfeited my ability to cry for at least as long. For I was not tamping down the pain of the moment but was drawing back several zones and gulfs before it.

“Have you seen Brock?”

“I can’t go there, Adam,” she said. She was done crying in front of me and waved this question away weakly. Her wet eyes looked such like a little girl’s when I sat back across from her and I ordered us another drink. I was now easing my leftover drunkenness from the night before just as it tilted into its delayed hangover.

Brock loomed large in my mind. The death of Rosie magnified him, like a mountain with the sun setting behind it. The contours of all that pain and all that was possible to him now glowed. There was the realization that nothing now could be denied him. If he knew who did it then destiny would come in on the wave to Chris’s feet. The law would come in later but they’d be punishing the wave, they’d be tampering with something outside of the law. Even the statie knew this. The mood he gave off was not of sadness but of a man’s tension in knowing there was someone new on his island who had every right to be killed, and yet he’d have to arrest the man who did it. He’d have to arrest Brock.

It would be so simple to tell Jill, but Elvis’s prints being on the gun were a complication that opened a door I didn’t think I’d ever have to decide about walking through. It was not a choice. Jill rose to go drive to Brock and I paid for the drinks and walked back to Mayflower with the odd sensation of a corridor opening up to me. For a moment, in that first step over the sill, anything felt possible, like I might arrive at the house and be told by startled faces that there’d never been an Elvis Gavin, that they didn’t know who I was. That I was wanted for the murder of Rosie Hallet. But this was the limbo before you get your second foot through the doorway. I put that wiggle room, that brief moment when you can refuse the corridor, back down from your courage to face the invisible rim and see reality to its new boundary, but once you chose it there was no turning around and finding the door again. Crossing it was an act of erasure. Each step now was an ante taking me away from Jill, and I knew now I’d be in it for each hand until I couldn’t measure the size of the bet.

I couldn’t say that I wasn’t afraid but the fear and the anxiety came now from a purer place not far from the bottom of the sea, not the familiar boundaries but from the endless steps below it like harp strings stretched all the way to the seafloor and the faint currents of an early storm were plucking them as the seas picked up. I felt fear but the danger of the fear withdrew, as I was now in a situation where something larger than danger was at hazard. I had a storm to sail through, and there was clarity and purpose in knowing there was no going back, there was only facing it down and this calmed me. Deepening into concentration, I knew a moment would come. Elvis’s prints were on the gun.

“Boy George, Adam, you’re back just in time!” This was Laura, at the head of a mass exodus of Gavins headed for Lighthouse Beach. “Get your speedo on and come down to the beach.”

I saw in their faces no indication they’d heard of the killing. It was too early for the radio or the local paper. I gave Laura some of our repartee. “Ah, I wish but I’m tired from work. I’m gonna go have a delicious little nap.”

She laughed and I saw I’d coined a new one. I tip-toed inside Mayflower where house workers had begun doing something arbitrary and breathtakingly loud to the walls and Chelsea stood barking at their feet. Elvis’s little brother Jamie and his girlfriend Serena were shifting in each other’s arms on the large couch, just waking up now from the party last night. From each other’s arms they asked if I’d drive them to the Boathouse, their country club which Elvis had never brought me to. I thought then of Elvis. If there had been times that summer where the boundary between our own minds had been blurred I tried to reach to him now. Already a sliver had opened up between us on my walk back from the ferry and I thought only of keeping him in Eden as long as possible.

I parked the Porsche in the sea shells and Jamie led me through the portico and the hydrangeas down to the changing room. Chris’s father came out of a racquetball court in all white and Jamie smiled and greeted him.

“Hey Mr. McConnel. Congratulations, I heard you’re getting the Tip O’Neill Award.”

“Yeah. Thanks.”

“Good stuff.”

“Yeah, good stuff.”

“Congratulations,” I said.

“We’re done with this court if you want it.”

“Oh thanks. But I’m not great at racquetball.”

“I’m here everyday at noon to play. Come down some time and I’ll give you lessons.”

“Thanks Mr. McConnel.”

I knew from Jill that no one had calculated a bullet trajectory yet. I wondered just how precise they could be with it. Would they walk the path through the woods straight to Frank’s and ask to search a billionaire’s house? I doubted it. I hated his face. It had more character than his son’s. The nose sharper, the face narrower, while Chris’ was chubby, undefined. His narrow face had married a woman soft enough to fall into and Chris’ son came out with the mother’s heft from which he tried to rescue his father’s ego. Frank’s was a sneaky face. It was a face that used silence to mask emptiness, and this silence then to project power. He could have been a coward as a child. Or a dickhead, a born tool. But for the coward, even if they are an evil coward, there are seams you can see them fall apart at, you can see them pinch and wedge and pull against themselves and I couldn’t read this in him. If his face had any gravity at all it was because it was simply old. If Chris wanted any shot at being handsome he had better get old quick. He had better get off this island and hide somewhere and get old.

McConnel’s partner came out of the court sweating, throwing around much more personality than him. I’d learned you could measure personality by drop in net worth. The less personality you had the more you could profit, as if cold character and lack of personality opened a vacuum into others’ pockets.

“Ned, this is Jamie Gavin.”

“Ed’s boy! And so you must be Elvis.” He shook our hands.

“No, I’m Elvis’s friend, Adam.”

“Ah I see.” He wiped his face hurriedly with his towel. Here was a much better face, a face that moved. It was overweight but it was friendly. You could look at it across a drink without getting spooked. “How’re you doing?” he asked Jamie. “How’s your mother. I don’t think I’ve seen her since the funeral.”

“She’s good. She’s good.”

“Strong woman. Tell her Ned Flannery says hi. I’d love to have her over sometime when Susanne’s back. You two playing racquetball? Court’s all yours.”

“No no, just hitting the gym. We don’t play.”

“Come by tomorrow around noon, we’ll teach you.”

We nudged past each other and said goodbye and Jamie brought me to the changing room. “About to get swoll iz, bru,” he smiled. Jamie changed into his gym clothes and went upstairs and I undressed and went outside into the hot tub. I was alone under a large awning and there were children playing around a large fountain on the other side of the fence. I laid on my back with my eyes closed and felt like I was going to throw up. The heat answered to some resonance of nausea within me and it came to the surface of my stomach and my lungs and my throat and burned off.

Underneath the nausea the colors of the past were deepening. The colors of the present were now of the same hue and they were blending into each other. Death is a creation and you have to take some gift from it or it will put a very dark hole in your heart, and day by day this hole will start stealing from you. Involuntary as a dream it comes upon you, all its events and feelings too incisive to form in the brightness of the day, but then it spills into your day, into your week, your month. Your winter and spring. Just as in a dream the moment you start trying to grasp it, hold onto it, remember it, record it, make it last a little longer, it fades. The second you become aware of the dream the dream ends. It will not be made to be voluntary. And so first I mourned Her and then I began to mourn the mourning.

For the mourning state is sacred. It makes this known through its own laws. Its strange waves and eerie tides. You cannot ask a wave to be any different than it is, you can only take it at the right angle. One lives in a state set apart from the world with a deadly clarity about reality, about the soul. One finally knows who they are and the world permits this, it permits you to walk around naked without your mask. It is like people are watching someone continually be born: there is no judgement when the newborn cries, when their faces are smeared in blood. There is no judgement at their nakedness. People deny nothing to creation when it comes. But eventually the world expects you to come back, even though you’ve touched Heaven. Your pain has searched the last routes into the nerves of Her last feeling. You have felt a little string attached from your soul to Hers and occasionally you feel it nudge and tug and you don’t know if it is Her or the wind, you cannot tell if the weight in it is from its growing length of the string or from Her at the other end, and new muscles form around the tugs, quick-twitch muscles to sense the slightest movement. But then you and the mourning state work together to destroy it. You begin to covet it and destroy it and mourning itself must follow its mysterious tides. It had been your only way to touch Her and you panic because you realize you will not be able to stop drifting from Her. It had put you and Her in the same nimbus. Wherever She was you were breathing some of Her air, Heaven’s or nothingness, you couldn’t be sure. But one day the pain may not be so great and maybe you could think about loving again. This is what everyone tells you, that in concert with time you will betray Her. You cannot stop flowing away from each other and that is worse than your own death. But She had followed Her death into a darkness and I did not want that darkness for myself. I reached a point of the dark corridor in which I could not be shaped to fit. I followed Her darkness as long as there was ground to cover but what I could not see was whether She was in light on the other side of the darkness. I could not follow Her route just as I could not have arrived with her through the same womb. It was Her own death just as it was Her own birth.

I felt now, however, that I was reapproaching Her ground from another field of play. That clarity that death gives to the resonance of tides left over in the body, the great floodtide of growing in the wet belly, when we breathed in the sea. That deadly clarity of knowing when to be born. I felt the promise of the missing feeling. A promise of the old feeling. I felt everything that had waned, everything that had drifted away was now caught in an orbit that brought it back to circle the momentum of the path I was on. I had been staring across a great gulf which had drifted so slowly from me that I could not feel it going until it was out of reach and now fate had brought it to back to my feet and something worse than fear was waiting for me if I didn’t take the step across. But I had. I had taken it and I was across now and what I had to accept was that it would be involuntary from here on.

I met Jamie and Serena at the restaurant behind the gym and ordered a Dark and Stormy. Serena was more beautiful than I had realized and her face was putting me into a beautiful mood.

“How did you two meet?”

“Well,” said Jamie, “Serena used to get with one of my best friends, and then she started hooking up with one of my other best friends, so I guess that’s when I first heard of her.”

“Yeah, I guess he wanted to get in on it,” Serena said.

I choked on my drink, my second, and a little stream dribbled down my chin.

“So then I texted her -”

“No, you Snapchatted me. You said, ‘Hey, you’ve hooked up with two of my friends, we should be tight.’”

“I thought it was an Instagram DM,” Jamie said thoughtfully.

“Did you actually say that?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“21st Century love,” she smiled.

Chris had left his boat unattended on Elvis’s dock and I sat on a chair on the deck of the boathouse brooding on it, spinning an ice cube in my drink. The deck was the size of my living room at home, and from here the depth of the harbor flowing between the twin white columns of the deck made a natural sea stage, and Chappy in the background a kind of mythic backdrop, slowing being obstructed by the distant, competing heights of new yachts, bunching together for July 4^th. I thought of the books I’d read on Near Death Experience, when the souls rise out of the bodies and look down on their loved ones in the room, trying to tell them how happy they were. Sometimes they follow the doctors out of the room to their offices, or travel to loved ones. I imagined Rosie now high above Chappaquiddick looking down at me. Had some particle of her mind followed me and Jill? I don’t know why I had thought of Brock as being so sad – he must be very angry. I felt his anger all the way from Chilmark.

“Are you Elvis?”

I turned around over the railing to the seagrass and dunes of Elvis’s shore. The workers had come down to the boathouse.

“No, I’m Adam. Elvis’s friend.”

“Oh, hi Mr. Adam. Do you mind if we take a look at the deck here?”

“No, not at all. Please.”

They stepped from around the side and between the white columns. But they dared not enter the actual deck, giving me an unnatural berth of about ten or fifteen feet. The leader pointed out two apparent blemishes in the wood and the paint tens of feet away. The two others listened, bending their heads down to the wood, angled away from my sight, trying hard to be ghosts to me.

“It must be getting late. Would you guys care for a drink or something?” I asked.

The leader smiled and waved his hand, bowing his head. “No, no. It’s ok.”

Then, instead of violating the bubble they made around me by stepping onto the deck and entering the already opened twin doors of the boathouse at my side, they went around the side and entered through the front door behind me. I thought it was Elvis for a moment because surely if it was them they would have entered through the open doors right in front of them. I turned around and they stared at me through the window, looking guilty and panicked. I smiled to let them know it was ok and turned back to Chris’s boat.

“I’ve come to rescue you,” a voice said behind me.

I turned around again, not expecting to be surprised in such quick tandem. It was Elvis with two sandwiches in his hand. He nodded to Chris’s boat and smiled. I smiled and we walked quickly towards it and I untied us from the cleats and pushed us from the dock.

“I thought you didn’t get back till like 7,” I said over the engine, the wind.

“I was supposed to, but the owner asked me to work till close, so he gave me a few hours break between.”

The harbor opened up to us and we found a natural path through the boats towards the distant line of Cape Cod and the smooth palm of the ocean. The rips, the standing waves, ringed the mouth of the horizon. I was curious just where Elvis was taking us, though not caring where at all.

When we were free of the harbor Elvis turned us towards Cape Poge, tucked inside of Chappy and well within the boundary of the rips. We beached ourselves inside the yellows and greens of the shore and the seagrass. I found a bottle of white wine and pesto in Chris’s cooler and presented them to Elvis.

“Just one drink for me. I’ve got to work.”

We were alone together again. When I turned the engine off the radio could be heard. “—passed away just past midnight. Hallet was only 12 years old.”

“Hallet. Wow, that’s a sick name. Hallet,” Elvis said.

And I felt my soul open into brilliant possibility.

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Starting Sunday, March 22nd, we’ll serialize the remaining chapters of Still Soft With Sleep here on the Substack, at the pace of one chapter a week. Do catch up with the opening chapters in the meantime:

• Prologue

• Part 1, Chapter 1

• Part 1, Chapter 2

• Part 1, Chapter 3

Mallarmé said that a poem was “chance defeated word by word.” So, too, is reading. Every choice to engage with art and literature instead of culture war slop is a brick in the edifice of human personality we all are constructing minute by minute. We’re glad to have you as part of this ongoing experiment. (And if you simply cannot or will not read fiction in the Substack ecosystem, check out friend-of-the-Substack Anthony Marigold’s Chrome extension for creating a weekly Substack digest for your e-reader or printing it out.)

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Excelsior,

Tom Watters

Editor-in-Chief

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• Vice Nimrod by Colin Dodds

  • Chapter 1

  • Chapter 2

  • Chapter 3

  • Chapter 4

• Still Soft With Sleep by Vincenzo Barney

  • Prologue

  • Part 1, Chapter 1

  • Part 1, Chapter 2

  • Part 1, Chapter 3

• Don’t Disappoint by Martin Van Cooper

  • Chapter 1

  • Chapter 2

  • Chapter 3

  • Chapter 4

For those of you just finding us, here’s a bit more about what PILCROW is, what we’re doing, and why.

Our Finalists are:

• Vice Nimrod by Colin Dodds

  • Chapter 1

  • Chapter 2

  • Chapter 3

  • Chapter 4

• Still Soft With Sleep by Vincenzo Barney

  • Prologue

  • Part 1, Chapter 1

  • Part 1, Chapter 2

  • Part 1, Chapter 3

• Don’t Disappoint by Martin Van Cooper

  • Chapter 1

  • Chapter 2

  • Chapter 3

While the traditional organs of American letters continue to wither, we recognize the need to forge a new path. If you believe in what we’re doing, PLEASE share and subscribe and spread the word.

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⚬─────────✧─────────⚬

In Don’t Disappoint, amidst a flailing career, a displaced midwesterner in Los Angeles goes home to confront the complications of a mother with advancing dementia, only for a marital sucker punch to leave him questioning what’s left of his family to salvage.

Martin Van Cooper writes the Substack Don’t Read the Dust Jacket

⚬─────────✧─────────⚬

4

Are you hiding from the turtle? Jason asked, finding her near the back wall of the property during his own solo exploration.

A little much, no? Jessica had perfected smiling with her eyes while frowning with her mouth. He seemed to her like a high school senior basketball player just grown into and not yet comfortable with his body. He was tall, 6’ 6” or 7” she guessed and because she was 6 feet tall in her socks, this placed him from the get go in the very small group of men who might not be intimidated by her size and physicality. His cheeks were red (did he even have to shave?) like he’d just finished running wind sprints or soloing the sunfish around the lighthouse off Nantucket. Every man thinks he needs to lead with wit as a stand in for prowess, but his wit was unaffected. Unrefined. He, to her, an unpolished diamond.

I heard the painting inside used to hang at LAX, he said. Was she objectively hotter than he could objectively justify flirting with? The instinct for comprehensive pairwise analysis of all major sexual phenotypes.

I’m embarrassed to say I haven’t been to a modern art museum in several years, she said. Actually, there’s just fewer people back here, she continued in answer to his original question. These things always make it necessary to talk to other people.

And here I am to prove that point.

It’s ok, I know what it sounded like but it’s not that, I’m just…not talking shop for a while is nice. She was flustered then, one of a handful of times in their entire relationship he would ever register this, for her, most foreign of conditions.

No shop. 10-4.

She had brown thick straight hair past her shoulders and dark skin. She wore no makeup—her complexion was the kind on which it always appears unnatural…the color most women try to tan their skin to be. She was tall and lean with a swimmer’s body he thought to himself, lithe arms and chiseled shoulders and back, high set calf muscles like a long-distance runner or a black woman. He could smell, in addition to her perfume, the slightest body odor that exerted some pheromonal control over him and which he suspected was not inadvertently unmasked.

It was Tuesday, no Wednesday last week. You must have heard about it. You can’t have not…the guy was flying west he was somewhere around Agora Hills or Calabasas and the engine failed or something. It was a single engine plane, like those World War II kind. He put it down right on the 101.

Ball of fire.

You’d think so, she said. But no. The guy walked away.

He didn’t hit any cars? Right in the middle of the afternoon on a Tuesday?

The cops must’ve seen him coming, he radioed in or whatever and they cleared it out. Lands the thing on the 101 northbound, jumps out and the thing catches fire.

I think I saw something about the fire online.

They shut down the highway for 4 hours or something.

It was the year of crossed red lines and no responses. They had found the back wall of the property and followed the solar powered LEDs along the stone path to the northwest corner of the lot. The second water feature was here on a low flagstone pedestal. He suppressed the urge to make a comment about being in a drought and they sat down on a bench placed in front, ostensibly for contemplation. The feature was in fact a black wall with water pouring over both sides from an unseen exit on the top that looked not unlike the enigmatic monument that appears in 2001 to herald quantum leaps in astral intelligence except for a raised, labial looking protrusion that gave the water’s path some randomness and irreproducibility.

There’s no fucking way I’m getting into one of those things, she replied, as they watched the water meander. Not in self-driving mode anyway. I’ll stay sober and drive, thank you very much.

I don’t think you just, I mean you still have to control, you still drive it. It’s not totally self-driving. I mean you can grab the wheel anytime you want. It’s like a driver assist sort of thing.

I’ll stick with my old-fashioned gas guzzler.

And what is that? he replied, and then immediately regretting it. What did his father say: never ask a woman what kind of car she drives, it makes you seem materialistic.

They were disturbed then by some other guests who had wandered away from the mansion and the patio and the pool and the gardens and so they got up and decided to head back towards the house, drifting apart and into different conversations. When he looked up a while later, she was gone. Back inside the house Ed had installed a Britannica set from the 1960’s as wall decor. Waiting for the bathroom he picked up a random volume, which happened to be Cs, and scrolled to China, which came after Chimney, Chimpanzee, Chin, and before Chios, Chipmunk and Chippewa.

<Hey. Did you want to see the car?>

The text came through two days later with an option from his phone to Report Junk? and they made plans for dinner.

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Our Finalists are:

• Vice Nimrod by Colin Dodds

  • Chapter 1

  • Chapter 2

  • Chapter 3

  • Chapter 4

• Still Soft With Sleep by Vincenzo Barney

  • Prologue

  • Part 1, Chapter 1

  • Part 1, Chapter 2

  • Part 1, Chapter 3

• Don’t Disappoint by Martin Van Cooper

  • Chapter 1

  • Chapter 2

While the traditional organs of American letters continue to wither, we recognize the need to forge a new path. If you believe in what we’re doing, PLEASE share and subscribe and spread the word.

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⚬─────────✧─────────⚬

In Don’t Disappoint, amidst a flailing career, a displaced midwesterner in Los Angeles goes home to confront the complications of a mother with advancing dementia, only for a marital sucker punch to leave him questioning what’s left of his family to salvage.

Martin Van Cooper writes the Substack Don’t Read the Dust Jacket

⚬─────────✧─────────⚬

3

Consumption. Transaction. Every person living like they’re the only one on earth, like the Dodgers and the Grove and Santa Monica pier and Sunset, WeHo, Venice or the Valley are realities when in fact they are tableaus, ridiculous sets that performances of lives are staged upon. There is no culture, there is nothing stable, everything vapid and vaporous and ethereal, fleeting and if you think you’re from here and connected here, you’re not, you’re moving through like everyone else, here for the weather, as confused as the tourists as to why everyone doesn’t live here. Because you can’t live here. The timeless story of redemption on the side of the bus, For Your Consideration, will be replaced by a car accident attorney’s ad with her pet dog at the end of the month. To this day when he thinks of the city, even having lived here all these years, when he hears a story about it and has to visualize the city in his head, it’s the corner of Colorado and Ocean, up the bluff from PCH and he is looking down from above, some drone-like panorama, panning up to look north down the coast and the sun is always setting. He had never lived by the coast, in Venice or Santa Monica or Malibu. The closest he got was West Hollywood, his first touch down in the city when he wanted to be in the middle of things and thought this was the closest he could hope to get. But there’s a frenetic stasis, like everyone’s ambition and excitement is stunned by the light and heat. Like hot dogs on rollers at the 7-Eleven checkout. When you relocate west, the experience over the first couple of weeks of wanting to strangle someone to get them out of the soma haze to get something done until they, the transplants, by the second or third month, fall into the soma haze themselves and then just chill the fuck out. Someone even told him that people threw out perfectly good conditioned and high quality furniture and he was so buzzed about the move that he didn’t pause to consider the likelihood that a place would exist where the laws of capitalism and materialism were strangely suspended or nonexistent.

To then encounter the conflagration of extreme wealth and extreme poverty. The needle jockeys outside the designer shoe store. The old woman who relieved herself in the mornings outside the laundromat in the alley behind his apartment building. The teenagers in the BMW screaming past at 2 AM on the way home from the club and crashing drunkenly into a street person’s shopping cart, scattering his worldly possessions of mostly cardboard and various beverage containers, some partially full with liquids of unknown provenance, all over the sidewalk, before swerving back onto Highland and off into the night. Of the male prostitutes that hung around the In-N-Out down the street from his apartment, one of whom OD’d in the bathroom twice in one week and was the reason the manager had a keypad lock installed and changed the code twice a day. The shiksas married to Jews telling their goy friends that Jews and Muslims cannot be friends and white women married to black men telling their white friends who can use the n-word and when. He found it impossible to establish a community, a sense of permanence in the city where no one had roots and everyone was, or pretended to be, a transplant. The inescapable history of your past, your family’s past, your history…where you went to church or watched a parade or walked to the park or the pool…this tapestry of experience that made life elsewhere so intolerable and unchangeable and unforgettable found its antithesis in this place, but this was no respite. The city was a bubble just like everywhere, but it was big enough that you could easily hide. Relationships and experience—your past and present—in the city was as ephemeral as an automatically deleting SnapChat message. The mentality is the past never happened, the present doesn’t matter and the future will soon be here and gone. A schizophrenic mix of lethargy and hyperactivity: it’s no wonder the place legalized weed1 in the early 1990’s when it was nearly derailing Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign. No one wanted anything to exist for any time beyond the present moment and spent all their mental energy on the next thing. What was happening was old news. Shit going on off Hollywood Blvd across from the Rainbow Room down one of the nameless side streets that looking south gave you a view of the city stretching out down the hill. When you had an affair in the Midwest it upset families and caused drama in the PTA and rumors in the congregation and accusatory looks at the grocery store, maybe even a shouting match outside the high school basketball game—people cared, there was something more tangible and hurtful and meaningful about what you could ruin in a Midwest family than what you could in any relationship here where basically once consummated, the thing was running on fumes. Once consummated it became part of the scenery, part of the endless trip of strip malls and apartment complexes, fast food joints and laundromats, interchangeable people and relationships just like any other consumable. He watched the thermometer in his car creeping from 95 to 100 as he drove past Universal Studios, then Coldwater Canyon and sat for 15 minutes to go one mile because of a crash and the associated rubbernecking on the 405. Ticking up to 103 as he passed through Tarzana and then down to 98 again as he reached Woodland Hills and Calabasas. She had picked Vanvleck because it was far enough from the 101 to have no traffic noise and up off the Valley floor to get away from the circuit board cluster homes, nestled in the canyons west of Topanga meaning little or no marine layer but still nice and cool on the summer mornings and almost cold on winter ones. The dash read 88 as he rounded the corner to his street and saw the late 70’s Ford pickup that as it sped away revealed itself to be a stick shift, with a surf board cockeyed across the bed, back out of his driveway and pause for a moment—considering something?—and then turn to drive off in the opposite direction further up the canyon. Who it was not: his gardener (he didn’t have one), the pool guy (he drove a Tundra and the bed obviously didn’t have a surfboard in it but was full of hoses and buckets and pool chemicals), any neighbor he knew (BMWs, Land Rovers or Subarus were de rigueur in the canyons, and all less than 3 years old).

The blessed anonymity the release of pressure to perform by being in a big city where there’s always someone better than you at everything you could possibly want to do. People who grow up in small towns never get this experience and so think they are all princes with their own duck ponds. He claimed this was part of the reason he stayed and why he thought he could start again here. But she retorted that in fact this is a fallacy because even here, especially here in fact, she feels the need to be the best at whatever she’s doing and she’s not casting stones or anything but it could just be he’s not as ambitious. She never said these things a few short years ago. That she in fact doesn’t feel the way he does at all, that inside she feels the city is just a much bigger and more real world, no microcosm at all, with more competition in every sphere and that’s why she was there, for the stress and the adversity and to feel on top of the biggest heap, not at all to feel buried as she claimed he seemed to want to feel.

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Our Finalists are:

• Vice Nimrod by Colin Dodds

  • Chapter 1

  • Chapter 2

  • Chapter 3

  • Chapter 4

• Still Soft With Sleep by Vincenzo Barney

  • Prologue

  • Part 1, Chapter 1

  • Part 1, Chapter 2

  • Part 1, Chapter 3

• Don’t Disappoint by Martin Van Cooper

  • Chapter 1

While the traditional organs of American letters continue to wither, we recognize the need to forge a new path. If you believe in what we’re doing, PLEASE share and subscribe and spread the word.

Share

Subscribe now

⚬─────────✧─────────⚬

In Don’t Disappoint, amidst a flailing career, a displaced midwesterner in Los Angeles goes home to confront the complications of a mother with advancing dementia, only for a marital sucker punch to leave him questioning what’s left of his family to salvage.

Martin Van Cooper writes the Substack Don’t Read the Dust Jacket

⚬─────────✧─────────⚬

2

Jessica Driver balanced her bag on top of the toilet bowl and tore open the box and the plastic wrapper, letting both fall to the floor. Less than 10 years ago when she had just moved there, Wilshire Blvd still had a McDonald’s and 7-Eleven close to Westwood, just west of the 405 and the Veteran’s Administration Complex, before the coach level cultural touchstones were pushed back into the Valley and LA LA, south and central and east, where you could just walk into the bathroom through the side door and take care of business without sideways glances from the employees or the need to borrow a key attached to a spatula or a fly swatter or a cut off broom handle from the cash register. She had left her clinic—she did haven’t another case until 3:30—and walked towards the CVS and, for a modicum of discretion, crossed the street and went into the only non-chain coffee shop in Westwood which she knew had no code for the bathroom because somehow the homeless and addicts understood that this place was for writing and yoga comedown and avocado toast and gramming and thus they, the indigent patrons, would not patronize it for their evacuatory and bathing and ingesting needs, instead patronizing the Starbucks or Coffee Bean or Pete’s (Subway’s bathrooms are strictly for employees only). There was only one bathroom and it said Relief on the door, no silhouettes or clothing stereotypes or gender cues.

The door opened in, barely missing the pedestal sink, to the right of which was the toilet bowl. The walls were painted black, ostensibly to cover up copious graffiti, still somewhat visible in tonal outlines, from when the place had been a record store. Someone had written Tuck Frump on the side of the sink she noticed, hunched over and hovering and trying to get some on the stick and keep it off the floor and off her hand. She set it on some toilet paper on the sink and flushed and looked at the mirror: there was a discoloration in the bottom corner that looked somehow like the material was corroding, that some type of improper chemical had come into contact with it. Waiting, she turned around to read the things posted on the corkboard behind her: several dog walkers, one lost Chihuahua (Pedro, of course), a yoga/Pilates instructor, two personal trainers, one freelance writer, one drummer, three spiritual advisors with Instagram contact info, one open mic night advert. Someone had scratched a peace sign into the corkboard with a thumbtack and there was a RVCA sticker stuck on the wood border. There was a small window to the right of the toilet that had also been painted, in this case a hideous mauve, which thus bathed the room with the murky light of a confessional. Narcotizing. Washing her hands, she looked down to see that the stick had rendered its verdict, which she answered by brushing the thing off into the trash can and turning to head back into the afternoon’s sunlight, unfiltered.

They said that every medical student meets the love of their life the summer before fourth year. Because fourth year is kind of a coast but after that it’s serious shit and matching and relocation for residency, followed by matching and relocation for fellowship. In her first year it was as though all her classmates had just discovered what was in their pants for the first time and set about putting it to use fucking the daylights out of other medical students, undergrads, the odd graduate student, even civilians. Half of the girls were in the clinic for UTIs in the second week of classes. Undergrads were particularly decimated as targets of these new powers because they had erections that could tolerate abuse sometimes approaching an hour and were usually good for second and sometimes even third go rounds. Jessica herself left a pretty respectable trail of bodies in the wake of her first semester. This was another reason why social media was a strict no no. She heard horror stories from her classmates at Pilates or synagogue or the gym or walking into their parents condominium complex in Playa del Rey and being accosted by a crazed USC sophomore, convinced she had lost her phone and thus missed all his texts and calls and professing his love for her and unshaven and unshowered and ready to do some pretty convincing and irreversible self-harm to get his point across. None of that for her. She was a proponent of 19^th century dating: verbal communication only, preferably in public places, no phone, no text, no email, definitely no social media and if things required privacy, this could be improvised on the fly. Her place was strictly off limits.

Bryant Wilson, III, MD, PhD had the sunburnt, preternaturally weathered appearance of someone of western European descent who spent their formative years on a surfboard. His father was an English Anglican and his mother a Russian Jew. There was a joke in there, he would say, never finding it. That made him an atheist. She surmised the first time she laid eyes on him—in the OR, she was paged in for cardiology consult on his patient, an OD’ing middle-aged white woman from Sherman Oaks who crashed her Mercedes into a wall on the Sepulveda pass—that he was the type of person with flip flop tan lines, a Prius with a surfboard on top, a (female) dog either golden or some kind of mutt named Dylan or Joanie or something, a condo either in Venice or Playa or (less likely) Santa Monica, no attachments and not a goddamn care in the world. The first night she spent at his house, after he had fallen asleep, she had the crazy idea to check his feet, only to find, wouldn’t you know it, the guy actually had tan lines from his Rainbows, two equally worn pairs of which were under the dresser. His teeth were nearly perfect in a way that told you they had always been perfect or had been perfected so early in life that he never knew anything other, personality development wise, than the disarming effect that flashing his mouthful of offensively white teeth had on people. The contrast of these teeth with his bronze skin was almost garish and his straw blond-brown hair looked straight out of an Abercrombie catalog. He was never rank even when she would tryst with him towards the end of a 48 hour shift and he often seemed to have salt haze around his eyes, where crow’s feet should be but weren’t, as though he had just dropped the board and let the sun and wind dry his face before stepping into the OR for a bowel resection or appendectomy or hernia repair. If pushed, she would say he smelled vaguely marine although she couldn’t be sure that was a real memory or one embellished from what she knew of his private life. To the extent there was one.

How is it that some people just coast, able to focus only on the things that matter, she wondered, and to master these things so adroitly, so effortlessly, ignoring everything else? It’s not just that these people can seem to do the impossible from a physical and intellectual standpoint…this wasn’t impossible per se, it wasn’t off the spectrum of what was imaginable. But it was certainly at the far end of the spectrum. But these people never seem to pay bills online, never renew their license plate, stand in line for groceries, waste a weekend repairing a faulty sprinkler system, miss a flight, shop for new pants, check their email. They never get in protracted arguments on the phone with someone who is remodeling their condo or fixing their car. They don’t engage in endless internal debates on the merits of a decision that will have little practical impact on anyone other than themselves and the only really quantifiable outcome of the exercise, if that’s not an abuse of the term, is on their own sense of self-worth. They don’t engage in mental masturbation. They don’t think about solved problems. They don’t have running disagreements with family members that get rehashed on monthly phone calls. They know about news and sports but do not watch news or sports. They never use social media. They have opinions but don’t read opinion pieces. They don’t get emotional, which is not to say they are entirely rational. They just don’t get carried away with things. That he was one of these people didn’t bother her—she was too. On the contrary, it set her at ease. At first. He was not going to come into the hospital screaming over some transgression, real or imagined, no matter how awful. He was not going to start talking over her in social gatherings or making rakish, sarcastic faces when she spoke. He was not going to fly off the handle when she didn’t call. It really wouldn’t affect him at all. There was something totally safe and reassuring about being with a self-absorbed person: he rarely noticed she existed except as a reflection of himself and since he happened to be quite a decent and hard-working person, the reflections others (including her) saw in him tended to be pretty rewarding. And so, you liked to look at him.

He would paddle out before sunrise so as the first beams of light made their way across the sky and the dim dawn spread around the horizon he would be bobbing alone on the point off Topanga. She would sit on the beach with Janice reading or sometimes, after she had been in LA for a while, doing some rudimentary yoga which to her chagrin seemed to improve both her mental and physical state. They did not drive into the hospital together—it was never discussed, they just both understood it, like how from the first date they alternated who paid in a perfect metronome. She remembered hearing the term transactional used around this time in a pejorative manner (it was during the 2008 presidential primaries and Obama refused to be transactional with John Edwards after the former had secured the nomination). That was what their relationship was and why it worked. He would talk almost incessantly on the drive to and from the beach, about his fellowship, his research, the clinical operation and the university and why it was so trammeled in red tape, and she would listen and not be required to say anything and it was a perfect symbiosis during the first year of her residency. On the rare occasion they both had the same day off, they would drive to Santa Barbara and go hiking or stay local and get in the canyons above Malibu and then circle back through Neptune’s and County Line with Janice for mussels and beer. There’s something to be said for when you have a skillset and people are willing to pay for access to it, he said one time, as though he had just been the first person to ever make this realization. To have people pay for access to your brain. He didn’t choose himself from a menagerie of options. He lived de novo. He had a couple of pieces from local Venice artists on his wall: a Jimi Hendrix painted on the side of a shipping pallet, an indescribable cubist nightmare (or so she thought), a kitschy looking wave and beach scene. The only other things in his apartment, save his clothes, seemed to be his record collection, turn table and speaker system which he said cost, when she asked him, about as much as a new 3 series beemer. And she never once saw him pay a bill, or answer an email or clean the apartment or change the oil in the F100 or stand in a line.

He remarked with mirthless, detached scorn at the behavior of his fellow academics. Most people believed the professor to be the reservoir of knowledge, the source of new ideas and moreover the ultimate arbiters of mankind’s wisdom. The ones he knew, by this definition, would come in as charlatans, no more oracles of knowledge than…he would wager that not a single one of his colleagues in a faculty meeting could solve 1/x-dx, let alone recall the basics of evolutionary biology or statistics or frankly even genetics for that matter, certainly not chemistry (his undergraduate major). They were mechanics: when your car breaks down, you don’t want a philosopher. Same thing with your gut or your heart or your liver. The last thing you want your physician doing is thinking. Medicine is recall. And the PhDs were even worse. Professorships were a license to pontificate. To never have to unequivocally prove or do anything for the rest of your career. It was a license to blow hot air, a license not to produce anything, in contrast to the private sector where, as Professor Ray Stanz observed, they expect results. Academia is a passport for your brain that never expires and never has to be renewed and has no proof of (intellectual) residency requirement.

Towards the end she started paddling out with him most mornings. Incidentally she only started surfing as it got colder that year and the mornings dawned later and the beach was breezy and the sand icy and Janice paced around listlessly. Maybe the dog could sense a change was coming. What they don’t tell you about surfing is that sitting on the board waiting for a wave—which you spend 99% of your time doing—is the hardest part to learn. She bought a wet suit and booties and after she got the hang of sitting still and facing the horizon and watching for the next set. Jessica could appreciate the sanguine peacefulness of inactivity—which they also don’t tell you is surfing’s chief attraction, in her opinion, the inactivity that is, and is why she still went out a couple days a month when she wasn’t on call until noon. Most mornings it was the two of them alone at Topanga, Janice on the beach near their towels. They want me to take some clinical chief position, he started. The division is too large and Metcalf is to researchy, the chair is afraid that the clinicians aren’t taking serious the practice building. It’s all about RVUs with this post-Obamacare consolidation. I told him that’s why all these kids want academic medicine in the first place. They don’t want to build a practice and hire nurses and staff and a receptionist, they don’t want to care about billing and rent an office. They’re kids. They never left their parents…they want to live like students, like children the rest of their lives. They have no interest in building a business, in building anything quite frankly. Starting salary in a private group is 450, we start these kids at 175. They don’t care. It’s most of their first jobs. They didn’t work, maybe they had some BS job in high school, most of them not. Parents don’t want them to work, especially these first gen kids. Straight from their parents’ house to the dorm, parents have 529’d their undergrad and so they have no debt, med school loans that pay them an upper middle class salary to be a student. So what we’re giving them is a winning lottery ticket. They walk right into a functioning practice, all the frustration, billing, staff, they just come in 3 days a week, operate, collect a check, attend a grand rounds lecture once a month for CMEs and write a limpdick case report every year for scholarly work for the dossier. He wants a clinical chief to ramp up the partner hospitals, increase RVUs across the board, basically a slum lord position for all these community hospitals we bought up that are doing appendectomies and hernias, the occasional bypass, that’s the big cash cow. Gall bladders. All the complicated quaternary care shit is done at the mothership and it loses money anyways, they just need that for reputation and to support the research enterprise.

They heard Janice’s collar jingle and turned around simultaneously to see someone jogging toward the water down from the parking lot on PCH. He had a BMI>50, long curly black hair, shorts, no shoes and no shirt against the November morning. It was obvious he was cold before he had even hit the water. Around his neck was a flower lei. He hit the water and leapt on his short board, making an audible exhalatory sound and a grimace when his body hit the frigid surf and paddled out until he was basically even with them on the other side of the point. He gave a little nod but otherwise went into his own shivering revelry. Waiting for a wave. It was about 5 minutes later when something stirred in the water in front of this man, all three of them seeing the brief appearance of a dorsal fin, at which point the Samoan or Hawaiian or whoever he was immediately flipped around and paddled furiously toward the sand. In his wake and unbeknownst to him, a dolphin briefly crested to peak a grinning snout, then continued its saunter south, parallel to the shore behind them. After the man had retreated all the way to his car and out of sight, Bryant said we should probably call this thing, don’t you think? Before it gets casual. And she knew without asking he was talking about their relationship and not the surfing, but she didn’t reply and a moment later a set came in and he caught the second wave and she watched him go for a good 10 seconds or so before catching the fourth wave herself and then following him up to the truck and putting the boards in and rinsing off and driving back to his place. There was nothing for her to collect after a year together, really, except for a couple days’ clothes, and that night she left his place for the night shift at the hospital and never returned.

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Our Finalists are:

• Vice Nimrod by Colin Dodds

  • Chapter 1

  • Chapter 2

  • Chapter 3

  • Chapter 4

• Still Soft With Sleep by Vincenzo Barney

  • Prologue

  • Part 1, Chapter 1

  • Part 1, Chapter 2

  • Part 1, Chapter 3

• Don’t Disappoint by Martin Van Cooper

While the traditional organs of American letters continue to wither, we recognize the need to forge a new path. If you believe in what we’re doing, PLEASE share and subscribe and spread the word.

Share

Subscribe now

⚬─────────✧─────────⚬

In Don’t Disappoint, amidst a flailing career, a displaced midwesterner in Los Angeles goes home to confront the complications of a mother with advancing dementia, only for a marital sucker punch to leave him questioning what’s left of his family to salvage.

Martin Van Cooper writes the Substack Don't Read the Dust Jacket

⚬─────────✧─────────⚬

1

The sky was iridescent beige and a light rain would continue for the rest of the day and into the night. It was 45 and the stillness of the air gave a finality to the mist and chill. He was on the way to the airport and had to meet his sister, for a coffee she said, before leaving and he knew it was going to be a close call. Security check at CLE was never more than 15 min and traffic nothing to speak of, but he was half an hour late after getting Jessica’s texts and then talking to her on the phone for a harried couple of minutes, leaving him wondering whether there was any real need to fly back to California at all.

Jason Driver pulled into the Starbucks in Seven Hills at the corner of Snow and Broadview and saw his sister Alice’s car already there and her seated at the window.

Sorry, he said, sitting down across from her.

Everything ok? Get something.

I don’t want anything.

It’s fine, get something.

Yeah, no, I don’t want anything.

And then after a moment he took off his jacket and blew into his hands to warm them, avoiding eye contact with her.

What did she say? How’s your wife getting along without you?

One thing he knew for certain: his wife Jessica had signaled unambiguously his marriage was over. The reason he was home was because he had to attend the wedding of his cousin and because things had gotten untenable with his mother. His sister said it was time to make a decision and she didn’t want to do this by herself.

Early onset ischemic, or so-called vascular dementia, moves fast. It can be less than a year from when someone starts repeating stories several times a day in a fugue until when they can’t sleep, wander off naked at 4 in the morning, or try to boil hot dogs in windshield washer fluid. It has been nearly two years since Jason had been home and about a year since his sister said that the near misses had gotten more frequent and that she needed to move in with their mother. Jessica was in the middle of fellowship and couldn’t move so Jason had been begging off his sister to handle this—although truthfully he knew there was no possible scenario he saw for himself that included moving back to take care of his mother. Now he was being asked to endorse a proposal to move her to assisted living. He didn’t feel he knew the woman when he was a child and certainly didn’t know her now and he had clearly shirked any familial responsibilities regarding caring for anyone, let alone his infirmed mother, so why now was his sister insisting on dragging him in to participate in the distasteful act of committing into a sterile place to die the woman who bore him into world? It was not to punish or shame him, this was not his sister’s trade. To make him own it? To help him atone? Maybe just assurance she was doing the right thing.

He had learned to apologize back to baseline. And no further. This had taken him the first 30 years of his life to figure out.

It was perfectly timed. It kept him from reacting rashly (her words) and gave him time to figure out how to keep her revelation from defining the rest of his life. Children bind you. Parents bind you. Spouses cannot bind you. It was the year someone discovered a 200-year-old salamander in Indonesia by stepping on it.

Jason had moved away from Ohio in the mid 2000’s. The period since saw his country spend enormous collective subconscious energy worried about being blown up by Islamic terrorists, who killed fewer people in the United States during that time than untreated spider bites. He’d been teaching high school English for the last decade. They lived in a suburb called Vanvleck, in a mid-century single level ranch on a postage stamp yard with a backyard pool in the never-ending checkerboard sprawl of the San Fernando Valley, two blocks from the school where he taught. Jessica had the commute.

He could not imagine a situation in which he would be fully formed. The upshot of this was that until his early 30’s, he was an indefatigable optimist. The kind of person who is a real chore to be around. Sun as morning star and whatever. It wasn’t that with her act he suddenly became aware that he was living in real time or that he became instantly pessimistic. Rather, over the past day he had become increasingly, suffocatingly aware of the volume of things he had experienced. The urge to eliminate one’s own map in such a situation can be overwhelming, not talking about anxiety or necessarily even depression or social ostracizing here. Just talking about sitting down in front of an excel spreadsheet listing out all the things you have done in your life. Nausea does not even begin to describe it. I don’t think you’ve ever had your heart broken, she observed in an impish, analytical, pugnacious manner over dinner during one of their first dates in the year of the JCPOA and a gold or maybe blue dress.

After landing at Cleveland Hopkins a day earlier, he had collected his older sister, who lived with and took care of his mother, and his grandmother, who lived separately and alone. The wedding ceremony was in neighboring Rockside Hills, and then on to a 1950’s rectangular single story sandstone brick Kiwanis Hall for the reception.

I went out for lunch yesterday, his sister started in before the car door is closed behind her, with my friend Laura. Well you caught me right now in the middle of stripping mom’s bed that’s why I was slow to come out. But I was ready. I haven’t done her room all week and it’s Friday, you’d be proud of me. I went with Laura, we met up at this place she likes for, she told me I have to try their mac n’ cheese. And this, I have to tell you Jason, this was a very different mac n’ cheese. And she told me it was going to be, she told me Alice, you need to try this mac n’ cheese, it’s really different, and you know. Mac n’ cheese can be really heavy and I don’t like, I’m trying not to eat so heavy, but Jason, this, when she brought it out. It was noodles stacked in a bowl and she asked me, the waitress, you can get one topping. She had asked me before, you know. You can get one topping and so I said sure and so I got the pork. The pulled pork they call it. Like shredded. They call it pulled pork. They put this on top. Jason, let me tell you, you should have seen it when they brought this out, it looked like, like I don’t know, like a flower. With the noodles and the pork on top. And. Do you know what? There wasn’t even that much cheese. And it wasn’t too rich, you know, because you know how I am, I don’t like things too rich. It had just the right amount of flavor. It was different. And that’s ok. I tried it. I’m ok with different.

He had lived with his older sister and mother for a few months after finishing grad school and before moving to Los Angeles. It was a time of perfect uninterrupted creativity as they both completely left him alone to work on his dissertation in the basement. The only hiccup: even before she got really bad, his mother had a phobia against the dishwasher and his sister therefore hand washed all the dishes. She used too much soap and failed to assiduously rinse the dishes such that over time they built up a layer of soap that inevitably got into the food. The result was a reactive constipation when he moved out of his mother’s house. It had been the year Lebron took his talents to South Beach.

He tried to disentangle the anger about the act and the anger about the fact she waited until he wasn’t there. She was the one traveling all the time. A week still before his classes began again. Days before this wedding he was already scheduled to attend without her. Time for him to get back to baseline for work and domesticity. Precise. The mathematical concept of chaos is slippery and very hard to explain in non-mathematical terms, Jessica said to him when they were still dating. Every simile obfuscates rather than clarifies. Chaos characterizes a system whose outcomes are sensitive to so-called initial conditions: one could predict those paths with some fancy math, though this was not her area per se, but the idea was there was some sort of predetermination, or at least some initial limitation of possibilities, inherent in all living things. The world is not random, it is chaotic, and this absence of order was necessary for anything to exist. Of course you needed some order. But every scale of life, every stage of life was laden with chaos. Medicine was about learning how to harness this, control it. And when necessary, eliminate it. A defibrillator, which rescues a patient from life threatening arrhythmias, does this by returning the heart to asystole. That is, no activity. The physician then waits and hopes the internal pacemaker, which is something called an emergent property at the cellular level, she said, kicks back in to restore a normal sinus rhythm. Humans can create order—for chaos, we need nature, she told him. It was the year that shooting-an-unarmed-black-man would become an adjective.

They arrived at his grandmother’s house and she was already walking down the sidewalk as they pulled up to her driveway. She was barely 5 feet tall in middle age and, now in her nineties, had lost several inches and most of her hair, blessedly hidden by a wig they all had chipped in to buy her last Christmas. Her hands had adopted the wrapped in cellophane appearance signaling convalescence and they looked like multigrain bread, pock-marked with melanomas she was bound to outlast. He needed gas and so stopped at the nearby station.

I was so relieved when Lisa was a girl, his grandmother was saying as he got back into the car at the pump, because I knew that she was number six and that was it. And if after those five other girls, with five sisters, if she would have been a boy he would have turned out to be a sissy boy.

Huh. Uh-huh, Alice said.

Course my girlfriend, well that’s exactly what happened to her. Four girls and then a boy. Same age as Lisa.

After about ten seconds his sister asked, humorlessly: So, did he turn out to be a sissy boy?

Well no, I don’t know. He went to college, you know, but they always had money and that. He ended up marrying a girl in a wheelchair. M.S. My girlfriend never got any grandchildren from him. So.

Jason hurries to get buzzed as soon as they get to the reception. His aunt’s sister-in-law, who’s probably 45 and single and 95 lbs sopping wet and 4’8” in precarious looking heels is showcasing her new assets: double D tractor beams that have every married, pear-shaped hypertensive man in the place red faced. A cousin he doesn’t know may be the only self-aware one in the whole place. She has bleached blond hair with untended soot-black roots and a single pink thatch in the middle of the right side of her head, pierced nose, pierced ears, a small red tattoo of an infinity sign on her left wrist, badly chipped black nail polish, a thrift store dress, and too-big shoes that are too-big in a somehow intentional, slightly prurient way, evincing the sort of tacit agreement that some young girls have with lechers. Her fiancée, whom she met 6 months earlier, was 4 months into a tour, his 5th, with the USMC in Mosul. Helicopter pilot. She smelled like cigarettes and Royal Pine car air freshener and hair spray and when Jason offered her a beer she declined. I’m underage, she replied, flatly.

His uncle, his father’s older and only brother, is changed. There is menace, fury, and a fleeting confusion in his eyes that Jason had never witnessed in the last decade he was old enough to remember such things. His wife had died the previous summer, perhaps freeing him to live more ruthlessly. His body was slowing down—breaking down—and this had alarmingly accelerated since the last time Jason had seen him.

I told them, no one’s gonna buy them, his uncle said. You can put them in the machines, charge a buck. We got our machines downtown all over near Progressive, the Flats. Quicken. You gotta make it cheap. Nobody gonna pay two-fifty for something from a vending machine. It’s like I told him when bottled water was getting big in the late ‘90’s. I told him nobody gonna buy water from a vending machine. This guy come to my office. I told him get the fuck out of here. I tossed him out. Black guy. But then we tried it few months later. What do I know. Charge a buck for it. People can’t get enough of it. Now it’s credit cards. Same thing. I told them, nobody is going to use a goddamn credit card in no goddamn vending machine. Well. That was 37% of our sales growth last year. 37%. Worked with cash all my life. You gotta be creative when you go see the taxman with 37% from credit cards Jack.

That’s from Lizzie’s redneck side of the family, they live in Indiana or whatever, my aunt is telling me. That’s her cousin, her father, not her cousin, her father’s daughter from another relationship, they never married, her half-sister, they live near Indianapolis. The girl’s a mess, she’s always been a mess, she, that guy, that’s not the guy she had the kid with, the first kid, she’s married to that guy now and he’s some kind, I don’t think he’s slow per se but he’s not all there. But he’s a saint. He adopted her daughter. Her daughter from the previous relationship, the guy she didn’t marry. The kid was born with her organs on the outside of her body.

See now that’s not where you want them to be, Jason says.

Right, right, she continued. The child had surgeries, had to put them back in, like a dozen surgeries before she was a year old. To put all her organs back into her body. You’re not supposed to have that many surgeries in that amount of time, the doctors don’t even want to do it but they had to do it.

Jason is calling every guy in the place buddy—uncles, cousins, people he has never met, men and women—he has absolutely no idea why. He realizes he has gotten slightly drunk.

That’s her, his aunt says to him later in the evening when an adorable toddler goes running across the dancefloor in the interlude after the cake cutting and the father daughter dance. Who, Jason said. The girl who was born with the organs outside her body. And he is staring at this child in stunned amazement, a child with whom he can find no conceivable flaw, that is happy, proportionate, not discolored, disfigured or in any way low energy, who is smiling and has long blond hair and a pink cotton dress and mock ballet shoes, thinking, he can’t stop thinking, about some kind of a zipper.

The last wedding was the year before. His cousin, who’s married to a man—hands down the best organized, most fun wedding Jason had ever been to, held in Manhattan at a Lutheran church (they’re the only ones who’ll do the gays, his aunt, his mother’s sister, said to him at the time in a curious turn of phrase) in the West 30’s…for Christ’s sake they served Old Fashioneds at the reception cocktail hour and the bartender was burning an orange peel with a hand held cigar torch and pouring Jefferson—and their twins are now almost three and they are running around this reception chasing the girl in the pink dress and they clearly look like one Dad and not the other and the winner of that race, if you catch the drift, is now apparent. Someone at their table also notices this and Jason is asked to give some academic-ish type of explanation, and he is trying to avoid euphemism but basically there’s no mixing he tells them. He uses the word recombination and there’s blank stares and so he says it’s a coin flip. It’s one or the other. His cousin is a few ahead and wants to know if there is a turkey baster involved. Some sort of slurry? The same cousin’s husband is checking his email and scowls into his third Diet Dr Pepper and it’s not even salad time yet.

Some distant relation he can’t place is telling Jason about how his store called Pampered Pets or Spot Chanel or something like that, which he started with his wife a decade ago as something to do in retirement, and which has a Yelp review average of 4.2 he tells Jason, is doing fine, we’re growing, there’s always a new challenge, he tells Jason, with finding new chintzy shit to sell to rich bimbos for their spoiled dogs. A little fluoxetine kicker, you hear me? Keep them from blowing their and/or their husbands’ fucking brains out by glossing over the moments where a vacuous thought might not be forthcoming, between the house renovation show and the update on Kardashian yeast infection and the trip to the eyebrow threading and hair salon and nail salon and the next trip we think we are headed back to Naples, you know the wife just loved the Gulf and to be perfectly honest it’s not that the resorts aren’t great but she’s kind of, frankly, uncomfortable in Mexico and the people are perfectly hospitable but she, don’t look at me like that, she wants to stay in the US this time so we are going back to Naples, it’s a quick 50 min drive from Ft Lauderdale, we have a guy, last time he got us a house right on the water, Gulf side, there was a pool, I didn’t get in, and a hot tub for the wife. But let me tell you, the books are balanced, there’s hiring and firing and always something new. He keeps going on like this and Jason is trying to maintain eye contact but he has a hair coming out of one nostril, about two times the nostril hole diameter in length, he estimates, that bristles and bobs with his speech and that Jason can’t stop watching and that the urge to cut after listening to him for 5 minutes is pure torture. Little patches of grey butch fuzz on either side of his nose too. Why is it once they are over 50 men who shave lose all the ability to negotiate nostrils, mandibular joints and ear lobes?1 His aunt’s sister-in-law is doing the electric slide, the artillery off her bow is strafing the crowd.

Internists—Jessica told him she had learned this from her father’s college roommate when she was 13 and spending a summer with him and his wife in the Inland Empire while her parents took a break—study and debate with the problem. Interventionists go in and fix it. A gastroenterological surgeon, he died of a fulminant heart attack the summer of her third year in medical school. His influence until that point and the nature of his demise played no small part in her decision to pursue a PhD between residency and EP clinical fellowship in interventional cardiology. What could be more elegant than advancing a laser equipped catheter into a beating human heart and obliterating naughty, arrhythmogenic cells? And satisfying. Bringing order to chaos, quite literally.

What was the source of his indignation and rage—she had the indignation to ask him over the phone, after she told him. What is it you feel has been taken from you? Jason found himself thinking in the middle of their argument, insanely, that he was pretty sure the word dasein had never been uttered out loud outside of a college campus.

All of my problems in life, his uncle is saying, come from other people.

These projections were just goalposts, not facts, she told him. Which quartile were you in. There are no diseases. Medicine is the probability, based on things that have happened, that something else will happen over a prescribed period of time. Medicine never deals in absolutes. Doctors are more similar to mechanics than engineers, she told him. They definitely weren’t scientists. And most doctors are religious. Because when you see these things up close, you realize how little we know and how even the most talented surgeon is at the mercy of the innate life force. But not me, she added in phlegmatic clarification after a moment. I’m not religious.

She was a cunt hair away from being back on Pennsylvania Avenue, his uncle is saying, prompting uproarious laughter. Fucking swipe left, you know what I’m sayin’ man?

Was there something that had to be cleaned up, he found himself thinking as he glanced surreptitiously at his watch for the moment at which he could not gracelessly excuse himself from the reception and Uber back to the hotel. This didn’t seem like something that you could do on your own, I don’t care how good you were with your hands. Was there some chemical involved? And then he was consumed with the idea that she was cleaning things up, literally and figuratively, right now, with him out of town for the weekend. The garage? The bathroom? What physical implements still in their daily life were complicit?

I didn’t know how to talk to my wife, his uncle is saying, drunk now and increasingly unhinged, and she didn’t know how to listen to me. People go their whole lives.

That house was bought for investment purposes, his grandmother is telling his sister in the car on the way back from the reception. Well, that’s the way it was. Your grandfather made the money and I made the financial decisions. And when he couldn’t work anymore, that’s when we sold the house. And we did make a profit off of it. It was more house than we needed, you know, with all my kids moved out by then. It’s what you did.

Yeah. No. I know, his sister replies.

There are people who live their lives for other people, to please other people or in the tracks of others’ expectations. As reaction. Following commands, spoken or tacit. And there are those very few that make their own lives out of full cloth, make their own lives their project. Not their parents’ project. They don’t make their children their project. All effort is focused on the self. And these people cut large swaths, they throw off chaff in all directions, they create carnage and largesse, plow through time devouring days and years unobstructed, uninfluenced, seminal. They move.

I’m not going to go in when I drop you off, he told his sister that morning. She’s not going to know either way. Meaning their mother. It was the year Kobe Bryant died in a helicopter crash in Calabasas. I intervened, Jessica said to him. There’s no other way to explain it. I’m not going to pretend I don’t exist.

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Our Finalists are:

• Vice Nimrod by Colin Dodds

  • Chapter 1

  • Chapter 2

  • Chapter 3

  • Chapter 4

• Still Soft With Sleep by Vincenzo Barney

  • Prologue

  • Part 1, Chapter 1

  • Part 1, Chapter 2

• Don’t Disappoint by Martin Van Cooper

While the traditional organs of American letters continue to wither, we recognize the need to forge a new path. If you believe in what we’re doing, PLEASE share and subscribe and spread the word.

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⚬─────────✧─────────⚬

Vincenzo Barney is a Vanity Fair contributor. He wrote Still Soft With Sleep for his senior thesis at Bennington in 2018. He is working on a book about Cormac McCarthy and Augusta Britt, a story he broke for Vanity Fair last year.

⚬─────────✧─────────⚬

The food was cooked and we filed into the kitchen of the “cottage,” about forty people or so. Caleb announced himself and smiled at Elvis ear to ear, pointing at me saying, “I can’t believe they let this guy in.” Caleb’s eyes were always in crescents, even when he wasn’t stoned, which he probably was. He wore a velvet suit and pocket square, looking like a blonde Don Draper with his square jaw and his hair combed back, but with enough volume in the hair that he looked more like if James Dean had made it out of adolescence and into business with the style of the five-o’clock shadow.

We sat at the table with a man who looked like Tom Cruise’s character Les Grossman in Tropic Thunder. I realized later it was Chris’s father, Frank McConnel whose brother had bankrupted the Dodgers. Elvis’s brother kept asking him questions about Ireland and England and you could tell how much money he was worth because he took as much time as he felt like before answering questions in one syllable, “Yeah” or “No” or “Sure.”

After a few painful rounds of this, a full sentence mercifully emerged to one of Jamie’s questions.

“Did you see any futbol games when you were in England this year?”

“I saw Chelsea and Arsenal.”

“You saw Chelsea play Arsenal?” Jamie asked excitedly. “That was one of the best games of the year. Man, I wish I could have gone to that.”

Frank ignored Jamie and called over to his other son who had grilled the swordfish:

“Hampton.”

“Yeah Dad.”

“Good job buddy on the swordfish.”

“Thanks Dad.”

“Good stuff.”

Jamie sat trying to reestablish eye-contact with Frank who was looking down at his plate.

Frank finally spoke. “Caleb.”

“Yeah Frank,” Caleb called across the way.

“You’re all alone over there.” By the impressive power of his observation, Frank had seen what was true: Caleb was indeed sitting by himself.

“That’s because I want no distractions,” said Caleb.

A lengthy pause. “Hah. No distractions,” said Frank.

“Yeah. No distractions while I eat this swordfish, Frank. Can’t risk it.”

“That’s funny Caleb.” Wealthy pause. “Good stuff.” Pause. “Hear that Hampton?”

“Yeah dad.”

“No distractions. Hah.”

“No distractions, dad.”

“Good stuff.”

“Good stuff, dad.”

He sat chewing for awhile and then looked back up, and stared nowhere over Jamie’s shoulder.

“No. I saw Chelsea and Arsenal play separately. Chelsea-Tottenham, Arsenal-Manchester.”

The swordfish was good, even though all Hampton did was throw it on the grill. Didn’t cut it, didn’t marinate it – just didn’t burn it. I even saw his mother relieve him of the flipping duties halfway through, so I’m not sure how much credit he deserves for standing in proximity to the food while it cooked, but he got it.

After dinner everyone filtered back into the kitchen and living room, and I stood around the kitchen table with Elvis’s sisters and their friends, drinking and picking appetizers off circulating plates. His sister Laura was walking around the room taking polaroids. There were some halfbeautiful women there, beautiful not because of anything inner or genetic or deeper than all of that, but because they were bland and wealthy enough to mask themselves with that wealthy-beautiful look, mold themselves to the dress and makeup the eye is trained to be attracted to on Instagram. They were all in the mid to late 20s, and had passed just barely that zone of youth Elvis and I were still safely inside of. They wanted us and they wanted to be as young as us again. Elvis and I passed a half hour skirting around the periphery, never penetrating deeper into the vapid, soulless pageantry, rolling eyes and making funny faces at each other across the way.

Then Chris walked by us looking for something and I touched his arm.

“Hey man, is that your boat moored off the beach?” I meant the yacht Elvis and I had touched.

He didn’t look at me as he passed. “Nah, but whoever’s it is is b-a-l-l-i-n-g-ing.”

“Uh huh.”

“Got something I wanna show you and your butt buddy in a bit.”

“Sorry?”

“It’ll blow your tits off.”

“Cool.”

I turned back and grabbed another beer, there not being much else to do. I was scrolling mindlessly through my phone when Caleb came up to me, pointing at my shattered screen.

“Have you ever considered getting a new phone?”

“Um, no, not really.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know.”

“Take a look at mine. This has the best digital phone camera on the market, and I only pay 80 dollars a month for it. Take a look at the camera. I take all my promotional photos with it.”

I pointed it at the party.

“Certainly looks good. But what happens to the quality,” pointing it at Chris, “when you zoom in...? Eesh.”

Caleb looked at me seriously. “You deserve this phone.” Then he paused, holding my eye and asked, “Who’s that on your background, She’s hot.”

“Oh, She’s just a friend.” I locked the screen and put it in my pocket.

Laura came up to us, taking a polaroid, and then said:

“Come outside, Chris is giving his birthday speech.”

“His birthday speech? Boy George,” I said.

“Oh sure, the sheer size of it!”

The McConnel’s had rendered the porch nearly pitch-black, turning off all the lights so that baby-faced Chris could speak to us on some wooden podium or chair beneath a floodlight. A woman’s arm reached out of the dark to hand Chris the glass of white wine he had handed her as he had steadied his half-doughed girth onto the chair. In his ill-fitting low voice he began.

“Thank you Sandra. I just want to start by saying, really mom? Only 48 people?” He held for laughs. “No, I’m kidding. I want to thank all of you for coming – well, some of you.” He held again. “No, I’m only kidding… Kind of. No, no, to be honest, I am really thankful for my friends and my family. I don’t know where I’d be without some of you, or how I would have made it to 27…”

“Probably just by not dying, right?” Elvis whispered to me.

I laughed.

From behind us in the dark, a hand slowly placed a vape pen in front of our faces. We both flinched in fear. A few heads turned to locate the disturbance, but the darkness hid us. It was Caleb, standing quietly behind us. Elvis and I hit the latest in Californian innovation, “Just to test that it was working properly,” Caleb had urged. Chris finished his speech and Caleb put his arms around us. “Chris wants to show you something. Gonna blow your cocks off.”

“What’s all this about blowing cocks and tits off?”

“You’ll find out.”

Caleb led us through the crowd and to Chris, fielding congratulations on his speech.

“Ah, you too. Thought you guys’d run off for a quickie.” His jokes were reaches all of them, mistimed insinuations. “Come with me. Are your cocks strapped on?”

“Sure.”

He brought us into his bedroom and took a box out from under his bed. I couldn’t believe how plain and devoid of personality his bedroom was. He fetched some keys and unlocked the box. And pulled a gun from it.

“What’s that?” asked Elvis.

“It’s .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and you gotta ask yourself a question. Are you feeling lucky?” He tossed it to Elvis.

“Jesus man! What the fuck.”

“Chill bro it’s not loaded. Not yet.”

“Pretty sick, huh?” said Caleb. “It’s from Dirty Harry.”

“Yeah but not the regular .44 Magnum. This is the Auto Mag .44 AMP from Sudden Impact. Fucking huge.”

“Big fan of the series, huh?” I asked. Elvis tried his best not to even hold the gun and Caleb took it from him and handed it over to Chris. Chris opened the cylinder and slid the bullets into their chambers.

“Time for fireworks,” Chris smiled. He led us into the backyard away from the crowds and into a clearing in the woods. I could feel how uncomfortable Elvis was. Could feel him looking to me to intercede.

“They’re gonna start anytime soon?” Caleb asked.

“Yeah, cept my mom’s such a retarded bitch she’s probably forgotten.” He laughed. “Kidding. Love her.”

The first birthday firework whirred into the sky and Chris hurriedly lifted the pistol. The firework exploded and several others shot up into the sky and Chris shot the pistol randomly and celebratorily into the air as they exploded. The sound was deafening and Elvis and I plugged our ears.

“You know that’s really fucking stupid right? Bullets come down,” I said when he was done.

“Chill dude. We’re on Chappy. They might hit a fish out in the water. I do this all the time.”

Elvis and I stole two of the most expensive bottles of wine in the dark and kayaked back over the harbor.

“What a fucking loser that guy is,” said Elvis. “That’s why I can’t stand these people, man.”

We hugged the shore in the moonlight, and I told Elvis I wished I had met his father.

“You know, all this wealth is new in my family. On both sides. My dad, he didn’t really like any of this. I mean, he did, he liked some of it, like his own house. But that kind of party wasn’t his scene. He hated that stuff. He hated the Charlotte Inn and getting dressed up to go out to dinner. And guys like Frank McConnel. You know? He wasn’t my dad’s speed. He hated the name Mayflower. It was my mom’s idea to name it. He didn’t want to. And I’m trying to keep that going, trying to make my siblings remember all that about him.”

“That’s because he earned it, and he was a real guy before.”

“Yeah, exactly.”

“His father was a janitor in Park Slope, right?”

“Yeah, got on some boat from Ireland when he was a teenager… nuts. Can you imagine doing that?”

“No way. I had trouble enough getting on this kayak the first time.”

“You know, this whole thing with my dad and your girlfriend… It doesn’t seem real.”

“No. It doesn’t.”

“When it all happens so suddenly, you know? I don’t know… You know it, but it takes a long time for it to settle in. For It and your head to get used to each other. I don’t know. I guess It couldn’t really happen any slower. But that could be that difference between knowing and understanding – just time, you know?”

“Yeah. But, sometimes the longer it goes on the more absurd it feels.”

“Yeah. That’s true.”

The water smelled clean.

“You know, I was listening to Cat Stevens lately…” he started.

“Cat man, what a beast. We both were.”

“Yeah. But by myself back in the city. You know ‘Father and Son?’”

“Yeah, course.”

“What’s interesting in that song is that when Cat sings, ‘And I know, that I have to go away,’ it’s actually the son saying that to the father. I always thought it was the father saying it to the son, but it’s the son. It’s not just the father who has to leave, it’s the son who has to make the decision too, even though it’s kinda already decided for him. I just realized that the other day.”

We went past all the boats and sailboats and yachts anchored in the harbor, and looked in all the windows at the people watching TV on their couches, eating, our kayak low in the water. There were Chelsea futbol highlights on one of the TVs and Elvis paused to watch them through the window. He cheered loudly at a goal and we made a getaway as the heads in the boat turned out towards us in the darkness and then, as we watched a harbor patrol flash its red lights and disappear behind the rounded edge of the beach that we were hugging, I felt about to cry for Elvis about his dad. But it felt disloyal to do that without him crying first, and besides, the tears could not come. I wasn’t aligned for tears anymore so I just did some silent halfcry like a stunted inhale behind him in the kayak, and above the beach and in the clouds and fog over Edgartown there was a red light rising and softing.

“You think that’s a fire?” I asked the back of his head.

“No, it’s just store lights or something.”

But when we got free of the beach and could see into Edgartown where people waited for the Chappy Ferry, we saw a crowd and a flashing ambulance going across. Elvis suddenly saw his sisters and brother waiting for the next ferry on the Chappy side. We kayaked over and called to them and they said that when they got there a woman was unmoving on the ground and she had put her in an ambulance.

Elvis and I tensed, thinking of Chris’s gun.

“She ok? The woman?” asked Elvis.

“Oh sure, just got drunk or something. She’s alive if that’s what you mean. So, see you guys at the boathouse tonight, right?”

“Oh sure,” I said.

There was already a boat at Elvis’s by the time we floated up. A twenty foot center-console with outboard engine and about nine or ten people drinking outside the boathouse, including Chris, somehow already back from his own party and calling all of his friends “my negro,” which we could hear from the water. One degree of separation from the word he desperately wanted to be saying and probably did in more intimate settings.

Elvis and I pulled our kayak in somewhat defeatedly to shore. I liked seeing a boat along Elvis’s dock, but not Chris’s.

Before long another center-console showed up and someone got out of it with a Bud Light and came running up to Elvis.

“Elvis!”

“Hey, Runnsler.”

“How the hell are yuh! Haven’t seen you in years.” He shook his hand and held it, keeping Elvis’s hand in a light throb.

“Yeah, last summer at the 4^th.”

“Yeah, it’s been years. How old are you now?”

“Twenty-two.”

“Over Twenty-one?”

“Yeah. Twenty-two.”

“Good stuff. You still at UVM?”

“Yeah.”

I went to correct him but Elvis smiled at me and I didn’t say anything.

“This is my friend Adam. He goes to school with me too.”

He let go of Elvis’s hand and shook mine.

“Runnsler, nice to meet you. Short for Runnsilier. So, I hear you go to school up in Burlington with Elvis.”

“Yup. Burlington.”

“UVM.”

“That’s another way of putting it.”

“Uvm.”

“Sorry?”

“Uvm,” he said again, pronouncing the letters UVM together as a word. “That’s what you call it up there, don’t ya?”

“Oh yeah. Uvm. Sure.”

“Great school. I had some drinking buddies from up there. We’ve got this tattoo here under the arm about it.”

“Good stuff. Where’d you go to school?” I asked.

“Yeah, good stuff, good stuff. Dartmouth,” he said.

“Oh cool. My grandparents live a little outside of there.”

“Yeah? Whereabouts? Those houses in Hanover are beautiful.”

“No, not in Hanover actually, but right outside. In Canaan.”

“Canaan? Where’s that?”

“It’s like right next to Lebanon and, um, they live on a lake called Goose Pond.”

“Yeah, I’m gonna get a drink. Christ Elvis, you’re so big now. My little brother is huge. Have you seen him? George? That’s my little brother. Taller’n me. He’s going to Georgetown next year with your brother, right? I told your brother if he can send me nudes of George I’ll pay him 100 dollars for ‘em. Good stuff. He’s gonna get trashed up there. You seen him?”

Elvis and I sat on the corner of the dock where the water broke. The waves were lapping over these little jellyfish, which you could only see when a big enough lap broke and shook an electric blue light out of them.

“That’s probably how they die,” Elvis said.

“By glowing.”

Another boat pulled up, another twenty-footer, a person for every foot. Expensive cargo. Caleb got off, all drunken-high smiles and helped the women onto the dock.

“Jesus. Look at how they stuffed ‘em on. They’re lucky nothing happened coming over.”

“Wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world,” Elvis said, his eyes still on the jellyfish.

“Not Caleb though.”

“No, Caleb’s a beast. Look, Adam,” Elvis pointed down at the water, “if you look long enough you can see the translucent shape in the water.”

I turned to look at the jellyfish but a guy jumped loudly off the boat, runwalking down the dock toward us with his phone up to his ear, grinning with his mouth open and his jaw shaking, eyes vacant and nose twitching. Coke.

“He’s got the boogle jaw for sure.”

“It’s like slack jaw, but with more slack. Look at that thing moving, it’s gonna come unhinged!”

“Look at his fucking tie.”

It was pink with little yellow and green squares on it.

“That is gross.”

“I bet you we could fineagle some coke out of him though,” I said.

“Could do,” Elvis said. “Could very well do bru.”

They had all come from the yacht club and were dressed as you’d expect them. Caleb came up to us there on the dock with a woman on his arm who gave us only two-thirds of her face before leaving to dance in the boathouse. We stood up and watched her go.

“Bruv, she is banging Caleb,” Elvis said. “How’d you smuggle her across?”

“Don’t touch.”

“Oh man.”

“No, I mean it. Don’t touch unless you want the herps.”

“Are you serious?”

“Yeah, you gotta strap up if you wanna take her down.”

“Jesus man,” I said.

“You got any of that pen from last night?” Elvis asked.

“Bruh, obviously. Put it in.” He leaned closer to Elvis and said in a high, sultry voice, “and then wait for it to vibrate in your mouth.” Elvis let out a choked cloud of laughter.

“And what flavor is this one, Caleb?” I asked.

“This one is for getting lit. I have four types: one for sleeping, one for chilling, one for getting lit, and one that will make you rock hard. I only packed the lit one though. Oh, and this one that’s lemon flavored.” He pulled another vape pen from his pocket. “It does a little of each, and a lot of neither. I also have some fire Molly if you guys want any.”

“Nah man, I’m good off the Molly. This lemon pen is sick though,” Elvis said.

“Dude, this pen is like if Apple got into the vape game. This thing is huge in LA. In ten years, women and housewives are gonna be coming home from work and they’re gonna hit this. Gone are the days of red wine to unwind. Gone. It’s an inevitability.”

Caleb went inside and Elvis disappeared pretty soon afterwards, saying he had work the next morning. I had forgotten that he had gotten a job at a beer brewery in town before we’d left for the city, around the time I had gotten the one at the Second Hand Store.

“You don’t have to get up til 12,” I said. “I’ve got work tomorrow at 9.”

“I don’t know man, I just don’t like these people.”

“Let’s just get trashed like last night. Then it doesn’t matter who we’re with. We’ll play cups and stick it to them again.”

“Maybe I’ll come down later. I have to talk to ‘Stana. She took off for LA this morning without telling me, and she might not come back to Londonberry next term.”

“Alright L, just come back down after.”

“Look man. I don’t like these people.”

“Neither do I, but it’s where the party is.”

After some black, vacant length I found myself steeped in a debate about John McCain with Runnsler out on the dock. How did I get there?

As 4 am rolled around I again found myself transplanted, sitting with Caleb on the second floor porch of the house, the party having faded and only a few suited stragglers left, including the guy with the boogle jaw who kept loping up and down the stairs, asking us if we wanted to go all night but not sharing any boogle to do so.

“Where’s Chris?” Caleb asked.

“He’s down there with that chick in the boathouse. He’s plowing dude,” booglejaw said.

“Hah, he’s plowing dude. Bruh, he’s totally plowing right now dude.” Caleb laughed with his eyes closed.

“Let’s go all night guys. Come on Cay.”

“You gotta share some of what’s coming out of your nose if you wanna do that,” Caleb said.

“What do you mean?”

“Bruh. Get a fucking kleenex.”

“Who is Chris with?” I asked.

“That girl you were trying to get with,” Caleb said.

“Sandra?”

“Yeah dude. What happened, you almost had her tonight,” Caleb said.

“I know. Well, we were just talking, I wasn’t trying anything. She’s funny.”

“She gives chill head bruh.”

The boogle guy put his phone to his head and rifled off a few yes’s and then screamed “No no no!” several times. All night he had been putting his phone to his head in random intervals or in the middle of dancing or laughing at someone like a complete lunatic, speaking for a second and then never saying goodbye or looking at his phone when he hung up. He may very well have been on a six-hour phone call for all I could tell.

“Will you talk somewhere else man? We’re getting down to this song.”

“What Caleb?”

“Your phone man.”

“You can stay if you share the boogle,” I said.

“What’s boogle?”

“It’s what you’re on bru.”

“Let’s do some brugle,” laughed Caleb.

“What’s brugle?” the guy asked.

“Enough talk, let’s just chill to this song,” Caleb said.

We probably could’ve used the coke, gesturing halfdead with our hands at the pitch black between the two columns of Elvis’s porch, our heads tucked into our chests, pointing and signing in presleep rhythm at the perfect square of black framed between the twin columns:

Because I’m still in love with You

I wanna see You dance again

Because I’m still in love with You

And later:

If You should ever leave me

Though life would still go on believe me

The world could show nothing to me

So what good would livin’ do me

God only knows what I’d be without You

God only knows what I’d be without You

Then we heard a familiar medley: “Yes? YES? YES!? Nonono!” with quick transition to a maniacal laugh.

“What kinda data plan does this fucker have?”

“Massive. Absolutely massive.”

“Caleb man, we have an extra bed.” I meant the blow-up mattress, which suddenly seemed viable to me. “There’s no way you can drive home tonight.”

“Bed sounds nice man.” He was slumping down deeper into that drunken exhaustion halfsleep of 5 ams.

“I’m gonna go in,” I said.

“Bruh, we’re chilling… Look at us bruh. Just two cool guys. Just chilling. It’s all we’re doing.”

Light was coming back to the Earth and I saw the door of the boathouse open and Chris and Sandra walk out, fully clothed. No way anything had happened. I waited for Sandra to get into the house before I got Caleb to go to sleep on the right angle couch by Elvis’s brother Jamie, head to head like two little kids, leaving the boogle guy to lap up all the lies coming out of Chris’s mouth.

I got into Elvis’s mattress after watching Chris’s boat float from the dock silently in the pink-into-orange of firstlight and Elvis said, “5:30, are you kidding me bru?” He had stayed up all night waiting for me.

I laughed and got into my boxers under the blanket. The room was freezing so I clung to the blanket while he told me in words coming straight out of whatever had just been his sleeping:

“I think I had an epiphany man. I had this crazy vision while I was halfway asleep,” he said.

“What was it?”

“I can’t say it in words. Tomorrow I’ll tell you.”

“No, you’ll forget it tomorrow. Try now. You won’t have the words tomorrow.”

“I’ve been trying to for twenty-two years man.”

“Just try.”

He didn’t say anything for a long while. Then I heard his mouth open in the darkness.

“It’s these colors of blue and orange, and, like, a path. I remember seeing it in my car seat, closing my eyes under the sunlight coming through the windows, and always seeing this shape back then, or these patterns of shapes, blue and orange with my eyes closed. And I was thinking, I remember seeing this little baby on the subway, maybe 2 years old - actually I’ve seen this a lot - and the kid was crying and his parents gave him one of their phones and he was looking through it, like gonna take a photo or whatever, and he was seeing the whole world through a phone and he just instantly calmed down and held it sideways to get a wider angle so perfectly like an adult, like it was so natural for him to hold a phone and look through it, staring into it like it was a pacifier. And he’s looking at his dad’s shirt through the camera, and this little band came onto the subway car, just a cello and violin. And I’m standing there trying to listen to Bron-Yr-Aur on my phone, it had a lot of importance to me after my dad died, and I was waiting the whole train ride to hear it because I had no WiFi and now I finally have WiFi and I’m turning up the volume so loud that I can’t hear these guys, and the violinist is almost elbowing me in the face he’s playing so crazy and putting so much into it, and I’m looking around and all these people are standing there and sitting there in the orange seats looking so blank and vague at their screens, or just looking at nothing with their own headphones in, not even looking inwards at themselves, just traveling through this little tunnel with the blue sparks of the rail flying up, smelling everyone and that’s it, that’s their only connection with these people, smelling everyone’s smell. Not looking, not talking, trying not to touch anyone, and some of them even threw the band a dollar, without even looking at them, or listening to them and, I don’t know, I can’t explain it, I was wondering how my face compared to these blank people with their headphones in and, you know, no one even met my eye, no one was looking anywhere… and these poor guys playing are all so raggedy looking and a little smelly, and there was some homeless guy passed out full on one of the seats and this train was crowded, and the homeless guy was there probably to just escape the heat and be in the AC because it was July, and, I don’t know… and no one in my family, none of my friends in the city, they never take the train… I don’t know. And I didn’t throw the band any money. Just thought of how my face looked.”

“I think I get it,” I said.

“Yeah. I don’t know. I guess I just, whatever, have this bubble around me, because of where I was born, how I was raised, and I hate it, and I have a real choice to just, I don’t know, just fly somewhere far away and know no one for a while and leave it all and have a house that you can feel the history in, and the soul in it. And, I don’t know, the freedom of that almost, that guy sleeping across the subway seat. I don’t know. I just couldn’t face those people tonight. I hate all of them. They’re not real.”

Elvis woke me up at 9:07 without a single dream I could remember, just the little afterflutters of one, confused as to why my eyes were open so soon and why it had had to vanish. I was still hammered and seven minutes late for work. I always thought it a joke when people said they woke up still drunk, but it’s not. Though I did find it funny.

There was a strange sound coming from the bathroom toilet but I didn’t stop to see what it was and headed down the stairs. Rounding the third floor I saw Elvis’s grandfather mopping up all this water falling out of the ceiling in the room below the bathroom. Elvis always blew his nose and threw it in the toilet and never flushed it, and evidently someone that morning had flushed the toilet and it clogged and not knowing how to use a plunger, it overflowed and was leaking through the ceiling.

Being too disoriented to fully run, I managed to runwalk to the ferry in under a minute.

The harbor I piloted the ferry over each day was a seatop of Debussian wavechords, like pianoing waves gliding across the opening of a scored film. I couldn’t wait to see it.

“Where’s Brock?”

Jill looked at me a little dumbfounded. “He’s not here, Adam.”

“Who’s gonna captain?”

“Didn’t you hear?”

“Ah well, it was about time I was promoted. We all knew Brock was losing his touch.” But Jill didn’t laugh.

“The girl who was killed last night was Rosie.”

“Who?”

“The girl camping in Chappaquidick. You met her the other day.” Then Jill put her head in her hands. “Adam.”

The sea was not rough that day but there was a strong wind coming across the harbor from the east blowing the small waves over into their toppled white. The wind deepened the color of the water and the clouds banked the sun in such a manner that its light did not glitter off the water but looked dark and wet. The beauty of bright dry sunlight in the water is that it does not look wet but glassed and precise. So the clouds were wet and this put a glare into the sunlight and made it moody and painterly and the clouds were so threadbare and moved so fast that all day we were darkened and opened into the light in the course of a few seconds. I felt the winter, the fogged snowy crossings in the night that Brock told me about, not seeing the landing until you were upon it and straightening out with only a few holy seconds to glide it in and hit the front rutter. Then the sun would open upon us and I felt the sweat on the sides of my body and the overlit attention of the summer. The sun too encompassing, the body too naked. Too naked, too lit. At the mouth of the harbor a bright white sheet of glare lay trapped and hemmed in by dark water and the yachts bobbed in it. I could see Chris’s father’s yacht, posed with towering innocence against the treeline of Chappadquidick.

I piloted the boat in the southeast wind and ebb. It was my first time left alone at the wheel. It was the smaller ferry with 20,000 pounds of ballast and a slight hull. This made it flush and track better in the waves and currents, but for this reason too it didn’t like to stop and I had the feeling each time landing that I was speeding in too fast but had to overcome this fear and let my muscles learn to calm and trust the front rutter to slow us in time. I backed off earlier than I had to and held the tension of fear against the calm and this made each trip an event, a potential of disaster that I had to steward from violence. Visions of the ferry going sideways and not being able to right it and all the tension of the wealthy eyes in the harbor marking my failure, but I handled it and by the end I could feel the calming ache of new muscle memory breaking through me and the wind whistling through the cracks of the glass wheelhouse was like a mother’s bedtime voice. I was in imitation of Brock and in my attempted overlap I felt him as if I was in a state of tracery scrawling over his trajectory and his talent for the thing.

There is a lot of anticipation involved in driving a boat. You are reading the waves at least thirty feet out at a time, come pouring and developing their size and shape in this zone. With such a heavy ferry you have to anticipate. First it is guesswork, first finding your angle, slowing in the turn and hitting the front rutter and feeling how this all adds together. It is like following footprints in the snow but having to marry the momentum of the water and the wind and your own inertia to curve perfectly into the footprint three steps ahead. You have to previsualize it and react in the moment to achieve the vision.

“How long is Brock going to be out?”

“Well his daughter’s dead Adam,” she said, looking out at the packed, throbbed, bunched bright harbor over my shoulder. “And they don’t know who did it.”

“Can’t they trace the trajectory of the bullet? I mean, can’t they calculate its direction and find him?”

She looked off now toward Chappaquiddick where the bullet had come from, and I sought Chris’s house through the trees and harborfronts drawing its curtain over it as I landed the boat a little late on the front rutter and the cars jostled.

“You’re doing a good job,” Jill said, and the upwardness of her gaze helped calm me. It helped me know how to pilot. She was a woman who wanted to look up into a man’s face so I would give it to her.

Only as I pulled away did the curtain open itself and show Chris’s house, spreading open behind my back. And as I started each crossing I would begin by seeing it in the corner of my left eye, and disappear behind the changing landscape as I drew closer to it.

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⚬─────────✧─────────⚬

Vincenzo Barney is a Vanity Fair contributor. He wrote Still Soft With Sleep for his senior thesis at Bennington in 2018. He is working on a book about Cormac McCarthy and Augusta Britt, a story he broke for Vanity Fair last year.

⚬─────────✧─────────⚬

The sun was banded suddenly with the dark of June clouds and as we left we ran into Astana, stoned and slanting towards us along the boards through the dunes. Her brothers and a few of their friends were there in their lifted Jeep getting wasted in the clouded dark. Their father was in their young faces, but not Astana’s. I wondered at her a little, so thin with her breasts pressed so tightly together, her hair blonded and poking imperceptibly from her bikini bottoms and I was glad Elvis had such a beautiful woman. The brothers knew about our college from Astana and were intrigued by Elvis and I and couldn’t believe we had swum from the boat to shore. After they left sliding joyfully through the sand we walked a ways down the beach to where it widened and deepened and the waves seemed finally to pick up with dignity and reprisal.

The breadth of the beach made it a natural stage, and Elvis put on a great performance for us, flirting with the waves and getting seduced into them, and Astana looked at me all excited and I knew what she was thinking and I said, “Go join this wonderful play that I’m watching,” and she ran like a child merging into the scenery and played with Elvis, splitting the beachstage into perfect thirds by swapping the midground of the shoreline and the highground of the sea with Elvis, sending the spectators of the orchestra pit into delight. A few elderly audience members passed through my sightline and asked, “Are they with you?”

“Yes.”

“Wow. How are they doing that?”

I didn’t quite know what “that” was, though I was enjoying it, and I answered, “They have a lot of energy.”

They looked back. “Pshewwww,” and shook their smiling heads and walked on.

I sat and smiled and knew I could never join them in the water because my view was holding up the bonds of the performance, and it would all be destroyed if I moved and I could not let the curtain come down on them together. It felt so comfortable to sit there, to be so young and tan and thin with my stomach flat and slipping past my waistband. It felt to be at the peak of something. A peak with thousands of feet below to fall through.

Astana sat with her feet disappearing into the sand and Elvis traced out an elongation of her leg and sloped it down perfectly so that her legs truly faded and vanished into the sand. Then he laid back and spoke in non-sequiturs. “So monkey’s then us, huh?” “We’re just born in the middle of all this and don’t need to know any of it.” “We could forget everything we ever knew, tomorrow. Right now. And never learn it again. Forget the arch all over again. Nothing’s keep us from it.” “Everyone is our age. The rookies, the artists, the porn stars.”

“Yeah L?” Astana smiled.

After an hour or so of half-sleeping and sunbathing Astana’s brothers came up through the sand in their Jeep. I wanted to join them ripping through the dunes and leant us bikes. I wanted to go ripping with them through the dunes but Elvis had been talking about taking me to the Japanese Garden on Chappaquidick the entire flight from New York City. There was also talk of a J in store when we got there, though the sun had made one hardly necessary, the sun floating us up off the beach.

In the garden three women were speaking somewhere behind the trees in the gentlest hill and their voices rang out to us through the silence of the stream and the floating turtleheads as if they were up in the trees. Elvis kept trying to roll a joint from Astana’s weed but we had to keep walking from the voices deeper into the garden to find a place to smoke in privacy. The voices crowded in from all sides.

Astana looked so beautiful and halfcrazy in the sun I had to look away. The beach had opened up another layer of her beauty and she had settled down comfortably into it. Staring at the sand between my dirty toes I got sick thinking of how little I had done so far that summer and wanted to bike back to Elvis’s house immediately so I could really do nothing.

Elvis used the back of Astana’s phone to roll the joint. When he was done, he scrolled through her Instagram feed and showed us a video of a basketball player shooting from beyond the arc, then landing and his ankle snapping in half and his bone dangling out.

“Jesus Christ. I’m never jumping again,” I said.

“That’s what I’m saying bruv.”

“Two feet on the ground, all times.”

The voices of the women kept following us and crowding us in and with the weed now their voices took on an altogether different pitch and harmony. So in panic, taking the shallowest hits I could, I started to herd us toward our bikes and out of the crooked turns of the garden. I looked back at the trees and heard the women’s voices threading and coming through the leaves in the wind. I thought I could see them in the trees, their voices breathing through it.

Astana decided to walk back to the beach to be with her brothers. I stood there waiting for her and Elvis to say goodbye, their noses rubbing. All three of us went to Londonberry College, which Astana was always threatening to leave, even now in the summer before our final year. She left her bike with ours, warning us with a smile that she wasn’t coming back to Londonberry next term, and when we called to her not to forget her bike in the garden she turned around in a sliver of sunlight, beaming like a slightly mad and tanned halfangel.

“I’d rather walk,” she said, and some part of me knew that this time she was serious about leaving, and that Elvis and I would not see her again in the Fall.

“The A, then the C, then the... the G?”

Elvis passed me mouthing our little song to himself, counting on his fingers the absurd route just to show how easily he was passing me. I had led him out in the strong headwind and my legs were so out of shape that he passed me leisurely on the straightaway toward the Chappy ferry. I laughed hoarsely and barely breathing and caught my breath waiting for the ferry to land on the front ramp.

“Hey there Jill.”

“Adam, you’re back. Brock, look who it is.”

“You’re still on the boat, kid?”

“Yup. That’s hangin on.”

“About the only thing, huh?” He nodded at me in my shorts.

“Yeah, just about.”

Jill and Brock were my bosses. Jill, a widow, inherited the Chappy Ferry from her late husband, and Brock was the head captain. There were two boats, but Brock was senior in the chain of command. I spent June piloting back and forth in the open sun over the hundred yard stretch of harbor that separates Edgartown from Chappaquiddick, driving every now and then under Brock’s tutelage. The smell of gasoline, the seatop. It was meditative.

I sat back down and set my eyes on Mayflower, Elvis’s house on the other side of the harbor in Edgartown. In a cul-de-sac of mansions and docks it was distinguished from the rest by a fifth level that I had only ever been on the midstairs of. Though we lived with a mutual freedom in Mayflower that June, it was implied by Elvis that that floor was the one place in the house that only he could go and I understood, content with the rest of the sprawl. Something to do with his father, I gathered.

We had had all of June to ourselves. In the morning we would jump from Elvis’s dock, or from the second story porch into the pool, and spend the day half-asleep, reading, drinking, taking baths at night with bottles of rosé. In the beginning, I would let myself get lost in the house, and Elvis and I would go hours without talking or being together, always finding each other when we both wanted, as if our thoughts touched the other’s across the house. But as the Fourth of July approached, Elvis’s family began their slow trickle into our days. Our dinners moved from the couch to the table, and the table filled first with Elvis’s mother, and then his grandparents. A blind Maltese named Chelsea now engulfed Mayflower’s intimate silences with unending barks, penetrating the privacy of every room and proving how deceptively shallow the walls and floors were of that large house. At the dinner table Elvis and I had fantasies of punting Chelsea across the harbor to Chappaquiddick, now suddenly packed with boats, which caused our forays off the dock to slow with the water weighed down in gasoline. We could feel the difference in our hair.

Soon aunts and uncles and friends referred to as “cousins” showed up too, and Mayflower took on strange new habits. If you put a glass on the counter, full or not, it would be gone within five minutes to the dishwasher. Cleaning ladies would show up when we least expected them, that is daily, and reorganize everything we owned into places that we couldn’t find or that didn’t make any sense, leaving Elvis and I with certain crucial pairs of underwear and t-shirts missing in action for days on end. If you left your change of clothes on the wrung outside the outdoor shower as opposed to the inside wrung, you would find they’d been taken and thrown into the washing machine while you showered. One even feared the inside wrung was not safe, and that they’d come bursting in for your shirt which they’d just washed and dried and you had only worn for an hour in the central air of the house. Elvis put a sign up on his bedroom door, “No Cleaning Please,” and on the envelope where he kept his cash he wrote, “I know exactly how much is in here: $453.” I died laughing when he first showed it to me.

Mayflower, which to my eyes was pristine, perhaps too pristine, was also apparently in disrepair and needed to be banged on with hammers and painted from morning to night. I was convinced for a few days that a team of painters had moved into the bottom floor until I realized all of Edgartown had become a construction zone of pathological upkeep. Entire rooms in the house would randomly be off limits for days so that the floors could be revarnished, or the couches washed. It was the day that Elvis’s boathouse, the crown jewel of the house, had been taped off from us that we had decided to fly to New York City and get away from our vacation. Fearing the packed house I made good on a long ignored promise I’d made to my parents when my father was laid-off at the start of summer, and got the job on the ferry.

Mayflower itself was about halfway down North Water Street in Edgartown, a street besieged by tourists of the middle-class who treated the road and the colonial captains’ houses with an almost historical reverence, gawking and taking pictures in an endless stream. You could see Elvis’s house in Jaws. The lawn was small, but that’s how it had to be with so many huge houses on the water, and so much expanse of ocean at the end of a great length of dock. The homes on the left side of the street without access to the water were much older, which you could tell by their architecture, and there was a beautiful old captain’s house that had been renovated the summer before to look like every other house on the street. I remembered seeing it when I was a little kid visiting the island with my parents, but now I had trouble spotting it.

As we neared land I watched Elvis’s house grow closer and closer until it disappeared behind the trees and I could see only his dock, stretching long and boatless into the water. Then that too disappeared.

Those weeks of being alone but together were gone. June was about to end.

Elvis turned to me. “Bruv, I am not jumping once this summer.”

“Bruv, not once.”

I found Elvis’s voice in the mirror.

“Can I borrow a shirt?” he asked, coming into the bathroom and trying to squeeze the two halves of a small dress shirt over his torso. “All I’ve got is stuff from High School.”

That night we were to dress in suit jackets and join the Gavins at the Charlotte Inn for dinner. Elvis didn’t own any dress shirts that fit him anymore, and his father’s shirts that his mother still left hanging in her closet were too big for him.

“Yeah, take one of mine,” I said, positioning my wet hair in the mirror.

Scoring a week before at the Second Hand Store I owned probably half of the street’s donated clothes. Not that the town had great taste, but I got the old stuff with style that, as the town’s conformity deepened, no longer fit Edgartown’s salmon pink and yellow palette.

“I haven’t been to this stupid place in ages,” Elvis said.

“Where? The Charlatan?”

“What?”

“The Charlatan.”

“Are you saying the ‘Charlatan?’” He clasped his hands together and bowed over them, laughing. “Oh my days. It’s the ‘Charlotte’ Inn.”

“Ah, putain, the Charlotte,” I said, affecting the accent of our French friend from Londonberry, hoisting up my second-hand French slacks to the height I wanted my belt to cinch them to, perfectly creased down the legs. “Excusez moi.”

Elvis pulled my waistband in the back to see the brand. “Wow, check the French Press,” he said. “Let’s get you in that accent all dinner long.”

“Oo la la. But of course.”

“On second thought, maybe not.”

The “Inn,” as the family referred to it, looked like a huge, gilded luxury lounge from the Titanic. But there were no Jack’s, nor Roses. We arrived a few minutes later than everyone else and Elvis’s grandfather Monty, a formerly working-class Brooklynite, ordered us Keyo Manhattans. We sat around chewing the whiskey-soaked cherries and making conversation. After hearing that I was going to Italy for the fall semester, one of Elvis’s aunts spoke of how impossible it was to kill yourself in Switzerland, how they put nets at the bottoms of bridges and how everyday the widows of Italy walked a mile and a half downhill thirty years after the deaths that grieved them still in black mourning and wheeled fish back up to their villages. Someone mentioned how an uncle of Elvis’s went to Italy once and had to call in fat to work when he returned because he couldn’t fit back into his suit pants. When the waiter came the same aunt cautioned him that he should pull up a chair to take her order, that’s how complex her substitutions and alterations were going to be. Everyone found that pretty funny.

In the middle of all this, the Serbian hostess came out to the top of the stairs leading to the dining room and stood smiling and blinking at me with one of the most angelic faces I have ever seen. The kind that takes you unawares, like the part of a blind dream that shocks you suddenly into memory, into the pocket of pure floating, the unclinging glimpse. With that look in my pocket I felt blissfully drunk sitting in the Hermes jacket that I had bought for only 2 dollars. Faking it so, I seemed to fit in more than Elvis who did his best not to fit in. He caught my eye and indicated the hostess to me with his eyebrows.

He leaned over. “See the look she just gave me?”

“Bru, are you out of your mind? She was looking at me.”

“Pff, you’re out to lunch pal.”

“We’re out to dinner, pal.”

Then Elvis pretended he we was being called by the hostess, looking off in her direction where she now stood turned away from us, mouthing to her back, “What’s that? This guy?” He pointed his thumb at me quizzically. Then he squinted his eyes, shook his head and turned the same thumb away from the table, gesturing with it toward the door. “Don’t worry, I’ll get him outta he’e.” I started laughing, feeling properly KO’d already by the Keyo. This caused the table to return their attention to us.

“But Adam, tell me, why are you going to Italy for the Fall semester of your Senior year? Isn’t that unusual?” someone asked whose name I didn’t know.

“Adam wants a little breather from Londonberry,” Elvis said for me, putting it lightly.

“But why not just go after graduation?”

Because I’m broke. “Because I got a good offer to go and study Italian in Sorrento. Cheaper than a semester at Londonberry, actually.”

“Oh, Sorrento. So beautiful.” The table fell back into tales of Italy.

Then Monty grabbed my arm and said quietly, “Look, Adam, let me just tell you somethin’ so you understand.” This was how he began most of his stories.

He and his wife proceeded to speak to me of their many six degrees of separation from the Bose of Bose speakers, of how the Charlotte Inn with all the twinkling crystal lights used to not be much until they got the new head chef who was a good friend of Mont’s, how I should save the cherries of the Keyo until the end and then drink the dirty ice of the martini last after dinner when it had melted. But when he grabbed my arm again after the appetizers I lowered myself to him and he spoke pridefully of the characters in Brooklyn he used to call Joey Two Shoes and Herbie the Bullet and his days as a firefighter. While holding my arm he told the table how he met Elvis’s grandmother. He had come to collect his date at her apartment in Bay Ridge, the grandmother’s roommate, but when he arrived the roommate was in the shower and Elvis’s grandmother was there instead. He found he liked her much better than the roommate and they snuck out for drinks before the roommate was the wiser, and the rest as they was history.

“When I first went to your grandmother’s house, I thought she was rich because her family had a picture window,” he said to Elvis. “Now I’m serious, that’s a true story.”

After dinner, in his Brooklyn accent, Hugh offered to pay the check, but Elvis’s mother Linda batted her hand and paid instead. The fortune had been Elvis’s father’s, not Linda’s or Monty’s.

Walking out of the restaurant, finding Elvis already at the front desk flirting with the hostess and slipping her his number, Mont asked me to feel the paint of the Charlotte Inn’s porch and see how it was so smooth and glowed in the moonlight. There were moments of sidewalk on the way back that popped up out of the flat brick and he pointed them out to me in the dark as we walked behind the others in a long train, Elvis up at the front with his mother Linda, the man of the family. Monty looked proud of himself and his family and where he was. But there seemed to be something sad sunken below his features, like he didn’t earn it the way he had wanted to, with his own hands. He was one of those men whom you feared most when they fell suddenly silent or sad-looking.

“Elvis told me they retired your badge in Brooklyn,” I said.

“Oh sure. Anyhow.”

Elvis’s sisters and their friends arrived while we were gone and we met up with them in the living room and smoked the “latest innovation in Californian technology.” Caleb provided it, one of the friends who was a producer in LA whom the sisters kept whispering to me about, and whom Elvis had already prepped me on. He was tall as me, muscular and handsome in a crushed velvet suit jacket. Everything he said was phrased in PR-speak, and he kept pushing on us these weed pens like he was taking a cut, the “latest innovation in Californian technology.”

Then like some bourgeois nightmare Elvis and I watched as the boathouse where we had spent so many nights smoking and playing darts became infested with suited, late-20s frat heirs. With all of our disdain summoned, Elvis and I won at games of cups even though we didn’t get drunk that way at our school and around 2 am, watching Elvis kayak one of his sister’s friends across the harbor toward Chappy, I nearly cried seeing him disappear into the blackness of the night I was so drunk and the dark wrapping him so whole.

Caleb asked, “You think he’ll make it back?” and I said, “If he’s worth his salt he will,” and I said it knowing he would make it back appearing in the strands of light coming from the ferry and the tall lights from the masts of the sailboats and the water running across the lights, and that was the beauty in saying it, knowing the outcome to a promise you begin with “if.”

I kept my brow furrowed at the darkness. And then, almost as if I had conjured him out of the darkness, Elvis came back into the light. I helped him haul the kayak onto the beach and everyone applauded him and went back inside the boathouse and I found myself properly wasted and peeing into his garden standing on the concrete corner of his pool. He was skinny dipping and told me to come in but I was warm in my dinner jacket and had gotten so many looks from the women in town and in Elvis’s boathouse that I had no desire to ever get out of it, even now that we were alone. I enjoyed the acting role I had affected for the night in front of these people. I had them enthralled wondering who I was the son of, what my father’s enterprise was. Someone had even said I was stunning, but it was maybe just Chris or Caleb halfjoking, I couldn’t remember.

But eventually I stripped down and went in. I felt so free and clean breastroking in the saltwater pool. We started swimming across the length of the pool at the same time and then slowly sped into an all out race where I outswam him to show that I was the faster and stronger swimmer. We playargued about who was faster all week and I think Elvis had started to believe it was actually him. He refused to remember the time I beat him across the lake at Londonberry and I felt I still had to draw even for him drafting me and beating me in the sprint earlier on the bikes.

Afterwards, in the outdoor shower, he cupped his palms below the water and his hands were white with it.

Upstairs Caleb was sitting elegantly wasted on the couch with Elvis’s brother Jamie asleep on the other side, sobering up before driving back to his farm in Vineyard Haven that ran all the way out to a private strip of South Beach. Elvis and I sat in our towels next to him, sharing several rounds of his vape pen. The latest in Californian design.

“Caleb man, how many girls do you bag a week?” Elvis asked.

“Oh man, anywhere from 5-8.”

I was gone for sure, but even that seemed a quirky range.

“Wow man,” Elvis said innocently. “Tell us. What are the girls like in LA?”

“Oh man, incredible. On my sets I get the most beautiful girls. If we’re shooting something that needs women, I call up all the models I know and I’m just like, ‘Come through,’ and then I’m just surrounded all day by these beautiful women. All day. Instagram models man.”

“Wow. How do you get all these girls man?”

“The key is just staying fit and confident, and then they love you. They love you. And smile a lot. Get a good smile. You guys have good smiles. A good smile means I’m successful and I’m approachable, and I want to share that with you.”

Caleb did have a good smile, and he shared it with us, pushing his mouth up against his cheekbones and putting his eyes into crescents.

“Wow. So, do you think I should be working out more?” Elvis asked, jokingly puffing out his chest, sucking in his stomach, gasping for breath.

“Yeah, your pecs are ok. This guy over here has the perfect frame.” He gestured toward me and smiled. His blue eyes could hardly open from the smoking.

“You think so?”

“Yeah man, you’d be killing it in LA. You have the perfect body, you just need more muscle. You could be dating a Sport’s Illustrated model.”

“No.”

“Yeah man. Both of you. I remember your girlfriend from last summer Elvis. Ashanti, right? Very nice.”

“Astana.”

“Right man, Astana, very nice.”

“Aren’t you dating a Sports Illustrated model Caleb?” Elvis asked.

“Yeah. I just broke up with her though. All she was interested in was my money. She came up to me one week and was just like,” he pitched his voice up, “‘So my mom and I looked over your Instagram, and you seem really successful and ready for a commitment. Let’s do this.’”

“Woah. Like, marriage?” Elvis clarified.

“Yeah.” He took a hit. “I guess Victoria’s Secret’s my next goal,” he said, his vape pen greening in his mouth. “I wanna be in love.”

Elvis had taken the queen bed off its frame in his room and put it on the floor because he preferred sleeping down there. All the other beds in the five story house were taken by family and friends, so his mother and aunt put a big king-sized blow-up mattress on Elvis’s frame, three-feet tall, complete with sheets and blankets and pillows thinking I’d sleep on it. I didn’t know they made blow-up mattresses that big. Elvis and I laughed at it and never touched it, instead sleeping together as we’d always done like proper bosom buddies in his bed, staying close for warmth with the central air set to 62 degrees by his sister and brother’s girlfriend across the hall, waking up and exchanging little dreamwords. As we drifted closer to sleep, sometimes it even felt like we were talking to each other in our heads and then answering out loud.

That night, I don’t know how it happened because I thought I was drunk enough not to dream, but I dreamt I was holding Her body against mine in bed and saying to Her, “You’re so cold,” and She with Her eyes shut in their orange lids saying to me, “I know. I’m tired Adam,” Her words little vocables precipitating out of whatever it was that was happening in Her head lying on the cot, as if there were a longer process to dying than just the heart stopping; as if the last precipitation of the dying came those days after, out of the deepest sleep, out of It; as if she could somehow share the knowledge even after. Or maybe it was what She would have said to me if She was even half there on the cot, “I know, I know.” It might have helped.

I woke up for a moment and touched the wet of my eyes and went back into nothing.

I woke up again not long after in a panic. I could not remember how Her lips felt against mine. I laid in the darkness panicking to remember. I tried to clear my mind and wait for it to come to me, for the feeling to come to my lips. But it doesn’t come straight to your lips and it is hard to remember Her warm lips, the lips that kissed you back, the warm cheek that yielded to your mouth when you have kissed the cold, the stiff lips, held Her cheeks that are not the same soft, not the same warm. You see the undertakers have shaved the little blondish hairs She had on Her upper lip but left Her eyebrows how they were, the little hairs trailing off the sides, plucked in the middle, exactly how you remember Her. Not a body and not a statue but something in between. You put your forehead to Hers and rub your nose against Her nose as gently as you did when She slept or when you were helping to bring Her into sleep with your lips. The eyelids are still soft and Her eyes feel alive somehow. This makes you happy, but you forget to touch Her ears before you leave the funeral home, or you have, maybe you have, yes you have, but you forget already how the earlobes felt when you rubbed them gently between your thumb and index finger so you stand around waiting and avoid looking at any reflection of your face in mirrors or glass for an hour while the others sit with Her except you look once once, and not in the eyes, you can’t look into your own eyes but you look just to know what your face looks like at a moment like this because the reflection of Her eyes cannot give yours back and you cannot show Her what She looks like, when She stared deep into your eyes to look, and when you go in again you feel Her earlobes once more with your fingers. Once you have kissed Her again your lips feel dead, and cold, and this feeling travels through your mouth. It closes your throat and makes it feel more numb than you were aware you could feel. It travels down to your chest and you cannot feel your heart. You do not realize that all this time you’ve been living that you’ve felt your heart inside your chest and felt each of your breaths trailed by another. But now it feels empty and cold and you feel nothing, and since you cannot actually feel nothing you are just aware of this nothing inside of you. ​This little nothing traveling and dispersing inside. The absence surrounded. You do not know where it ends up but this is when you know She is not in Her body anymore, you know She is gone somewhere else and yet you cannot stop looking at Her face, kissing Her lips. You have no control where your hand goes, from your forehead to your eyes, from your cheek to your mouth, all wet with the tears’ traces. She is not in Her body. You are brought along by something which is utterly you that you have not felt before, a kind of hand emerging from within, as if waiting, formally and eternally recused since the blurred unreal of childhood but now commenced again, a hand which leads the mind that is more entangled with it than you knew, the hand of clarity, and it helps you remember those times lying with Her in your bed, ​when you tried to slip out because you had had to pee for hours and hours and She grabs you in Her sleep, tightens Her hold on you. You slip Her hand off and She hugs you harder. You wait and you slip Her hand off again and you are almost out and Her sleeping body senses It is not as close to you as It wants to be and Her warm thigh comes over you now. Before the thigh was over your leg, then between your legs, now it is over your waist, and you stop and you think ‘If we could just lie this way forever’ and you believe you can, you’re already doing it, and you kiss Her forehead, Her sweet forehead and Her lips come up to you in sleep and you kiss them and then you remember how Her lips feel. Then you lie there in the dark and you remember how Her lips feel.

Associated Press, Thursday December 22nd 2016

LONDONBERRY, Vt. – Vermont State Police say investigators have confirmed that a body found in the waters of a Dorset quarry is that of a missing Londonberry College student.

Police say the cause of death of 21-year-old Ajjul Wafa was drowning and the manner of death is pending. Divers found the body Wednesday.

On Saturday Wafa left a residence where she was staying and did not return. She was reported missing on Sunday and her car was later found at the quarry.

Divers had nearly finished their three-day sweep of the quarry when a detective spotted an irregularity in the ice consistent with the size of Wafa’s waist and what appeared to be a body “in the fetal position” some feet below.

Investigators said that the warm temperatures of the last few days had helped melt the snow on the ice’s surface and reveal irregularities in the ice to the topographical view.

The consistency of the hole to Wafa’s waist indicates that she may have entered the water feet first.

The next day Elvis and I woke up God knows how for the sunrise and drove to Gayhead, even though it was really the sunset you wanted to see in Gayhead and the sunrise over here in Edgartown. Standing on the nude beach in the blue unpaling of sky the sun rose behind our backs like a big billowing mess and parts of the cliff looked like a womb you could climb back through, and the whole world felt like it was reversing by rising at all. It didn’t feel right, it was that kind of uncomfortable beauty that you can’t look away from.

We ran out of gas on the way back and sat at the gas station for an hour waiting for it to open and talked about the night before.

“Your sister’s friend Hampton is dead,” I said.

“Fully is. He’s the deadest guy I know. All of them are. Especially Chris. He’s the deadest one.”

“I liked that guy John though.”

“John is dead bru.”

I consented. “100 p bru.”

Once the station opened Elvis gave me his card for the gas, officially establishing a line of credit between us as my funds which had recently improved from the negatives to the status of permanent depletion. There was a pulse to my bank account, but just barely. Afterwards, we stopped at the 7A Sandwhich Shop and he bought me one called the Liz Lemon. Everyone on the island put lemon on everything. And sesame. And ate very small portions. But the sandwiches at 7A were huge and greasy and felt more like home and my stomach welcomed it.

“Who the fuck names their kid Hampton? Or Bantam? I mean, I played Bantam hockey, but…”

“On the C team right?”

“Oh sure,” I said.

“And Chad Windchill. What kinda name is that?” Elvis scoffed.

“Windchill… I don’t think I met him last night.”

“Ah. A shame.”

“But I felt him. I felt Windchill,” I said, getting it was a joke. “You meet Hilton Clause? He was pretty sick. I liked that guy.”

“Yeah, I think so. Friends with Tommy Chalant right?” Elvis was quick.

“Riiight. I think his dad produced the first Dusty Saunders LP or something.”

“Dusty Saunders, right. He played with Dicky Reed, Live at the Greek, right?”

“Yeah. Killer album. You have a signed copy of that back at school don’t you?”

“Course. Given to me by Glenn Verr Klempt. Old family friend from Belgium.”

We had nothing else to do so we went back to the beach. A whole load of fog had settled in out of nowhere and the waves had grown taller than our heads. We walked down through the fog and sat as naked as the rocks themselves and painted our bodies in the pigment of the cliffs thick as oil paint and read a sign later that said we weren’t allowed to. We saw faces in the cliffs, real Native American faces with their eyes closed to the sea that, by slowly eating them off their beach, was eroding their features into a last and final relief.

There was a giant rock out in the water that looked like it was moving, sailing through the waves. It must have been twenty feet tall, but a part of it was carved as if to make a seat for a giant and we swam out to it and raced each other to try to hoist up on it and sit as long as we could before the waves threw us off. We didn’t speak, we just did it like it was a game we’d played our whole lives, and we stopped only when we were breathless.

I couldn’t help but think of Chappaquidick and Gay Head as the sight of a great seaside Western. During World War II there were forts out on Aquinnah, and bombers would practice strikes with live bombs off Noman’s Island and Chappaquidick. To this day Noman’s, which lies right off Gay Head, cannot be beached upon or sailed too close for fear of unexploded ordnance in the water, or dredging up in the sand like fossils. Bombs being immortal wombs of destruction outliving their maker.

Elvis and I didn’t speak for about an hour and a half, but when we did again I thought I heard my voice in his.

We drove back sharing some sunwarmed rosé. Elvis parked at the Chappy ferry and I went into the hut to get my check. I was hoping not to run into anyone reeking of alcohol but there was Brock and a young girl.

“Adam, this is Rosie.”

“Hi there Rosie.” Rosie looked about thirteen years old.

“My daughter.”

“Pleasure to meet you Rosie,” I said, shaking her hand. She was wearing a huge backpack of gear, her hands proudly holding the straps. “You’re moving Brock out or what?”

“Not yet,” Rosie joked. I was impressed by this response. She was very plain looking in a very sweet, touching way. You couldn’t quite tell which way her face would go in the coming years.

“I ain’t that old yet,” smiled Brock. “She’s camping the night on Chappy.”

“Wow, look at you.”

“Not that crazy, I do it all the time.”

“It’s true,” said Brock.

“Well I wish you luck Rosie. Not cuz it’s scary over there but cuz you gotta deal with your dad ferry you over.”

“Yeah, I’ll be white knuckling the whole way over.”

“Aren’t you funny,” I smiled. “Hope to see you soon, Rosie. Brock,” I said, saluting him with my check as I left.

After jumping from Elvis’s dock into the harbor water mixed slightly with gasoline and showering, we got into another bottle and met his sisters Laura and Michelle and brother Jamie and their other friends at the Kelly House. They all had a boyfriend or girlfriend with them except for the oldest sister Laura, who was single. They all loved Elvis with a sweet affection, and besides his name which stood out so strongly amongst the Anglo sea, including my own, it was clear he was different, he was the family and friend’s favorite, he was rare and unlike anyone. But many times they did not understand Elvis, purposefully it seemed.

I spent the whole night answering questions by saying “Oh sure” in the most nonchalant way possible, like Elvis’s grandfather had done to me, and joined Laura in saying “Boy George” instead of “by George,” and “the sheer size of it” in reference to anything at all, a plate of food, or Jamie’s new Yeezy’s, anything, and they became great running jokes that week and the only personality or pose I felt confident striking at the parties to endear myself. My character was taking shape. No one doubted I was anything but one of those “different” wealthy kids who congregate at far out colleges like Londonberry.

Walking out of the Kelly House, one of us must have stepped on a pop-rock or something of the sort because there was a bang at the ground and a blue ball passed muddily over our vision.

“By George, what was that!” Laura yelled. But we had too much drunk momentum to stop and give it much of an acknowledgement, and treated the blue ball as a little blip we collectively decided to zoom past or not register. It felt like I had simply scraped the heel of the 600 dollar Bally shoes I got for five dollars against the pavement and elicited the spark.

Then, for a moment, I thought I smelled Her perfume. But the street was so packed with people in dresses and Vineyard Vines regalia and tourists trying to match the wealthy color palette that I could not locate it and I let it go.

Later that night there was a surprise birthday party across the harbor in Chappy for Chris. Elvis and I smoked a bit in the boathouse before leaving, our last stronghold on his property, listening to Cat Steven’s Trouble on repeat until we couldn’t listen to it anymore. Then we played the Supreme’s Run Run Run three or four times, and I kept dropping the needle back at the beginning because I loved how the song falls into the first chorus, and how fast the piano sounds in the background, “You better run-run run-run run run.” The whole harbor looked like it was twinkling along to the music, all the distant lights of the yachts glittering in the darkening sky.

Afterwards we kayaked over, sobering a bit going across the harbor, lucky for me as I had begun feeling my voice start to untether in the boathouse, slipping a few levels into the brass while I stood staring into the reflection of Mayflower and its chimney rising above the fifth floor through a pane of glass in the boathouse door, mistaking it for the head and shoulders of a person. But the ocean has a way of sobering you, of prolonging you, evening you to itself and we passed along to the gentle sounds of our paddles.

We stopped at a massive yacht anchored a little ways off Chris’s beach and touched the side of it with our hands.

“Imagine, some alarm starts going off.” Elvis rubbed his hand on the boat and made a face, biting his lower lip and scrunching up his nose like he was deep into a flirt with it, trying it on with it.

When we got to Chris’s private shore we hauled the kayak in the dark, judging the tide to be going out, and walked through the private dunes and the cold sand toward the house which was the only focal point of light we could see in the night. Sand, sea and sky all bound in one color.

We sat for awhile with Elvis’ siblings on the deck of the three-story “cottage,” as they called it. Everyone was in suits or button-up shirts and dresses except Elvis and I, who were barefoot. I didn’t want to drink too much more but Elvis’s little brother Jamie and his girlfriend Serena kept making me dark and stormy’s and talking about how funny Caleb was being, quoting some new meme or slang in an Australian accent that I hadn’t heard before, but was desperate to work into my actor’s epertoire:

“Caleb over there, he’s beached as,” Jamie said. “As” was pronounced, “iz.”

“He’s funny iz,” said Serena

“Jamie bru, you’re stoned iz aren’t you bru?” I said.

“Oh sure,” he smiled.

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Vincenzo Barney is a Vanity Fair contributor. He wrote Still Soft With Sleep for his senior thesis at Bennington in 2018. He is working on a book about Cormac McCarthy and Augusta Britt, a story he broke for Vanity Fair last year.

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PART ONE: SIX MONTHS

That day at high noon Elvis and I took a ride across the Vineyard Sound to Chappaquiddick beach. Chappaquiddick is the easternmost shoreline of Martha’s Vineyard, the Massachusetts island where Elvis and I had spent the month of June together in his house called Mayflower. Elvis and I were coming back from a quick trip to New York City without our phones or belongings, depending entirely on the clothes at Elvis’s brownstone on the Upper West Side, and I entirely on Elvis’s money which paid for my flight both ways. We dove through the clouds and by the time we landed the sun parted them above us. We would have flown back directly to the Vineyard except we were to spend a day in Falmouth where Elvis’s girlfriend Astana had a summer home and then boat over with her father. While Astana’s father gave Elvis a tour of his house, a mansion not as big or shiplike as Mayflower, and of an inferior tax bracket, they left me to my own devices on the dock. Happily, I put my shoes on the pylon and climbed through the open hatch of the sixty-foot catamaran and laid on my back in the pristinely made bed below.

The master bed had no personality to it, and I found no evidence of a woman. I uprooted its blanket and laid looking up through the hatch at the sky and the blue sail wrapped around the mast going up to where the weathervane pointed South. The clouds were wrinkled and pulled apart and showed what the wind had done to them. Some of this warm wind came over me through the hatch and I looked at how golden against the white blanket the hair on my forearms had become. My brown hair had turned blonde in so much sun and the sea had come into its waves and I had begun to feel that in some way I was the summer. Always in May I’d want to be in the sea breeze that came in at my window and on the Vineyard you felt you were really in the summer and not just sweating it out. You were a participant. It was still now and I thought of how at night the boats passed Mayflower silent with the lights of the docks and anchored boats smearing and wrinkling below their bows and then I didn’t think anything.

I was not sure if I was asleep or not, but I knew I had nearly dropped down to where I wanted to be when footsteps came along the dock to find me. But the light airy steps of Astana were not amongst them and they were the footsteps of Elvis and Astana’s father alone, who had decided to tell us just now after wrapping up the tour and refilling his drink that Astana had gone ahead of us with her brothers to the Vineyard to drive the sand dunes of Chappaquiddick. Because Elvis and I had not taken our phones with us on our trip, we had missed Astana’s text.

I wasn’t surprised. I’d learned early that summer that the disclosure of time sensitive information is entirely at the leisure of the millionaire. One submits to their timescale and your own personal schedule is supposed to dissolve blissfully within it. I raised up out of the hatch and the face of Astana’s father, who had not given me his name nor had I asked for it, did not alter when he saw that I had been laying in his bed but stared around me, and then at Elvis. The alcoholic blush across his cheeks, purple veins riverring his nostrils. I thought perhaps he had clocked that I was not of wealth and this was why he had not invited me to tour his grounds, but I’d just proved I was. The brazen violation of decorum is the return serve of the younger American scion, and I knew some part of Astana’s father respected my entitlement to his possessions. I knew it put a rush into his imagination, wondering what kind of wealth I came from. Wondering who my father was.

“Stana’s had a fine summer. Disembarked this morning for the dunes.”

Now he was eying me, offering me whiskey from his boat house and he wouldn’t stop saying disembark, the way the vapid become obsessed with particular words. He bid us into the shade of the boat house’s front porch.

I didn’t like his face at all. He was bald and his forehead was huge. There was too much space between his nose and his top lip and the rest of his head seemed to recess from this point. It was a rich man’s face. It was a miracle he had such a beautiful daughter.

“We can disembark after a drink. Neat or on the rock?”

“Ah, bit too late in the day to start drinking now,” I said.

But he put four fingers of Old Rip Van Winkle in my hand and smiled. It was a way of keeping me in his orbit, now that he’d seen I was worthy. Now he was sharing, and I had to look to him as the source of what he shared. Keep me close.

“On the rock, eh? The size of it. Thank you.”

Elvis, eye-roller extraordinaire, gave me a look that took in everything: the father, the mansion, the dock, the fleet of boats, the power flip, the “on the rock.” I gave him one back. Elvis’s cheeks bulged with trapped laughter.

We were trespassers that summer in a world of boundless wealth. Wealth that didn’t put any tethers on us but was ours to exploit because we could look and play the part, even though I alone hailed from nothing. It was my more humble origins which evened us, made Elvis see and sneer and pilfer with antipathy the wealth he had been born within as if for the first time that summer. He had been born into a webbing that shouldn’t have been there, and through me the deep resentment for the safety net that would never let him fail or fail in interesting ways was reborn and stretching its legs wide across the summer with me at his side. I had never seen Elvis as happy as those lengthening days of June, alone with him at Mayflower.

But we had passed the equinox, and now the days were shortening, imperceptibly.

From the edge of Astana’s dock the island of Martha’s Vineyard looked so close you expected to run your eyes along its coastline and see it merge smoothly into the mainland of Cape Cod, where I was born and my family lived in an old cottage. But as Astana’s father boated us over in his Grady White, his second of three boats, he kept inexpertly cutting the boat Southeast and parallel to the waves and away from the island, keeping my eyes from playing at joining the two coastlines and putting us in an uncomfortable and avoidable rocking. Like most wealthy men, Astana’s father had no skill with a boat and no eye to read the sea. He was not of the fathoms of Cape Cod. He was the kind of guy who crosses the tight parallel formation of fishermen trolling off Monomoy in pursuit of some other fishing ground, cutting dozens of lines and thousands of dollars of tackle, scaring the fish and leaving the boats throbbing in his wealthy wake.

Though this was my first summer on the Vineyard, I knew the waters off the island well from fishing black bass and bonito here with my own father. There are rips about a mile off the coast that pick up in the flood and ebb tides and froth in the wind. Rips are formed when the seafloor shifts dramatically in elevation. The tide pushes against a wall of sand and creates a formation of white caps on the surface, a long ribboning line of what look like endlessly unbreaking waves, rips in the surface. The waves crash onto the water like onto the shore. Bait fish are pushed up in this flow and the larger stripers and blues wait on the other side with open mouths you try to tempt a lurer into, and Astana’s father took these rips at unskilled angles. The color of the water is often different on either side like a pulsing, living borderline. They mesmerize and even the air feels different on the other side. You breathe more deeply in the calm. After pussyfooting we finally crossed the rips and were within the waters of the Vineyard.

There is no greater comfort on a center console than to lay on the floor, the low center of gravity removing any but the slightest, most comfortable jostles and cradle rocks, and the T-top putting you in the shade so that there is nothing but comfort and rest in keeping your eyes open, and you feel like you could fall asleep that way, with open eyes. I couldn’t watch Astana’s father drive any longer and laid with a cushion under my head on the floor.

Elvis had cottoned on and was about to lay down on the other side of the console when Astana’s father began complaining about currents and bottoming out even though we were 32 feet above the floor. I told him this, getting to my feet in order to pretend to consult his radar. I told him that there were no sandbars off this coast of the island. It took some convincing to get him to take us closer to the island and when he saw he wasn’t going to get any commiseration from me and his reputation with a boat was on the line he pushed forward like it was his own idea.

By the time Astana’s father skirted Edgartown, the seas had picked up and the beaches of Chappaquiddick relaxed our eyes, looking like a line of dark against the sky until we got closer and it yellowed and smoothed into something coherent. He dropped us a little further from land than we would have liked, and we swam the quarter mile from his boat to the shore, fighting little pools of fish larvae floating by the thousand and really churning at the shoreline. Astana’s father didn’t wait for us to reach land before he left, nor say much in the way of parting, but the wake of his boat reached us, outpacing us to shore where we couldn’t tell its sound from the other waves crashing against the sand.

We left even our shirts and shoes on the boat, happy to shock him. All of Elvis’s clothes were waiting for us in Mayflower.

Astana was nowhere to be found and the beach was nearly deserted, except for a few scattered sunbathers and one elderly woman holding a camera with a foot-long telescopic lens pointing diagonally from her lap. Perhaps curled in her lens were frames of Elvis and I forward crawling to shore.

Elvis grinned at her, the sunshine wet in his wet black hair, his curls having found their true curvatures in the saltwater. The tattoo of the Guiness harp which he’d done on his forearm for his father looked dark and just inked in. “Talk about overcompensation,” he said, nodding in the direction of the woman and the long black lens poking into the air.

We waited until our backs had dried and laid down on the sand. I closed my eyes and the sun looked bright orange under my lids and I could hear Elvis sliding his heel through the sand with my ear pressed to it. I rolled over and he cracked my back and I rolled over again and in a near whisper I bet him 20 dollars he couldn’t put me to sleep sprinkling dry sand on me and telling the beginning of a fake Kerouac novel.

Undaunted, he began.

The sun turned turquoise under my eyes and I looked up at the real one to capture its true color again and closed my eyes with it safely orange and thought about the funeral and could only see Her lying there on the cot covered to Her neck and glowing orange in the mortician’s makeup, Her face ending and candling. I put my lips against Hers and there was no push, no give to them and they were cold and the cold travelled across my lips and down into my chest and I felt dead and spent eight hours crying and sitting on my heels and knees by Her body and then standing outside pressing my boot into the same footprint over and over again in the dirty halfmelted snow, and at this moment under the summer sun I was breathing so slowly I couldn’t tell that I was breathing at all, and Elvis was massaging me so gently that I fell away from the caviling orange ball under my lids and deeper into the blackness of It than I do when I sleep, that lost dead clarity It, and the sun laid just so on the seal of my eyes that they began to ease open into the yellowbluenesses of the light.

“First I took the A to the C to the G.”

“Then I took the 7 to the 2 to the 3.”

This was a little song Elvis and I made up in the city about taking the trains. We walked down the beach throwing in numbers and letters that were not trains in New York, like the 9 or the H or the “dub,” for W. Elvis put in all this fake flair like it was some 90’s hip-hop boyband song, trying and comically failing to flash the correct numbers and letters of the trains with his hands as quickly as he sang them in perfect parody. I was dying.

“I took the dub to the T to the 9.”

“Ok.”

“And then I took the H to the U to the I.”

“Uh-huh. And did you get there on time?”

“Damn right. And you know I don’t lie.”

“And I know you got high.”

“And you know I ain’t bi.”

“And I know you ain’t bi. But I heard you took the S to the T to the I.”

“And I heard you took the G to the A to the Y.”

“So you took the dub to the T to the 9…?”

“That’s right.”

“And then the H to the U to the I…?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Sigh…”

“Why…?”

“Cuz I took the K to the V to the Y.”

“Ohhh!”

We went in and out of the water, heading down the beach every twenty minutes or so when we had warmed in the sun and the first beads of sweat budded our hairlines, halflooking for Astana as well as a patch of water without the floating larval eggs. The ocean had calmed since we arrived. Or at least it appeared that way, because now the tide was going out and the wind was blowing with it so that the water fell back along the shore towards the sea with such force that the returning waves threaded through the oncoming ones. The larvae rested there at the shoreline, and you could see them in the water being pulled towards the open water and overlapping back through the waves. A gust came and curled the falling waves away from the beach like a woman pushing her hair behind her ears.

“Fuck it man, they’re everywhere. Let’s just go in here,” I said.

“...then I took the N to the Q to the R, then I took the 1 train real real far.”

Chappaquiddick is technically an island, though it is connected by a thin curling whisp of beach to the mainland. This wet thread of beach traces the island North and spirals in on itself into a small bay called Cape Poge. The name is Wampanoag, and means “separate island.” Like Monomoy off of Chatham, every few years a storm breaches this thread and makes of Chappaquiddick a true island. One can live completely off the grid on its shores, and you can only reach the mainland of the Vineyard and its stores and gas stations by the Chappy Ferry or one’s own boat.

The beaches here are the work of glaciers and currents and we walked up and down them. They have no roots in the bedrock and look new, like a storm has just pushed a long sandbar round the island, tracing the shape of something below. If they were the work of one storm then they could be taken away in one storm and one had the feeling of walking a beach pushed up into the sun for the first time. Something which might not stick around but has revealed itself just for the dream of it.

Chappaquiddick is also the island where Teddy Kennedy killed his secret girlfriend, Mary Jo Kopechne, in the Summer of Love. The two got bombed at a fundraiser and Teddy lost control of his car on Dike Bridge driving her to the ferry and dove into eight feet of water. He extricated himself and claimed to have dove down to rescue her a dozen times before sitting on the beach in exhaustion under the moonlight. He called his lawyers rather than police at the payphone and then tucked his boat shoes into his belt and swam across Edgartown Harbor to his hotel room and slept. The next day a resident called in the car and Kopechne was found in the backseat. According to the autopsy she survived for an hour in an air pocket in the back of the car. If Ted had called the police she might have lived.

We stood to our shins cupping the eggs, looking at their translucent shapes in our hands, and then swam past them to where the shore dropped off into nothing and the water had that cold open-sea energy to it. Finding my feet again on the steep shore I counted again all the people I knew with dead fathers. I don’t know why but out of nowhere I counted eight begetterless people and got to wondering whether it was a coincidence I knew so many of them, or maybe some subtle message telling me I would die a father with young sons and young daughters, that I was supposed to get to know and love these people to see in what shape I might leave my own children, or by doing so I was paying my penance now for leaving in the future, I didn’t know.

Elvis’s head rose seal-like out of the water, his small Irish freckles browned and faded away into his tan, all the grace and poise of a sea-kept secret revealing itself to you without any reason at all.

Then I thought of my own father. Lying back down in the sand I remembered that I had had a dream that morning that my father died, either a drumming up of tragedy so my eyes could come crying through the lids - because I couldn’t cry when I was awake anymore - or a way of preparing me for the pain when that death eventually comes. The body gets used to death, and wants that muscle worked so that it is ready for the sadness at any time. And the sadness of the dream was that pure worst sadness that feels each time like it is irretrievable and only possible to feel once. That sadness that brings you so completely down within your own body that there is not an inch of yourself that you do not feel, and there is some bizarre pleasure in how in-and-out of you it comes, in how whole and throbbing it leaves you feeling afterwards. You feel complete and then, if you are lucky, ashamed you have made yourself feel this without reason, and you tell yourself not to want that feeling again. And if you are really lucky, you are not ashamed afterwards but you feel clean and whole, and you do not need that pain anymore to feel the person within you. I felt nothing as yet. I was still appraising my own luck.

Then, I felt I wanted it. My body wanted it.

“When you close your eyes under the sun, do you see cells?” I asked.

“Yeah, sometimes,” Elvis said.

“Like, little cells with tails? I see one with a little tail. What do you see?”

“Loads of things.”

Elvis had been rubbing the edge of a flat stone against his inner thigh. I watched him close his eyes and pinch them against the sun, scrutinizing the darkness beneath his lids and the sun shining through them, and I watched him thinking toward that tight close of his eyes until some bug or horsefly came toward me out of the sustained silence of the waves and I closed mine.

I opened them again and watched Elvis brush something away from his nose. Maybe the same fly, passing from my nose to his. His hand lingered on his face, scratching the parts of his futbol beard that needed trimming, and then worked its way down his body, lightly scratching the brief spates of stick-and-poke tattoos he or Astana had done along his arms and chest. He seemed to touch them unconsciously with his hand, points of contact or chakra, words I could not read with backwards E’s, a woman with a baseball bat along the pale bicep. That and the small shining pendant in his right nostril made him look like a pirate or some bohemian belonging to another century, decorated by his own hand in the right, natural doses.

I began clicking my tongue in the back of my throat. When I was a child I woke an hour before dawn with a high fever to the sound of jumbled, ecstatic voices conversing not so much in words but direct vibrations and my tongue was clicking along and I was twitching my nose. The voices came in waves of intensity and I listened very curiously and when they dimmed I called for my mother. My fever was so high I felt like the bed was pitched forward and I might fall onto my face. Lying on my back in the sloped sand I clicked and twitched my nose and thought myself back into that moment and could hear the voices again.

“You usually make that sound when you’re falling asleep.”

“I could fall asleep right now. Could you?”

“Maybe.”

“Elvis, tell your fake Kerouac story again.”

“It doesn’t sound much like Kerouac. ‘sides, I forgot it.”

I didn’t say anything for a moment, pinching the light blue smears under my eyes until they turned orange, verging on a deeper hue, and then, before I pinched the colors red, I said, “I remember. It’s about some guy in the city, and he’s all upset because he’s just had a falling out with his unrequited love, or had this realization or something, this total moment that it’s never going to happen, this person he’s put so much stock into. And he’s out with his friends and he meets a girl and her friends at a bar or something - or she’s a mutual friend of his friends or something - and they’re walking down the street on this little adventure all drunk and he realizes this new girl is his soulmate, and the person he’s supposed to be with forever. In all of the universe and all of the world he’s supposed to meet this person. All of time has come forward for this, and even though he’s just met her their love is like some memory he’s always had but could never pin down or understand until now, and he tells the girl this and she says she feels the exact same way, like it’s Deja-Vu. But a continuous Deja-Vu, one that isn’t ending when you put your finger on it, isn’t fading away like it’s supposed to, and she says she felt it as soon as she laid eyes on him. They go down to the docks, some docks somewhere in the city, I don’t know, and they’re kissing and holding each other, and holding their lips together so slowly and then he realizes he can’t be with her, he realizes he has to leave her, he has to leave the country. He doesn’t know why, just that he has to. His body rejects the feeling, the ‘Deja-Vu of fate’ you called it. And that’s how the novel begins, him on a plane over the ocean and all of it behind him.”

“Mmm,” Elvis said up at the sun, smiling, his eyes closed. “That sounds about right.”

“Yeah, but I didn’t say it right. I didn’t say it how you did. I just summarized it.”

“I dunno. It didn’t really sound like Kerouac. It wasn’t that good.”

“No, it was. I liked how they’re both each other’s true love and how it’s fate and all that, and the guy feels it so strongly, but he has to leave her. He knows he has to and he does. Like, if Jesus or Moses had just said, ‘Fuck it’ and stayed home and fished or something. If Achilles didn’t go to war and didn’t do shit. The freedom to walk away.”

“I think I was just feeling inspired by the Malamud I’ve been reading.”

“Yeah, but your story was better than anything that guy ever wrote. Ever. 100 percent.”

“100 p?”

“Hundred p.”

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Our Finalists are:

• Vice Nimrod by Colin Dodds

  • Chapter 1

  • Chapter 2

  • Chapter 3

  • Chapter 4

• Still Soft With Sleep by Vincenzo Barney

• Don’t Disappoint by Martin Van Cooper

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Vincenzo Barney is a Vanity Fair contributor. He wrote Still Soft With Sleep for his senior thesis at Bennington in 2018. He is working on a book about Cormac McCarthy and Augusta Britt, a story he broke for Vanity Fair last year.

⚬─────────✧─────────⚬

World was in the face of the beloved,

but suddenly it poured out and was gone:

world is outside, world cannot be grasped.

Why didn’t I, from the full, beloved face

as I raised it to my lips, why didn’t I drink

world, so near that I could almost taste it?

—Rainer Maria Rilke

Keep those tears hid out of sight.

—Mick Jagger

⚬─────────✧─────────⚬

PROLOGUE

I’m standing on the balcony looking across the park and she is calling me back to bed.

She’s tired but there is play to her voice. “It’s cold Adam, close the door.” She hits “door” with a lilt and I can hear her smiling and rolling in the sheets. “What are you even doing out there?”

What am I doing out here? I’m looking across the park from the 30^th floor, up in the violet and the glass of Manhattan. It’s December and there’s been a frost in the rainfall. The winter winds are pouring in billows through the fluted slalom of Broadway, curling the cold open brim of Columbus Circle and putting a tilt in the frosted trees. Days before, when I saw the park from the woman’s apartment in the daylight, it stretched out like a lawn at my feet, full of unpetalled trees and evergreen needles like the sharp burrs one stepped across as a child barefoot in the grass, the needles listing toward their far off Apriline seams, the big stitch of Spring. But now past midnight the park is a stretch of cold Atlantic darkness. There is curvature in it. It curls up into Harlem. It touches the bluffs of the Eastern and Western shorelines in a slow shattering sound and there is the memory of salt air it. A dusting of snow is coming down like gentle starfall upon it, and the snowflakes are so light and so far away that you lose them in the darkness and can’t tell if they ever touch its sea. Christmas has added to the fallen glitter of its surface, to the underdapple of its midnight swells, and its swell is cold and heavy and slow like the ocean in winter, but an ocean that will not let all light into its waves, only select stars in the seabraid, and the reflection of these stars glide its three miles of mirror and it is so vast that even from thirty floors I feel I am looking up into it.

I don’t know how the old feeling got back in but it did. Like a breath. It was just a matter of the depth of the inhalation, the memory of salt air. There you are, hidden, bottom of the lung. The feeling of breathing into somewhere else. Deep tunneling breath of a slipstream, like if you could withstand it you could take this breath in forever and whereto. Perhaps when one stays awake so long past midnight they go on dreaming in some secret place and I’m dreaming there now, underneath, and breathing into the lungs of myself in dream.

In its wake the old feeling was putting a long drowned ribbon through the swells of the park. It was the feeling some stage before tears, when memory is poised in the rim of the eyelids, when memory has come into the musculature and the eyes and one feels the cold blooming of the memory coming out of the bone. A pain as old as the musculature, as old as the world and the human design swimming it. And in this a feeling of deep tethering, as of touching the bottom of the ocean through hundred-mile currents and subterranean storms secret from the surface. This the primeval depth that floats the iris, the eyes a brief brim of glitter as if the reflection of the stars have wetted in. And you don’t fight it but you tingle with it and you remember that you have been waiting for it to come back to you and you try to gaze into its overcoming, a pain as old pain itself. I know now that I had been drinking my way toward it when I met the woman inside the room a week ago. A swell under the bow of the bar brought her into my arms and I steadied her in the steepness and her face had been a hint I didn’t catch of the changing currents. And here I was now, on the stern.

Earlier in the room there had been a sudden overlap and Her face was under me again. Not the face of the woman inside the room now calling me back to bed, but Her. A face I thought I’d seen for the last time. This was how the feeling back got in, in the overlap. As the woman and I’s cheeks clung side to side I suddenly saw Her shining up from below like the moon coming into the surface of a pond in an open field before the sky, and Her face glowed upward onto my neck. As the woman breathed me in and heaved and we bound more closely together I held my eyes in a squint the way one looks at a Monet to find its clarity and the light of Her face came bursting through my eyelids and blurred into focus and even when I opened them wide to take Her all the way in She was still there and I did not have to squint to see Her. When I was a child I used to press my eyes close to the blue wallpaper of my bedroom and unfocus my eyes and the white circular clouds of the wallpaper would double and separate, one for each eye. I could not tell the real apart from the double. Then I would slowly refocus my eyes and the doubled image would hang there next to its original, lifted off the wallpaper. Seeing Her there below me had been like this.

The woman laid against me with her head on my chest and her profile tilted under my chin. This was the way I always remembered Her, with Her eyes closed and Her soul sealed in. In Her eyes had once been hazel and amber through which she watched whole aeons of sleep, florations of dream, the ripples of Her irises pushing the surface of the lids in dreamtide and Her own currents. Between the eyelid and the hazel a mysterious frontage, an invisible dimension that gated these glowing roses from me, and which I had laid on the other side of at night, gazing across. All I had to do now in the room was look down at the woman to see Her like this again. There was no blinking Her away.

I don’t know why, but I couldn’t remember Her any other way except in this pose of secret intimation. I could never make Her open Her eyes in my memory, and if I could I couldn’t get them to look straight at me. In the room I suddenly smelt Her and tasted Her breath in my mouth, in the back of my throat running down to my Adam’s apple and pushing past it where I lost it and its route became secret. I used to sleep within the field of this breath, like a flower breathing in the carbon dioxide, putting me to sleep in the green clearings of Vermont a killed flower, dreamily warped in the windblown heat shimmer of Her breath skimming off the green tilt of hills. It had been a decade since I stood behind the foldable wall in the funeral parlor carrying my eyes across the whole of the room on my knees, looking everywhere but up at Her face. I carried my eyes across everything that could be seen, Her feet at the edge of the cot wrapped beneath the blanket, my hands clasped tightly before Her without prayers whispered into their folds and then, slowly, I saw my hands part and hold the blanket loosely which had covered Her and I let my eyes look up toward Her profile, silent and softing against the afternoon light on the winter wall. I was like a little mouse, with the fear that She may suddenly move an inch, that She may unclose Her eyes but She did not and I laid my forehead against Her’s and looked down in the enclosed darkness so that for this minute in the funeral parlor it was like nightfall and we were sleeping nose to nose in the dark again, the night fuzz snowing out of the air. Her face like coordinates in the grid, shaping and angeling the room’s dark bedroom blue. This is how I remember Her, the crescent lids the long lashes had twined closed, curled into Her cheeks. The cutely snubbed nose down to the thick pinched lips. The soft black twinkling of a room at night. Breathing and dreaming and in my arms, still soft with sleep.

It seized me suddenly, as the woman I was with slept and I kept looking down whenever I wanted to see Her face again, that today was the day. I’d almost forgotten. It seized me that I’d almost forgotten. It was a decade now since She had Decembered away, first through those thirty feet of darkness and then through the ice. Destiny had brought a heatwave in to thin the ice or else She may have simply broken Her legs, never passed through. Today was the day She did it, sometime after midnight. But the musculature does not forget and remembrance is like growing conscious of the breath, the mechanism and the chest over it and the heart within it like a rill within a river. It is like taking control of the breath and then with a startle forgetting how to let go of it and let the body do it again. I felt alien suddenly from the world, from moonlit sheets and bodies and as the feeling came back my muscles felt younger and my body lighter and loose in the buoyancy of a long ago afternoon ocean. The feeling touched the original self that was still there. It passed straight through like a ribbon through a wound. This original self that had twired to Her a decade ago, had lived a thwarted life of secret tunneling, forbidden branching. It walked the paths of a dark cold garden I was kept from. Death is a separation and this was the pact of my letting this self separate – that it not age. That we live in secret from each other. But I had buried its secret. I had worn it down and put a weight on it. It was youth with no body to get back into, a ghost of myself that had branched away inside and haunted the secret tunnel leading out of the body, lonely and vivid. He had had his eyes opened wide to the invisible rim within, waiting in mourning for Her to come back in through the natural gates of the body. Waiting for this old feeling to slip back across the sill and its promise of intimacy with Her. I lived in secret from him but from time to time I could feel the cold draft from this door left forever open to December and so I began to bury him. I made it a maze to get back to him and this door he kept. Every morning for years I turned heel and kicked the earth back over the open passage as I left for the day and the original self took it on both turning cheeks because he was a pious pilgrim, a devotee of Decembers. He had only to wait and grow abandoned like Janus, turning to look both ways as first She separated from him down the forbidden hall and then as I separated from him in the opposite direction, aging away from his piety. Only I knew that he would be waiting here with a plaintive patience until the day I approached him, in old age or in surprise, and took his hand and joined him through the door and out of our body. He could not move otherwise. She was an Ophelial leak in the stream and he was forever in awe of this leak. He was forever remembering what Her cold lips felt like kissing her goodbye on the cot. He’d never forget. While I had grown up and fallen in love again and again no other woman had ever touched his lips but Her. He was forever in stone for he had looked back over the shoulder and he wanted to be turned into stone so he could look backward forever at the complex loops of the past knotting perhaps into the deep future. It was good to know he was still there, that he would never blame me, but he was a slurrying, a running of the self, the ink of an ancient love letter rushing rainbrushed past the edges of the page, falling out of handwriting. The blurred page taking on the weight of rain. Now the intimacy of being caught in the same storm as him, out on the stern. Somewhere in Her death had been a promise about how I’d live the rest of my life, and here I was in a new rain of old sounds.

It started in my ribcage. I felt panicky and tiptoed to the bathroom and looked away from the dark hints of my face in the mirror. I did not want a reflection and I did not want a face and I did not want a name. I did not want to be in some scenery which She had lifted from, could no longer thread through. That I was here and had turned 30 and She was 21 forever, that most dreamed toward American age. And yet she was buried in Bethlehem. It panicked me. I walked to the balcony then. I wanted to pour back into the universe through my chest. I was not scared up so high in the wind above those hundreds of feet of darkness and beneath the stars, but I was sad not to be able to draw closer to them, to blend back in. I had passed long ago into the elegiac side of Her death, and then the elegy ended. I had fallen out of all that breadth and range that Her death had opened to me. And yet She was still fading from me somehow. After all this time still flowing away. I hadn’t been watching the currents. I had been hiding from the sea. The panic of holding on in the midst of Her withdrawal, being outstripped by Her disappearance and the disappearance of mourning. Like a tide gone too inland to ebb back, the elastic snapped, the currents halved. She was a billow, unribboning and flowing away to some unbowable point down the thread, to some boundlessness I could not find Her in. That I kept waiting for Her to visit from, approaching from overhead like an angel.

I was thinking again like my younger self. I was back in his voice. I had stretched dangerously away from Her for so long and now found the currents had changed on me. I was up to my waist in waves, in the sea of the Vineyard Sound.

In truth I had been drinking towards Cape Cod all this time. There is a relation between an overpoured whiskey in winter and the Cape in summer, the sharp wince and the warmth puts you in the sea breeze. If I drink enough I can feel the waves and smell the sea and it takes the weight from my shoulders. Stresses and tensions you didn’t know you had dissolve when you hit the ocean, and the mark of a man is to bring him to the ocean and see what he dissolves down to. It’s when these dissolve that things push up through the sand. Sex is like ballast on a night of this kind of drinking, so that you are not plunged down in darkness and you are not on land either, but bobbing in the deep sea sun innocent of all danger, so open to being reached back towards. She lived in this place that whiskey touched on shortening December evenings.

There was a summer I was ready to face again and I let the tides of this feeling drop me on the shores of Martha’s Vineyard. The first summer that had come without Her in it. When Her name lifted from me, deified. I could no longer say it. It was as if to have known once what God’s name was but then to have been flowed away from, the drawing back of the tide an act of forgetting, but also of stretching far enough away so as to draw back into you tight like an elastic and it was snapping back. So I was back in that summer a decade ago, the summer I spent with Elvis. Elvis is a strange name anywhere in the world except Londonberry, the Vermont hamlet where our college was hidden in the woods. At Londonberry College there were Rivers and Ariels and Elvises against the green leaves and December vapor and snowlit purple mountains bright as rosedust every drunkenly misrisen Sunday morning, and in that Eden I was called Adam. I thought back to a summer and a destiny I had slipped away from long ago. Something I could not hold still for, or whose purchase of fate was the elusive brevity of its enclosure, the escape it made from me. It had come to orbit me in a timid oval of gold, once a year. Not in Summer but in Winter. A sunshot sadness. An overlit solstice of Junes, Julies and Augusts braided through me the dreamlike coloration of Chappaquidick just the other side of Edgartown, and the license of youth pushed to its limit. I had let myself be flowed away from, but now the tide was coming back in, and suddenly She let the light back into Her waves and I wanted to dive.

Associated Press - Tuesday December 20th, 2016:

LONDONBERRY, Vt. (AP) - Vermont State Police are searching for a Londonberry College student who was reported missing over the weekend after her car was discovered at a swimming hole in the Green Mountain National Forest.

Troopers say 21-year-old Ajjul Wafa left a Londonberry residence where she was staying on Saturday and didn’t return. She was reported missing on Sunday morning, December 18th.

Police say her vehicle was discovered Sunday at Dorset Quarry next to Vermont Route 30 on Sunday.

Wafa was last seen wearing a large green sweatshirt. Police say she’s about 5-foot-3, 130 pounds with brown eyes and curly black hair.

If seen citizens are asked to contact their local police department.

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Our Finalists are:

• Vice Nimrod by Colin Dodds

  • Chapter 1

  • Chapter 2

  • Chapter 3

• Still Soft With Sleep by Vincenzo Barney

• Don’t Disappoint by Martin Van Cooper

While the traditional organs of American letters continue to wither, we recognize the need to forge a new path. If you believe in what we’re doing, PLEASE share and subscribe and spread the word.

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⚬─────────✧─────────⚬

In Vice Nimrod, a young refugee from a brimstone-wrecked small town, Ishkebek finds his way to Nimrod’s Mighty Tower, where he lands a job. Through a mix of savvy alliances and good luck, he rises through the ranks, and survives a professionally disastrous friendship with an idol-smashing protege, to reach the rank of Vice Nimrod, Communications. In his words, we learn how Nimrod’s Communications Group deftly handles the inquiries of the neighboring kingdoms, how it spins the burning of Sodom & Gomorrah, and how it finally flounders through the varied crises that make up the Confusion of Tongues.

⚬─────────✧─────────⚬

Managing Nimrod - Divine Compliance, Workplace Piety & Communications

The fight would come down to the mathematicians against the youngest and dumbest of the Hundred Righteous Men, like it always does. But that didn’t mean we could ignore it, Jerr said.

The Great and Holy God of Utter Cataclysm was something even Nimrod could not manage. The best that the risk-management priests in Divine Compliance could do to hedge against Him was to keep righteous men on the payroll. They were supposedly impeccable characters from almost all walks of life (though, it’s worth noting, never from Communications). They served as our hostages against an angry God, or gods. Like all tower departments, it hedged its bets in that regard.

My hometown of Shinursba had ten such men, supposedly. The lesser capitals and larger cities kept 25 righteous men on their payrolls. Neighboring Sodom liked to boast that you couldn’t find ten righteous men in its precincts if you tried. Not to be outdone, Gomorrah claimed that every righteous man to enter its gates certainly hadn’t left that way. These were mostly tourism come-ons for frustrated farmers and horny rich kids. Each city had its own ceremonies and prayers long and tortuous as to test the sanity of an honest man, who are commoner than you might think in those districts of iniquity.

Nimrod’s Mighty Tower, which even some of the lowliest executives suspected might be a direct provocation to Him, supported 100 righteous men. As with any cross-your-fingers-and-wish-on-a-shooting-star insurance policy against utter ruin, management liked to keep it quiet.

Every few years, the tower’s Hundred Righteous Men and the Tower Operating Committee met to renegotiate privileges and stipulations. The righteous hosted the negotiations in their lavish complex, which took up an entire floor, with some of the highest apartments in the tower, right below the offices and meeting rooms of Nimrod and his Operating Committee.

The Hundred Righteous Men wanted, among other things, another floor. And after the fiery desolation of Shinursba, they had good reason to believe they had the bargaining power. Jerr was an old hand at these negotiations, which occurred every 19 years, at the coincidence of the tower’s lunar and solar calendars. He chose me as his deputy this time around.

The floor the righteous men kept was stunning, all white walls, with tasteful, idol-bearing niches or mirror-clear, silver-backed torch sconces. All of it was bright and caressed by the ample yet gentle breezes, courtesy of some of the most senior curtainmen in the tower.

At this time, I lived in a world of small tower apartments, cubicles, cramped and windowless temple boudoirs. Occasionally, I could spread my arms in a mid-level conference room or market floor. The residence of the Hundred Righteous Men seemed a profligate, conspicuous expanse. It was pleasantly cool, dry and so quiet that our half-whispered conversation and the occasional bird cry seemed to echo.

On the lower floors, everyone who didn’t dream of escape dreamt of living in the upper floors, despite the high rents and the elevation taxes that doubled the price of nearly everything. More light, is how we’d phrase the wish, though the windows on the lower floors weren’t smaller than those above, and after a dozen or so landings there were no other buildings to cast a shadow. But the light on the higher floors was finer, and ampler. It filtered through less breath, fewer eyeballs, was absorbed by fewer brick and stone supports. That other meaning of the word light applied to our wishes as well—you felt lighter up there. It was as if the body could feel the hundreds of stories above, and the mind took some of the responsibility for holding them aloft.

The Hundred Righteous Men started negotiations by requesting a second entire floor for themselves, their families and support staff. That wasn’t going to happen, Jerr said, during a break. Look around, he said quietly to me—if the floor space they had was farmland, they could support a hundred families on it. In addition to their floor, the Hundred Righteous Men enjoyed privileges and luxuries meant to keep them sated and righteous. But they had acquired the desire for more.

The mathematicians had just begun working, but Jerr and the Operating Committee had one number already on hand – 16.4 million – that was the raw square footage the Hundred Righteous Men possessed. Shame was one of the Operating Committee’s primary negotiating levers, Jerr explained. If the Hundred Righteous Men asked for too much, then they weren’t exactly righteous, were they? If they negotiated too hard, then they weren’t righteous. In the end, however, management would have to give them whatever they demanded. The great flood, of four or forty generations ago, was a bigger negotiating lever than shame.

The Operating Committee relied on mathematicians from the priesthood to set the framework of what was reasonable and appropriate. The tower employed all kinds of priests and astronomers. And among the astronomers, some withdrew to deeper, more inscrutable abstractions. It was to those intense, oddball priests that their high priest Melchi Zedek would put the question “How much luxury can a man enjoy and still be righteous?”

The priests set to work, making inquiries all over the tower. They were among the few who took its true measure, I suppose. Their search for information took on the appearance of the wildest of rituals. With Nimrod’s sanction, they stormed about, counting the kernels of corn in a sack, the running sores on the bodies of interns, weighing the femur of a newborn ox for density, measuring the level of sediment in the wine served in the top levels of the tower, the age of the five youngest grandmothers on each residential floor, the length of time it took an express elevator to run the heighth of the tower, the scent of wastewater at the bottom of the bottom floors, the cost to rent a studio apartment in the four city quadrants around the tower, Nimrod’s hairline and weight, the hue of the clay used in the bricks, the transit of Venus, the opacity of the smoke coming from the brick-baking furnaces, the date since the last war among the five adjacent kingdoms, the annual catering expenses of the Operating Committee, and so on.

Their calculations took a full year and burned through what was, to my scribe’s eyes, a heart-breaking amount of papyrus. The numbers they arrived at would be final, and would, if not conclude the debate, tightly circumscribe it.

The Hundred Righteous Men sent a five-man Accord Delegation to the negotiations, which were referred to, when referred to at all, as the Colloquy on Continuous Virtue. No one from either side would dare to call the meetings a negotiation. It made the righteous sound unsavory and management sound like they didn’t have the situation entirely in hand.

The negotiation began. The righteous looked righteous—very clean, with bland faces and a tendency to look whoever was speaking in the eye until they felt they’d received permission to look away. Probably to disperse the faint odium of negotiating at all, they took turns speaking.

The extra floor they wanted was for their growing families, one said, and for ill-defined “health and ritual purposes.” Their delegation consisted, oddly I thought, of only very young men. They spoke, one then the next around their side of the table, as if reading aloud. Their list of proposals included more servants, higher stipends, one less workday per week in their respective jobs, and the right to third wives.

The list went on. One thing that they repeated in different ways throughout their requests was that something be done about the birds.

Once I had accustomed myself to the Righteous Men’s huge spaces, clean air, spacious bathrooms and panoramic views, what really struck me were how many birds and how many kinds of birds there were, flapping about the floor. Chirping, squawking, defecating, strutting, pecking birds and the harried servants perpetually cleaning up after them were the only blemish on impeccable home of the Hundred Righteous Men.

The birds, numbering in the hundreds, are trapped, one of the righteous explained. His skin was clear and reflective as wax, his eyes were perfect almonds and the ringlets of his pale oiled beard were perfect circles. His face was practically a wallpaper design. He explained that the birds can still fly—they fly all around the floor. But when they should glide or be chased out of one of the floor’s 2,700 large windows, the tremendous height terrifies them, and they rarely fly more than five feet out before scrambling back.

As the righteous man with the meticulously cared-for beard spoke of the droppings, the noisy dawns and dusks, and the tremendous strain on the servants, my thoughts wandered to the storms, foolhardy courage and misplaced faith that brought them so much higher than they could tolerate. I despised the birds at the time. I had no choice.

After a few hours, we broke for coffee and pastry in the sprawling reception hall outside the cavernous meeting room. I followed Jerr to a table in the corner. He predicted that the back-and-forth would drag on, and that the Operating Committee would cave on everything but the real estate. That was the way it went. He lowered his voice, and said the Operating Committee would appear to cave in to their demands, and a few months later, it would brings in some righteous men from the countryside and reshuffle the deck: Out go the righteous with double-digit families; Out go the ones who jump too quickly on the new three-day work week, and of course, out go the negotiators. It always went the same, he said.

I asked why any of these guys would risk their positions by playing negotiator. Jerr said they were righteous, but no one said they were smart. Anyway, people forget. Everyone does, except management.

I asked if the Operating Committee could do that. Sure, he said, it’s Nimrod’s tower. Everyone else is replaceable. But support staff is something they relish replacing. Jerr advised me to always keep that last part in mind.

I asked about the birds, and he commended my keen ear. The story for the newsreaders, and the gossip that I would have my staff plant would all be about the birds, he said, his eyes widening slightly like they did when he got idea he liked. The birds will stick in the mind, leave people with the vivid picture that would take the place of knowing what’s going on or thinking of what’s at stake.

Plus, he said, talking fast, the idea of a floor so high that it scares even birds speaks to the glorious scale of the tower. He told me to be sure I made the story long enough that people would forget what the Hundred Righteous Men protect us from, how much we pay them, and why we need so many.

I said I’d get someone from engraving to come up and sketch the birds. And? he asked. And I’ll make sure they don’t sketch anything on the floor but the birds, I said. Jerr nodded.

Associate Executive Managing Vice Nimrod, Divine Compliance, Workplace Piety & Communications

The operating committee once more smiled on Jerr, and he smiled on me. My identity badge was brass now, with my name and title in larger letters at the bottom. There were fewer names and ranks between my name and the image of Nimrod with the animals bowing to him at its top.

I didn’t mind working nearly every waking hour, along with some that rightfully belonged to sleep. So each promotion improved virtually every aspect of my life. More money, more authority, more people laughed at my jokes. By this time, I was the funniest guy in my department, just behind the twenty men and women above me.

The promotions gave me the kind of stature and income where it would look strange if I didn’t marry. Nimrod was a family man, as everybody knew.

Looking back, my attraction to Clauvia, who was born to the tower, at a secure and uninterrupted remove from the dusty earth, never less than a hundred floors up, makes more sense. The mystery that persists is why she took an interest.

But she was a Chaldean, from an old tower family with deep roots in diplomacy and astrology. Who knew what whispers she listened to?

The day we met, I was in Clauvia’s family apartments to talk to her father, an astrologer of august enough rank to resent having to speak with a mere Associate Executive Managing Vice Nimrod. The family apartments would have impressed me if I hadn’t arrived there from another tedious meeting in the acres of spacious sofas, pillows and roasted meats that belonged to the Hundred Righteous Men.

I was there for rumor patrol after an accident—the astronomers that Clauvia’s father commanded had spilled a lot of blood. On the roof of the newly completed topmost level, the astronomers had set up their usual gear—mirrors, pipes and so on, watching for fresh terrors in the shimmering ink of the night sky. This was standard practice whenever the intern-beaters from Ascension completed a new level.

The astronomers set up camp for a month to make the observations that would inform their barrel-thick scrolls of tables, numbers, crocodiles, bears, bisected and trisected circles, crabs, vases, dates circled in red ink and dates circled in green ink, all accompanied by even more bizarre and incomprehensible shorthand. Because the Chaldean astrologers were an essential line of business for the tower, their work had won them a limited amnesty from the tower’s One Language policy.

While conducting their regular observations on the effect of planetary movements on the blood of the innocents, a massive vat had broken. When the gallons of blood spilled down the side of the building, it understandably revived a number of disowned rumors and spooked a great many residents.

Specifically, rumor had it that a spearman had poked the belly of the sky and drawn first blood in a war with the heavens. For us, it was the usual rumor-control work, a yawn. I was called in because the old man had already ejected one of my juniors. He was a prima donna. And I was bringing on a protégé, to show him exactly how we would cobbled together a sunny and picayune story explaining the viscera, whose dried residue stained the top few stories of the tower.

The old stargazer, naturally, kept us waiting. That’s when I first met her. I don’t want you to think I was a neophyte in these matters. I worked with women, and for women, every day in communications. And I had a twice-weekly standing appointment at the Hospital of Ishtar, the good one, above the Kishar market floor. I thought I knew women.

But Clauvia, Clauvia. Like the tower, I feel I only really saw her those first few times. Then she became submerged in the echo of my first urgent infatuation. Who she was, how we left things, what she must think of me, what she meant, how we fit together, what must people think—it pulled me on rippling waves from her, even then, when she was right in front of me.

This implacable distance infests every moment. Maybe that’s just the sad, shadowy part of reality that precludes reality. It’s what all people in all times who have spoken of reality without ecstasy cracking their voice have meant by the word. But Clauvia, more than the tower, makes me regret that it is so.

Her gray eyes looked direct, and at me. Sure, rich girl, she can afford to stare direct. That’s what you’re thinking. That’s what I thought. But there was a bravery, too. There was something that stopped me in my tracks.

We only sat together for a few minutes in that sprawling apartment foyer with its knotted quartz pillars, mosaics and embroidered red-clay walls. But it’s something I’ll always carry—a sudden mountain among the unremarkable. I still feel how she startled me with those eyes, with her hard but effortless talk. She shocked me to a dead stop simply by saying hello. I simply tried to keep up.

We exchanged small talk. But until she fixed me in one place like she did, I never realized how I was being pulled in so many directions. She stood still against the endlessly unfurling agendas, high desires, low cunning, major connivances, minor ambitions and numbing fashions.

Her father shouted from down the hall. He was a major trader in gossip celestial and otherwise, an Executive Vice Nimrod for gods’ sake, he had little time for me. I was just an Associate Executive Managing Vice Nimrod of Communications, and Internal Communications at that. It was a support function and subject to general disdain from anyone involved with gathering money, materials and manpower from surrounding kingdoms, propitiating the always-skittish gods, maintaining order, collecting rent, mixing bitumen, ensuring luxuries, or the baking, counting, testing, hauling or stacking of bricks.

Clauvia’s father, who told me pointedly at the outset of our interview that he resented having to speak with me during the day, was no different.

We got the story together nonetheless: The “blood” was actually a container of rare red palm oil used to lubricate the lenses in a viewing pipe. It had broken as the astronomers celebrated the discovery of a new star. That much was true—they’d found a new one, so faint that the old man said no one could’ve detected it from even one floor lower. And they named it Heinekuk— after Nimrod’s teenage son who’d died in a chariot wreck last year, coming back from a week in Sodom.

The story worked—it elided the vat of the blood of the innocent. And a new star is always a nice thing—as long as you don’t know how court astrologers work. With each new star, they have to reshuffle their charts, recalculate their peculiar equations. When they do, they inevitably arrive at another two or three or a hundred men who, based on the time and place of their birth, would grow up to challenge and possibly supplant one of the nearby kings, perhaps even Nimrod himself.

Every king for hundreds of miles subscribed to these charts. The tower’s astrological expertise was one of the main inducements that kept them funding and staffing the tower. After all, regents had to rule, usurpers had to be eliminated. The kings, many of them former usurpers themselves knew that much better than they knew anything. And whom can a jealous king trust, except numbers and stars?

Ancient observations and daylong equations weren’t the same thing as faith. But for the powerful and insecure, they filled the gap well enough. That’s why astrologers are paid so well, and are so incredibly arrogant.

But no astrologer could guess what would come next. Because, as I left the sumptuous apartments of that cranky, imperious, puffy-eyed man, his daughter waited for me by the door, where she followed up on her unnerving hello with an even more unnerving goodbye kiss on the cheek.

It was the first of several preposterous events that clustered suddenly at the midpoint of my life.

Associate Executive Managing Vice Nimrod, Divine Compliance, Communications & Facilities Maintenance

“You ever sit in a meeting until the people become a collection of geometric shapes?” That was how Avram introduced himself. He was tall and lean, a bag of elbows who always seemed to talk just a hair too loud.

His glibness startled me after the dry, careful formality of the negotiations. I’d seen him before, and only knew him as a young priest who chimed in here and there during the preliminary negotiations with the Hundred Righteous Men. Those meetings took place in a conference room with floor-high porticos from which the distant mountains looked like a wrinkled bed sheet. Throughout those long hours, Avram seemed to escape the room, getting lost in the daunting distances beyond the windows or in the twisting low-relief patterns and friezes on the walls. He’d occasionally speak from his cloud of abstracted aggravation to correct a small point about the scheduling of a ceremony or the ways that the righteous jointed animals for sacrifice, before vanishing again.

That day, I supposed I was a bit flattered that I gave off a half-thoughtful spark beyond my buttoned-down appearance. Still, I wondered if I could have the young man fired.

We talked for a little while about the slow death inflicted by the negotiation ceremony’s hoary formula. These months of negotiation were, after all, nothing more than perfunctory preamble and box checking. Low-level functionaries read through old pacts between management and the Hundred Righteous Men, updating a phrase here and a clause there to reflect changes in law, fashion or leadership of the surrounding kingdoms since the last negotiation. Heck, I was probably the most senior person there.

To their credit, the Hundred Righteous Men handled the catering, I said to Avram, tossing a shrimp into my mouth. I must have missed the testament about appetizers, Avram said, too loud. My cheeks burned and my eyes darted. I cautioned Avram to be more politic, or at least quieter, but couldn’t restrain a smile.

He apologized and said he’d been up all night, hanging laundry on the roof. He explained that it was a ritual. After every floor is completed, they send a priest to the top of the tower, every night for a month. The priest goes up alone and strings up lines and dries his laundry up there, when the roof is bare, without even a low lip of brick. It’s the kind of dangerous ritual they assign to a junior priest they don’t really like, Avram said, shrugging. If you fold a big sheet when the right wind comes along, he said, you’re gone. He traced the trajectory of just such a tragedy with an agitated hand, punctuating the drop with the information that it had happened to an unlucky priestess two weeks ago.

Some of these rituals don’t make any sense, I said. Seems like they could stop that one, or just not use real laundry.

But it has to be real laundry, and it has to dry up on the roof, Avram said. The idea is to convince the gods that everything is business as usual, that the tower is just an implement of domestic convenience, and nothing more. Lowering his voice, Avram said with most of these rituals, by the time we finish them, no one can tell whom we’re fooling, the gods or ourselves.

I know the feeling, I said, surprising myself. Which gods are you trying to fool? I asked. Depends on the night, he said, smiling at me like a friend. Then he confided that he was in line for a transfer to another god. I nodded, asked if it was a step up. Who knows, Avram said, conspiratorially, they all claim to be foremost, when they’re not calling themselves the only true god. The priesthood just cleans up after the rituals and tries to keep the genealogy straight, he said.

That was the first time I met Avram. And all these years later, I still can’t decide whether to curse or cherish the day. It’s always one or the other, though.

Share

Subscribe now

Our Finalists are:

• Vice Nimrod by Colin Dodds

  • Chapter 1

  • Chapter 2

• Still Soft With Sleep by Vincenzo Barney

• Don’t Disappoint by Martin Van Cooper

While the traditional organs of American letters continue to wither, we recognize the need to forge a new path. If you believe in what we’re doing, PLEASE share and subscribe and spread the word.

Share

Subscribe now

⚬─────────✧─────────⚬

In Vice Nimrod, a young refugee from a brimstone-wrecked small town, Ishkebek finds his way to Nimrod’s Mighty Tower, where he lands a job. Through a mix of savvy alliances and good luck, he rises through the ranks, and survives a professionally disastrous friendship with an idol-smashing protege, to reach the rank of Vice Nimrod, Communications. In his words, we learn how Nimrod’s Communications Group deftly handles the inquiries of the neighboring kingdoms, how it spins the burning of Sodom & Gomorrah, and how it finally flounders through the varied crises that make up the Confusion of Tongues.

⚬─────────✧─────────⚬

Senior Associate - Workplace Piety, Communications & Kingdom Marketing

A year or two went by. Work was good. Those years were like flying on narcotic and erotic tailwinds and updrafts of distraction and self-importance. The fantasy of the world made all-encompassing, tangible and real the way that memos about memos seem to prove themselves by a cheap principle of reflexivity. When you only spend two or three waking hours a day out of the office, the office becomes a perfect tautology.

People who never experience it have no hope of understanding it. But imagine a life where you never have to think about who you are or if you’re right or wrong, good or evil, never had to think about death, or reality, or the fleetingness and futility of it all. And you got paid enough that you never had to worry about money or getting old. When things are good at work, life is a variety of perfect. And it only costs everything.

Eventually, the wind blew from the south through the new moon, and a fresh Festival of Layoffs began. Young men cheered and old men lamented a world they alternately took credit for and, shaking their heads, claimed they did not make. Women wept their coffee-scented tears.

Yersinia, who so loved the Internal Communications Function, was out. Her Internal Communicators Vision & Values Statement, however well distributed by human resources, couldn’t save her. Though bald, I doubt she was more than forty. I heard she went back to her kingdom, and got into sovereign correspondence. I didn’t know anyone who missed her.

I was junior and useful enough to glide through unscathed. I stayed close to Jerr, and learned a few more things of the variety that might dispirit someone slightly less invested.

I was promoted. Now I could use my little iron ID tablet to ride the executive elevator on late nights and weekends.

But the real promotion was being read into the conspiracy, shown yet more of the trick of the riddle, and advanced from a dupe to a liar. I was proud. I took the raise, said goodbye to my roommates and moved to my own apartment a few floors up. Except for rare weekend jaunts, I rarely left the tower anymore. I liked it that way.

Rumor control was the unofficial name for a lot of what I did then.

Rumor control, tumor patrol, hey lady have you seen a mole? my colleague Brian liked to sing. Brian was born and raised in the tower. With an Executive Commanding Vice Nimrod of Leasing, Odor Suppression & Wind Management for a father, he came in as a Senior Associate, and could take more liberties than most.

He was probably still tipsy from the night before. But his little rhyme made sense. A tumor, as someone explained to me once at a party, is a bit of tissue that’s too excited about growing, and so grows at the expense of the rest of the body. Cutting it out helps sometimes, but not always. A rumor works the same way. Except it’s very hard to cut out a rumor once it’s become fashionable. What a good communications team can do that the body can’t is create more and more flesh to encase, confound and drown the rumor. Now a Senior Associate myself, I’d learned a dozen ways to change the subject and call it staying on message.

The tumor that day was big, in that it had big implications. But it was also of no immediate danger to anyone in power, so Brian and I got the call.

It was a Monday after a long weekend in Sodom, where Brian had an apartment, and we were both worse for wear. I was still young then, and would take the occasional trip to Gomorrah and Sodom. I learned some of the vinegar-sour pleasures that the tower, for all its cosmopolitan tolerance, would not allow. The starving men and women in hanging cages, near death, who’d simper as you feasted a few feet away, or the new eunuchs chained to the windows of the brothels, looking on sullenly.

For a provincial like myself, it was too much. But Brian had the purse and the temperament to put those famously debauched cities to the test. What I recall of that weekend, if I’m not confusing it with others, is that I begged off in the early morning, leaving Brian in a tavern. I became immediately lost in the warren of alleys that border the expensive precincts that housed the disposable boys and girls homes.

All I remember after a certain point is vomit in my sandals, and the pitying look of a sleepy prostitute as she rubbed my head and patted my pockets. Brian tracked me down after the sun had risen, right when the madam of the establishment where I’d fallen unconscious was about to have me stretched half to death on the “visitor’s bed” that the town famously reserved for deadbeats.

Tumor patrooolll! Brian sang that nauseous morning in the office, as he rolled across the office floor on a stool with large wooden wheels.

Jerr yelled to me from his papyrus-screened office. I evicted the idle mad mirth from my face and hurried over, hoping I didn’t still smell of Sodom.

He asked if I was on rumor control with “Harrahrad’s kid,” which was how he referred to Brian. I nodded and he told me to take the lead on it. He gestured for me to sit, and smiled tightly, as if he’d spent considerable time arranging the creases in his face. He asked what I thought of the assignment.

I said what I knew: It should be easy—with the rumor reported on only three floors. The job was mostly a matter of telling the other side of things—off the record, to give the sense of privilege. The gossips and loudmouths we told would tell the other version of the story. That would confuse the matter and make everyone weary of the subject.

I said I’d make the rumor “die of disinterest,” to use Jerr’s preferred phrase. He nodded, said it was hard to go wrong with bewilderment. He fixed me for a moment with his eyes—clear, though the flesh around them was like blossoms fried in a pan. That day is still clear to me. I can see the small arched windows open behind him, the light through their dirty glass marking the walls. It was an old floor, with a brick desk like an altar. What came next was important, and later, I tried to pass it on to the underlings that I liked.

Jerr tapped his desk with a knuckle, gestured around at the office, the tower, and told me that all of this is essentially nothing special. It’s just brick, stone, bitumen, glass, rope and iron. That’s the truth, and it’s what the builders and the dullards will tell you. But the tower is actually made from something else—something more volatile—attention. Jerr paused on that last word. Without attention, there is no tower and there is no life in it. And attention—that’s what we’re the real architects of.

I wasn’t sure what to say. Jerr gestured at the office behind me and asked about something I’d finished, a tablet that was read aloud at two-minute intervals at all the gates over a recent holiday.

He asked me to recite it, and I could. It had to do with which objects and people could pass through the Mouth of the Weeping Thin-Lipped Whisperer, and where other traffic should be rerouted during Nimrod’s Camp Holiday.

Jerr said that announcement had altered the meaning of that gate, of the people who passed through it, or went around. It had reinforced the meaning of the year and sanctity of our organizational hierarchy. He reminded me of the hundred subtle tonal elements of the screamed announcement, the thousands of words not used. It avoided mention of the lawgiver, avoided apology, avoided a hundred other wrong or puzzling impressions. It protected the certitude of the quotidian, he said. Thanks, I think, I said. Jerr asked if I understood exactly why we couldn’t have three floors of decorators, idol-buyers and low-level astronomers going around saying that the purpose of the tower is to wage war on the gods. I asked if it was because of what happened in Shinursba. I clenched my jaw at the mention of it.

Good, he said, and asked me what happened in Shinursba. I told him that the Lord God, in multiple form, cast His righteous anger on the small city and smote it with a low orange deluge of flame that burned for half a day and simmered for forty more. Jerr nodded, said he hadn’t heard all the details. I told him I was from there. He asked if we had ten righteous men. I said we thought so.

He said it’s a tricky business—righteous men—but we’re getting off the subject. He tried to remember what he was talking about, and said attention. Attention is volatile; we live in a house made of lamp oil. And if that attention were to shift—to the grievances of which we are all rightful heirs, or to the numberless tedious and humiliating scenarios that keep us alive, the million dreams not coming true, the ever-sinking sensation that you are no capstone but the gray murk of old bitumen between lower support stones, or even if that attention were to turn to the sudden ecstasy that springs from no man or earthly authority, but surges overpoweringly and unites all of creation in a flash—then before very long no stone would stand upon a stone, our name would evaporate, and we would be scattered across the formless face of the earth.

From his face, I could tell Jerr had gone somewhere when he’d spoken. Like most senior managers, he’d grown up in the tower. What I’d just heard was, I think, what the tower had told him at some very early age.

We sat in some silence for a moment. My hangover throbbed. I remember stuttering a little before choking out the next sentence. I asked how I should push the attention for this latest assignment.

Jerr took a breath and gave me the background. There are a few basic rumors about the tower that Internal Comms has to patrol and either confound or refute again and again, he said, leaning back in his chair.

One is that the tower is a siege ladder. That’s the gossip that the lower-floor embroiderers, calendrists, stargazers and idol carvers were all aflutter about that day.

The second is that the tower is a gift from the gods by which we may eventually reach them, attain their stature, and live in peaceful communion with them.

Three is that the tower is a pillar meant to buttress the heavens and keep the floodwaters above from again crashing down and drowning every living creature.

The fourth is that the tower is a garish spectacle by which the cynical rulers of the five kingdoms embellish their greatness, and divert their intelligent underlings from courtly plotting.

Five is that the tower is an arbitrary center for the attention of man, an island of sensible social reality piled to block out the chaos that roils our own natures, as well as the oblivion that rages from past and future, above and below, blowing in every wind.

The sixth is that it is a bulwark against death and time, the signature of our undying name on the earth, and a lasting reminder that we exist, and have existed.

There are a few others, Jerr said, but those are the most frequent ones that pop up.

I struggled to get it all down on the scraps of scraped, mismatched parchment that I always carried back then. I asked which story we espoused.

Jerr smiled as he sat down behind his desk. So you want to know what the tower is for? he asked me. I shrugged, afraid I’d misspoken. Do you? Do you want to know in service to what truth do we suppress these stories? he asked. I said yes, but softly, as if mumbling made me less culpable.

Our work serves no truth, Jerr said, it serves the tower. Whatever ideas happen to be in fashion, we can make them serve the tower, he said. But it can never work the other way around. Never. He asked if I could understand that. I said yes, and apologized, blaming my background in the priesthood. He said it’s okay, it’s good even, having a basic knowledge of deeper reasons made me better at my job. Eternal verities are great for us, he said, especially when we don’t have to massage them away later.

He saw I wanted to say something and told me to spit it out. I asked if it was all just obfuscation and distraction. He smiled.

You think you’re wrestling with reality, and that’s good, but you’re not, Jerr said, kindly, like a father. He looked off and said something I’d later repeat.

“We, by which I mean the tower, are a colossus. Don’t forget that. But we’re a colossus on a high wire. We are the culmination of hundreds of generations, languages, races, nations, religions all gathered to speak with a single colossal voice, to build something that means all things at once. Something like the tower occurs so rarely that you might as well round it down to never. We are a freestanding scandal upon the devouring murk of the earth. In this preposterous position, the colossus twitches a hand here, bends a knee slightly, jerks up an arm, ventures a foot slightly outward, crouches halfway. The dance signifies nothing. But without it, the colossus would plummet into an abyss past nostalgia or regret. All we do, with the words we use, is to shift a finger minutely, to flex the inside of an ankle, to shift a shoulder to keep from falling. That’s Communications, in a nutshell.”

That afternoon confirmed me in my career, eliminated all my naive doubts and hopes. It drew me still farther in.

Associate Manager - Divine Compliance, Workplace Piety & Communications

I learned how to run meetings, and how to subvert those of my rivals. It was part politics, part long hours, part plotting and part honest friendships. But I was promoted until I was one of the seven or eight most powerful internal communications executives in the entire group. Smarter men, stronger men with wittier repartee and better connections fell away like damp scaffolding after the autumn rains. I surpassed those born to wealth, to sophistication, to the tower. Brian left to start a restaurant with a couple guys he went to school with.

The work could be dispiriting if you were prone to idealism or ambivalence, or if you had other options. I had none of that. It could be frustrating if you wanted to get something done. The interdepartmental contradictions, cumbersome review process, senseless redactions and insertions from higher ups, made the job less about conveying a message or sharing information and more about maintaining a subtle but unyielding mesh of organizational taboos and unspoken truces among bickering bureaucracies.

But we weren’t the least free of all the scribes in the tower. We had one guy join our team, a young and thoughtful fellow named Jedla, whose quick smile only later revealed itself as the visible reed of a deep-rooted panic. He had transferred in from Potentate Relations, and was amazed at how few reviews and strictures we had in Communications. In his old department, weeks of work were spent on the honorifics and salutations. The rest was a matter of negotiating with the ambassadorial grammarians. For Jedla, Communications presented an impossible amount of freedom. He was always asking questions, so many questions, and didn’t last past the next festival of layoffs.

The job was hard on the decent, the ones who couldn’t quite shake the feeling of dishonesty and subtle wrongdoing. Maybe they could do the job, but they rarely advanced very far. With each shrewd maneuver, you increased your culpability. This was best understood by the best of us, who found a way to quit despite their ambitions, with insomnia, depression, chronic misspellings, or worse.

But I had no outside interests, no family, nothing calling from outside the office, not even the light debauchery of my station. My weekends in Gomorrah grew farther apart. There was something wrong with the pleasures of the pleasure towns. Even in the best of the houses, on whose silken pillows and lush perfumes one seemed to float, every visit cost a little more than the last, and revealed some new small flaw in the mirage. Finally the city’s exacting exuberance added up to a nervous titter against the miserable silence that swallowed the horizon on all sides.

So I mostly stayed in the tower. I despised anything else. Work was all I desired, and there was more than enough work. Nimrod and his Operating Committee were always rewriting the Sacred Tenets of Responsible Ascension, or the Vision & Values Statements for recently reorganized departments, or changing the Relentless Career Advancement program, to a something it called Capabilities and Community.

As The Mission Statement of Nimrod’s Mighty Tower to the Heavens will tell you in bullet point number two: “We speak with one language.” This was true only because we were very busy erasing the one we used the day before.

One day, Nimrod decided that work on the tower had slowed unacceptably. So he publicly stated that the tower was a pillar holding the heavenly floodwaters at a safe distance, and the sky was starting to sag. It was my job to spread this story. I knew it well—it was a rumor I’d helped to confound a few years earlier.

From afar, I can’t imagine anything more shameless than us on Nimrod’s Communications team as we undid the work we had done only a few months earlier. I can’t imagine more effort resulting in less meaning. But I lacked even a glimmer of the voice I’m using with you today.

For real Communications executives, undoing our own work was the real proof of our skill. It was our glory. That you might not understand it—that’s our glory, too.

Jerr brought me to new meetings with real Senior People, where I learned the boardroom language of raised eyebrows, slight nods, small wags of the chin, about those above us. In this eminently disavowable mix of facial semaphore and insinuation, I was admitted further into how the place really worked.

After, we’d go back to his office, where he’d explain what had just happened. Jerr’s talks, full of good gossip and practical advice, would often end with a strenuous pep talk. I didn’t need one, but I think he did. Looking back, I realize that Jerr was trying to explain to himself how he’d spent his life.

The gossip, especially about Executive Directing Vice Nimrods and above, was gold. Any connection to those blessed executive tiers was. The gradation of ranks determined the flow of deference or abuse in the tower. Everyone wanted a little more money, slightly cleaner water, somewhat fresher food, marginally prettier lovers, and, above all, to eat a little less crap. At the top, presumably eating no crap, was the figure of Nimrod, the Mighty Hunter. Sometimes Jerr would talk about Nimrod, but not the descendant of Noah or the hunter to whom the animals meekly offered their necks. To hear Jerr tell it, he was something more mortal, an executive.

To hear Jerr talk about what Nimrod liked, what he didn’t, who and which enterprises were in favor and which were out—to me, it was like hearing about the toilet habits of God. His gossip made me imagine my next promotion. And promotion was the only perpendicular move against the ever-horizontal hand of death. Achieving rank seemed the only measure that you were worth being born at all. I labored under these assumptions for most of my life. The tower had a way of blotting out the rest of the world like that.

I wasn’t alone. Nimrod (and to a lesser extent, the regularly shifting roster of executives on the Operating Committee) was the obsession of most in the tower. From the cold mud of a deluge-ruined world, he’d fired bricks and began building. Now he was the boss of all of us, upon whose tenderest whim our fates relied. Maybe you’d catch sight of him at a festival, or giving an impromptu speech to a division that had achieved a notable success, but even if you didn’t, he was everywhere.

Each gate of the tower bore the face of an animal that no longer walked the earth, thanks to Nimrod’s mastery as a hunter. The three-eyed lion, the featherless, six-winged eagle, the bull with a spine of horns were all gone from the earth, and adorned the East, South and West Gates.

In the time when Nimrod hunted, some whispered that destroying a species so soon after the flood wasn’t exactly the accomplishment that Nimrod and his people made it out to be. Nimrod hunted those whisperers just as effectively, so that the world might speak one language. The thin-lipped whisperer’s agonized grimace adorned the tower’s shady North Gate.

In those days, I dreamt of Nimrod. We’d walk the upper floors talking about plumbing, about the weights and counterbalances of the dumbwaiters, about the conical crumbled ruin visible in the center of the tower’s courtyard, which no one ever spoke of. The mood was very casual.

In one dream, we were leaving through the Lion’s Mouth on an oxcart, dressed as retired temple prostitutes, with dresses of flowing ribbons over our distended stomachs. We rode on rough sacks and laughed as we drank sour wine, its sediment sticking in our teeth. I asked what was in the sacks we were sitting on. Nimrod’s face, like it was in all these dreams, shifted in the shifting light, a composite made from the million ill-wrought or well-worn tower coins.

He told me the sacks were full of eyeballs. I asked if they were human. He closed his own eyes and nodded. Yes, he said. Does it hurt? I asked. Yes, a great deal, he said. But if we didn’t sit on them, they’d spill in the mud and blow away in the wind.

Our Finalists are:

• Vice Nimrod by Colin Dodds

  • Chapter 1

• Still Soft With Sleep by Vincenzo Barney

• Don’t Disappoint by Martin Van Cooper

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In Vice Nimrod, a young refugee from a brimstone-wrecked small town, Ishkebek finds his way to Nimrod’s Mighty Tower, where he lands a job. Through a mix of savvy alliances and good luck, he rises through the ranks, and survives a professionally disastrous friendship with an idol-smashing protege, to reach the rank of Vice Nimrod, Communications. In his words, we learn how Nimrod’s Communications Group deftly handles the inquiries of the neighboring kingdoms, how it spins the burning of Sodom & Gomorrah, and how it finally flounders through the varied crises that make up the Confusion of Tongues.

Colin Dodds is a writer. He lives in New York City, with his wife and children. His novels, scripts and films have won multiple awards. His essays appear regularly at No Homework. And his aphorisms can be found at Forget This Good Thing, now available as an app for the iPhone and Android.

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Junior Associate - Communications, Tourism & Mental Felicity

It was a bad job. I might have grumbled, but I was new and didn’t know anyone to grumble to. Atop the tower’s latest yet-unbuilt top floor, I read and re-read a series of announcements to the illiterate interns. The announcements were about the preciousness of the bricks, how each was the product of centuries of divine guidance, how each took a full year to rise from the earth to their divine station in the tower, how each one would outlive the man who carried it, and should be handled with a care bordering on worship.

The top of the tower was incredible, at first. People at the bottom of the tower and in the city beyond believed incredible things about its top—that from it you could scoop out some of the warm substance of the passing moon. They believed that you could hear the gods arguing, making love and conspiring.

Up top, it was all relentless sun and murderous gusts of wind. You learned you could be mortally overheated and freezing to the bone all at once. And you realized that though you were breath-stoppingly far from the earth, you weren’t really much closer to the sky. You came to know others who lived at such heights. They mostly wanted to know about lunch.

The odor of the hot tar woke me up. It lent the morning a feeling of shrill opposition. It was boiling in black-stained vats. Its pungent fumes infiltrated every orifice and shadow. On the site, the food tasted like tar, the water tasted like tar. The joke was that it took the bitumen mixers and spreaders a year away from the job to ever get the stain and the smell out of their skin. Of course, you get used to it quickly enough.

The worksite, like all precincts where the poor and junior lived and worked, was crowded with the handiwork of the communications team. The anti-suicide signs from an earlier wave of interns faded on walls full of exhortations about relentless career advancement, the need to conserve supplies, and the consequences that awaited the careless and wasteful.

Bodies wash off the lower tiers of the tower easily. And the smell passes after a few days, the woman I was replacing had explained. But when people spill bitumen, it streaks the tower. A big enough spill will stick on the tiers below. It makes the whole tower look sloppy, accidental, she said, and costs a lot more to clean up than it does to onboard a new batch of interns.

Atop the known world, I peered out from between the tar vats and brick piles. The palm trees looked like baby spiders, the thousands going in and out of the tower’s four gates vanished to mottled rivulets of shadow. The city below bewildered the eye with its intricacy. Truth is, from the top of the tower, the view is disappointing, because you can’t see how that endless swell of land ever means anything. You can’t see the tower. Without it, the earth just goes on and on. The disappointment, the height and the heat were too much for me that day. I clung to a sliver of shadow cast by an empty bitumen furnace, stepping out only to repeat my announcements to the dead-eyed interns.

Overseeing the construction was a woman dressed in a stiff straw hat tied tight beneath her chiseled lupine jaw. Aside from the hat, all her loose clothing was restrained by what seemed like a hundred small linen straps. She ignored my fellow reader that day, an older guy named Rochek. He’d been doing these announcements for years. But she introduced herself to me as Meconia Dohegson Ozymandias Mansom. I’d never met anyone with so many names.

The interns moved faster and studied their feet when she came near. The interns who had found a way into management, and drove their fellows became especially cruel and loud when she walked past. It made me grateful for my job.

The sun was huge and bright. Damp, uninterrupted heat rose from the tower and washed over us. Plumbing wasn’t due on that level for weeks. We had a few jugs for the whole crew, and Meconia Dohegson Ozymandias Mansom wasn’t about to miss an elevator-load of bricks for more water. By mid-afternoon, interns began to load their gasping, groaning or eerily still peers on the empty down-bound brick elevator cars.

She didn’t seem to mind this development. With each worker lost, the managing interns grew louder and meaner.

I kept on repeating my announcements. But I’d already finished my portion of the Executive Support Staff Water by the time the interns started dropping. The sun continued to climb. And the heat-stricken workers only added panic to my thirst.

Of course, I had water, in the water clock I’d been issued before I rode the laborers’ elevator to the rooftop. The clock was a cheap item, basically two cloudy glass bottles sealed together at their mouths, with a cork on one end, by which it’d been half filled with water. At each turn, the clock told me when to step out of the narrowing shadow and repeat the announcement I’d been given to read. That clock became an obsession. Just one sip, I thought, sensing the consequences dimly.

After a few sips, the consequences became clear. With less water in the water clock, I was reciting the bricks-are-sacred-and-you-are-not spiel more and more frequently. That dried my throat further, leaving me no option but to take another sip. Soon, my water clock was mostly empty, and I was driving my section of interns half crazy by repeating the company line without cease in a miserable, halting croak.

Finally, Rochek gripped my arm with a violence that surprised me, given his stoop. He whispered at me ‘alright, we get it, laddy buck—you’re a comer—just lay off. Hustling for a promotion is one thing,’ he said in his old-man growl, but I was forcing respectable working men to chase their tails, and that wouldn’t stand.

Disoriented and a little shocked, I held up my clock and croaked about my mistake. He nodded and took my water clock behind the elevator’s crane apparatus.

I’d think the spectacular height would do more to stall a bladder than having another man see you piss. But not for Rochek. He handed the clock back to me a minute later with nothing more to drink, but plenty of time.

From then on, it was only the incredible heat full of subtle smells and the unthinkable distances that overtook me in the stretches between announcements. The communications team and other executive support staff got fresh water and sandwiches after mid-day, while the interns hissed and clawed over a not-so-big basket of bread. After lunch, they started dropping more often.

I eyed my piss-filled water clock with hate and respect. It stank, and it leaked a little when I flipped it. But it gave me a break—it let me watch from some kind of distance the drama that rose with the warm stink from the core of the tower and fell with the stricken and dead interns descending on the hard floor of the brick elevator.

The extra weight on the down-bound elevators, I later learned, sped up the delivery of bricks. So if you could work your interns to utter collapse at the right pace, you could actually optimize your building time. Later in my career, I saw Meconia Dohegson Ozymandias Mansom give a presentation on the tactic, and how it could be applied to other departments.

But that day, in the heat, watching interns drop and convulse, the phrase This cannot last spread from my aching shoulder to my dry throat and made my eyes sting that much more. That day, the entire tower seemed to be drinking carelessly from reserves that were vital to something still more vital, and yet desperately ignored.

I decided I just needed to get some sleep. I decided I’d feel better after I spent some of the money they paid me. And I was right.

Before very long, I got used to the heat and wind and rain and ruthless conditions atop the tower. I came to regard it as part of the deal it had struck with us.

In those miserable weeks I watched old Rochek take his little sips and reiterate his own announcement in tired, measured syllables. What I learned wasn’t the danger of working too hard. Rather, I learned the danger of not being ambitious enough.

Associate - Policing, Sanitation & Internal Communications

The problem was that they were too educated, had enjoyed too many months thinking they belonged to themselves, too many years thinking they were human beings. The problem was that it never occurred to the middle managers in their home countries, or on our end, that they’d rather die than be interns in Nimrod’s mighty tower.

The problem was the interns were a willful bunch who wouldn’t tolerate the long hours, bad food, scarce water and scant dignity that the budget allowed. The problem was that they couldn’t fathom or endure the steady diminution of self that the staggering scale of the tower inflicts on all of us without even meaning to. They insisted on being something, rather than not very much at all.

If not for my position, I might call it an admirable attachment to a noble idea. The problem, for me, was my boss. Her name was Yersinia. My other problem, I would discover, was the word ‘invisible.’

‘Rework it,’ Yersinia said. It was her preferred edit. My ability as scribe had gotten me off the roof. Yersinia had gotten there by knowing the names and predilections of her bosses. And she showed her disdain for both writing and for me by telling me repeatedly to ‘rework’ something, or to ‘wordsmith’ it, or even to ‘language it up.’ I nodded. New to the communications team, and happy to be working indoors, I was impressionable and impressed. Any suspicions that my co-workers in Internal Communications weren’t the brightest bunch were still faint coals. I was intimidated by how comfortable they felt in their surroundings.

I asked how I should rework the piece in question. She said to write it like the other ones we’d done, but to make it fresh. I did that. She said the announcement was a mess. I asked how. She said it just was, shaking her head at the parchment sheet in front of her. The tone, she said, was all wrong.

I asked what about the tone was wrong. She looked at me, sad and angry. She was middle-aged, with a powdered face taut from years of quiet panic. Her broach was heavy and tugged at the fabric of her starched gray tunic. It looked like a hand-axe made by someone with a short attention span.

As she looked at me, I had the sense she didn’t see me. Rather, some nightmare I wouldn’t understand until years later seemed to unfurl directly behind my insignificant form. The wind was blowing from the south. She told me to look at the other scrolls about employee fulfillment and relentless career advancement, and to make it sound like them.

The great triumph of Yerisinia’s career, and her life, had been overseeing the update of the Vision and Values statement for Internal Communications. She spoke of it frequently as the kind of glittering success none of us might live to witness even if I, like her, worked every waking hour, and some of the other ones too, for the internal comms cause, whatever it happened to be that day.

The scroll in question would go to Junior Associates, who would read it to yet-more lowly interns on the upper floors who had taken to leaping rather than piling bricks and tarring the seams.

“In Nimrod’s Mighty Tower, we all strive for the highest possible safety standards every single day, consistent with the swift and steady ascension of...” it began. Then a few paragraphs on the investments the Tower Operating Committee had made in employee safety and health. Only once the listener was tired of listening came the abstract, tangential mention of the recent rash of jumpers. The fact that a hundred men dashed themselves to pulp in a month rather than submit to a lifetime of minor promotions to nowhere went unmentioned.

Yersinia said the opening line was strong enough to keep. She said it quietly, loathe as she was to admit that I wasn’t totally hopeless. I’d learned a few tricks in those weeks. I’d learned the aim wasn’t to communicate at all, but to cultivate enough ambiguity that the people at the top could have it both ways. As for the people below, who were being communicated to, the aim was for them to feel as though they’d been given some kind of answer, without giving one.

But Yersinia knew the trade far better on that day. And I accepted that. I was a buttoned tunic and a shut mouth in those very early days. I leaned in to learn the latest thing I’d done wrong.

She tapped a painted crimson fingernail like a talon on the parchment, pointing to the word invisible. That was a word the tower would never use in an announcement, she said, and especially not to interns. She snickered at my idiocy.

In the announcement, after detailing the loving care of the Operating Committee, the announcement informed the interns that the workplace idols watched always, and that neither their gods nor the ones dear to executive management would guide them up the invisible ladder to the next world if they leapt. Rather, they would wander the wilderness without surcease of wailing and so on. It was a short paragraph, followed by several more about the programs offered by the Relentless Career Advancement For Interns program.

But the ladder is invisible, I argued meekly.

Yersinia took my comment as another opportunity to speak to me like I was a child with a head injury. This isn’t the priesthood, she said. We are the internal communications function of the Policing, Sanitation & Internal Communications division of Nimrod’s mighty tower, she said, slowly. It is not for us to tell people what is visible and invisible, she said. It is not for us to even say if anything that’s invisible even exists. That’s for Priesthood, Socialization & Mission Marketing, if they’d even touch it. But she doubted they would. With that, she sent me off to rework it once more.

Each poster, memo, announcement, greeting, training manual and sundry material we created had to pass through a minefield of forbidden words. Internal comms had formal and informal bans on so many words and phrases that it took me months to comprehend the vague outline of the logic, and another few months to actually believe. For instance, nothing could ever be said to improve—as that would imply that things had once been lacking.

Whether it was safety standards, architecture, efficiency, intern training, bitumen consistency, professional development, brick hardness, management effectiveness or communications strategy: Things could only be first-rate, world-class, kingdom-leading, exceeding pre-flood excellence, best-in-category, or striving for some combination of those. ‘Striving’ was a safe word. Everything living and inanimate in the tower was striving in some way or another, according to us.

I had just begun to know this, but couldn’t quite accept that this was how someone who included communications in their title would want to communicate.

I looked at the parchment for other parts to change. And Yersinia looked at me from behind her fine desk of wood, so pale it seemed to float, like I was a crooked-eyed orphan she wanted to return to the Field of Wailing.

Back at my desk, I could think better. Situated about as far as possible from the floor’s outer and inner windows, it pressed against the tight brickwork of an elevator shaft. For the part of the day when I was not being lambasted, criticized or pitied, I labored to the sound of steel chains gently scraping and the pale, wistful moan of the air as it rattled heavy wooden doors set on iron casters whenever those small rooms approached and vanished. It’s a sound worn into every memory I have of that time, a song I hear whenever I think of my career. It remains the secret name I have for the hopes, desires and illusions that animated and identified me for most of my life.

After a week of decreasingly chastised revisions, Yersinia reluctantly agreed that I had managed to capture the tower’s Executive Tone. But lest I think my job was safe, she remained mildly outraged that it took me so many drafts and so much of her nonsensical instruction to get there.

The Executive Tone is coldly polite. It neither exhorts nor pleads. It wills the addressee to do or think a certain thing in the expected fashion. Without emotion or inflection, the tone assumes that every aspect of the reader or listener’s existence will be subjugated to the blithe and often-unclear intent of the tone’s issuer.

Intern Relations & Junior-Builder Motivation took a month to revise and approve the script. The final announcement eliminated all mentions of suicide, and added quotes from the Vice Nimrod of the division of how proud they all were of the safety and advancement programs available to interns.

By then, the boldest of the interns were dead. The remaining workers had either been swayed by the promises of the Relentless Career Advancement representatives, or had quietly given up on being anything but something that survives—if there was a difference.

Associate - Workplace Piety, Communications & Kingdom Marketing

Communications was merged into yet another division, and Internal Communications received a new Executive Vice Nimrod, a guy by the name of Jerrozeboth Shamanad Laddorrah. As anyone who’d spent time studying the top lines of their ID tablets, or scrutinizing the ceiling of the hall of the org chart knew, this was a big step down for the executive, who told us just to call him Jerr. It could only be a modified retirement, or a gesture meant to inform his enemies on the Operating Committee that they needn’t bother having him killed.

For some reason, he took an interest in me, which probably saved my job. Without him, I never would have made it to Managing Nimrod. He taught me how things really worked, and how the work of Workplace Piety, Communications & Kingdom Marketing played into it. After so many years, it spilled out of him—the big picture and the small. I was junior enough to trust with a few candid words.

“Just kick it off with an ‘In an effort to,’ then go to ‘maximize the potential’ then something about ‘streamlining’ so people get the sense that we’re saving their jobs by moving them to a smaller office on a lower floor, or, gods forbid, the annex,” was how he’d assign an announcement. It bored him.

I got to know Jerr while he dictated the communications strategy around the announcement that the tower’s offices were reorganizing. I remember the day I asked, aghast, if we were moving to the annex. The annex was a series of low office buildings outside the tourist-swarmed West Gate of the Horn-Spined Bull. Being sent there was an indicator that your team wasn’t exactly integral to the tower. To me, it was an exile, if not a variety of death.

He smiled. We all loved the tower, but for different reasons. Jerr, I think, loved the conspiracy of it all—the play of knowing and not knowing, of having and lacking power based on a loose word let slip.

That’s not public information, he said. Seeing the panic on my face, he finally said, no, but we’re moving down a few levels. I asked if the division was in trouble and he said no, it’s just part of how the tower works—it needs more materials and more interns from farther away to grow, so it has to placate more kings. So the tower has to offer them flashy apartments on the good sides of the high floors, which means everyone else has to move. The principalities get our space, and so we move down, lose a few offices, share a few desks, and everyone who matters is happy.

At least we’re not going to the annex, I said. That’s the spirit, he said.

With that, he walked me through the order for the usual public folderol—the maximizing, the streamlining and the bit about the tower being a creation-wide leader, an ageless brand to whom all is possible, never to be scattered across the face of the earth, and so on.

I asked about the details of the move, like who’s going where and when. Leave it out, Jerr said. The plan was to put out the announcement without specifics and to have the Managing Nimrods take the temperature. If there’s grumbling, the Operating Committee will probably vote to strip a few perks, maybe charge everyone a little more for office coffee, reduce the oil for the lamps, slow the elevators, maybe something worse. Then Communications put out a few more equally vague announcements about streamlining and efficiency.

I said we were scaring people. But he said no, never—if we scare people, the good ones will move on to greener pastures, because they can. It was more about instilling dread. Dread tended to freeze people where they were. You can’t go wrong with general, pervasive dread, he said.

As usual, Jerr was right. By the time anyone knew where their offices would be moving, we were riding infrequent and packed elevators to offices where we drank watery, expensive coffee and grumbled ever more softly in dim offices. More than once, I heard someone from a department relegated to the annex say they were glad to leave the tower. I nodded and was glad I didn’t have to tell myself that particular lie.

The relocation took two years and ground us all down. We sophisticated professionals in Internal Communications, more or less versed in all the latest politics, architecture, culture and business, spent our days discussing the best way to communicate tower policy about absconding with a desk lamp, or the unsanctioned switching of an office chair, or the pilfering of parchment. Then we held yet more meetings to brainstorm and craft communications on the coffee pots that had vanished or relocated during the move.

The meetings, usually with some jaded Managing Nimrod of Human Resources, Career Development & Population Verification, revealed a deep misery. It was something I hadn’t bothered to notice since my days reading anti-suicide communications to construction interns. These were, after all, office people, who were inside the tower. Human resources delivered the hundreds of complaints about prematurely removed coffee pots. It was easy to see that they weren’t about the coffee pots. The complaints were in part, the spiteful response of helpless underlings to their callous managers and an uncaring fate. These were mid-tower people, their positions so secure or insecure that they could count the loss of the office coffee pot as a mighty affront, and perhaps the last straw.

Our initial response, written by those of us junior enough to share some of the fiery rage of our supposed colleagues, was cordial and almost apologetic. It may have lacked Nimrod’s Executive Tone. The grumbling, the time-wasting and continued meetings about coffee pots and their trivial equivalents persisted.

Jerr oversaw the next round of communications, which focused on coffee pots brought from home. And it delivered all the policy-and-damnation insinuations the Executive Tone had to offer. That quieted the office grumblers. The short but bold statements hung by every elevator bank, speaking more of termination than coffee. The meetings stopped. Coffee flasks appeared on desks.

“There’s no power without desire and no desire without fear,” Jerr said at the time. “Increase one and you increase all.”

I didn’t understand that one at the time, so I made sure to remember it.

The silencing power of those communications on my peers only confirmed my own breakneck brown-nosing and backstabbing career trajectory. I wanted more of that power, even if just as its wordy custodian.

When we finally moved offices, it was like Jerr had promised—lower down and in closer quarters. Being a comer, I had a desk near a window; being junior, that window faced the inner courtyard, with a view of the dizzying concave wall of small windows and the conical heap of broken masonry at the center of that forbidden central precinct.

The department, as a whole, was jammed in about half the space they had before. The ones who lost their offices in the move started to look tired all the time, and seemed to get sick. Yersinia’s hair thinned, and her efforts to cover the bald patch made it hard to talk to her without getting distracted, which was dangerous, as she’d turn vicious in an instant. But I was close enough with Jerr that, aside from sniping in a staff meeting, she didn’t go after me the way she had.

The quarter-floor that our division shared with Ambiance Continuity, Number Management & Policy Observance was dark and strangely gorgeous. There are a few like it in the tower, the walls full of arcane and mysterious friezes, frescoes and tracery.

The inner wall of our section was dominated by a deep-relief scene—a group of men, gathered in three-quarters profile. One pressed a gimlet into the straining skin of the sky, which dimpled and broke slightly. Another man held a finger up to the gimlet, gathering a drop of fluid from its edge. A third man, with a finger in his mouth, stared off. The carving was exquisite, fascinating and perverse.

Like everything, though, I didn’t notice it again after a few weeks.

Huge buttresses and pillars of mismatched brick interrupted the ancient frieze and all of the other carvings that ringed the outer wall of that floor. The walls, with their faces and filigree, someone explained to me, had been carved to celebrate that this was the top floor, the last word.

But some disappointment or later imperative drove the tower higher and required the ugly supports for the floors above, which covered much of the art. Ours was one of several such floors.

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Our Finalists are:

1. Vice Nimrod by Colin Dodds

2. Still Soft With Sleep by Vincenzo Barney

3. Don’t Disappoint by Martin Van Cooper

While the traditional organs of American letters continue to wither, we recognize the need to forge a new path. If you believe in what we’re doing, PLEASE share and subscribe and spread the word.

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In Vice Nimrod, a young refugee from a brimstone-wrecked small town, Ishkebek finds his way to Nimrod’s Mighty Tower, where he lands a job. Through a mix of savvy alliances and good luck, he rises through the ranks, and survives a professionally disastrous friendship with an idol-smashing protege, to reach the rank of Vice Nimrod, Communications. In his words, we learn how Nimrod’s Communications Group deftly handles the inquiries of the neighboring kingdoms, how it spins the burning of Sodom & Gomorrah, and how it finally flounders through the varied crises that make up the Confusion of Tongues.

Colin Dodds is a writer. He lives in New York City, with his wife and children. His novels, scripts and films have won multiple awards. His essays appear regularly at No Homework. And his aphorisms can be found at Forget This Good Thing, now available as an app for the iPhone and Android.

⚬─────────✧─────────⚬

And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.

And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there.

And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar.

And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.

-Genesis 11: 1-4

We have taken great care to re-articulate and re-emphasize our cultural values and corporate standards consistently and clearly so they can be internalized by employees and result in the kinds of observable, ethical behaviors that we expect.

-JPMorgan Chase, How We Do Business, 2014

⚬─────────✧─────────⚬

Part One

Onboarding in the Tower of Babel

Applicant

I was new to the Plain of Shinar. The tower shimmied in the heat for three full days. When I finally reached it, filthy and exhausted, I pushed through the crowds to touch its dirty outer wall, just to confirm that either it or I actually existed.

Up close, it was gorgeous, terrifying, impossible—a mountain that spoke a human dialect. Beyond awe, what I felt was a desire so unbearable it made me consider fleeing back to the dusty wastes.

It was summer, and the tower bulged like the pistil of an overripe flower, its million windows full of women of scarcely guessable gorgeousness, full of possibilities that time has proven I couldn’t imagine.

I’ll stop there. It’s almost impossible to describe the tower. You only really see it the first two or three times, and maybe another two, three times more if you spend your entire life around it. The rest of the time, you don’t really see it. Maybe it’s like this with other places too. I wouldn’t know. What I believe, though, is what most in the tower believe: Unique in all of time and space, it may be the greatest single thing ever built by man.

And yet, after a few years, the tower becomes a strange sort of intimate. Your eyes begin to dart where its might and your desires become a clear window upon its own.

This may sound upsetting. But it’s not. It’s a transaction. You agree to it. I remember when I did.

Tilted Arch Park is a half-mile southeast of the tower, set on a low hill. From one of its benches, you can see the featherless eagle’s massive granite wings flex above the south gate, as well as the top eye of the three-eyed lion over the east gate. On a weekday, you can marvel at the traffic in and out of both. The park itself horseshoes around a bright white marble triumphal arch half sunk in the earth. With its carved figures and inscriptions smooth from the floodwaters, it looks like someone dropped a sheet over it.

They’d planted a nice lawn over the muck that had stalled the arch’s tumble. People picnicked in its uneven shadow. Especially around the tower, there was a lot of monumental detritus that people found easier to dress up than to remove.

From my bench, I watched the middle of the tower swallow the afternoon sun. With the cool shade that fell, came a sudden quiet. I knew a negotiation had begun.

Nimrod’s immense tower proposed a simple exchange. Some part of me for some part of it, roughly. And I, with the ashes of my kin still in my fingernails and hair, agreed.

We’re all orphans, but not exactly. My thin reed of surviving family was a surly second cousin north of the tower, in the moss-and-mushroom district (before it was fashionable), with a rag-piled corner he said I could use for sleeping, for a while.

The picnickers packed up around me. And I nodded at the looming beacon of shade, agreeing to its terms. And as of that moment, I had a home.

Candidate

It was a busy day in the tent labyrinth that Human Resources ran outside the jagged-toothed gate of the three-eyed lion. The sun was high. I hadn’t slept much the night before. I remember trying not to look up. I remember trying not to sweat.

The line was long and the woman from human resources wasn’t impressed. The look on her face was something I wouldn’t learn to decipher until much later. It was the look of someone who’s seen your face—your exact face—a dozen times before, probably saying the exact same things.

She wore gold dust on the black hair of her forearms, and a thick layer of makeup. Scrutinizing the clay tablet I’d given another similarly suspicious middle-aged woman two weeks before, she said she didn’t recognize the deity of the temple where I’d worked in Shinursba. A rural deity, she asked. No, I think that he has a shrine in the tower, I said. She said it must not be very high up. I said I thought it was high up, though I didn’t know which landing it was on. My cousin had told me to use the word landing when referring to a floor in the great tower.

The Human Resources woman, her lips wet with wax and her face dry with powder, told me that if I make it to the next round, not to say “landing.” I asked why not. She said “floor” was the word now. A bad batch of interns last year—a lot of jumpers, she said, so no one says “landing” now.

She told me that I must be looking for something in the Priesthood. I said not necessarily, said I’d take anything available. I said the bit that I’d rehearsed the night before about my literacy and numeracy, my adaptability and willingness.

She said good, and informed me that all the open positions in the tower depended on the wind for the moment. I nodded, not having the slightest idea what she was talking about. She let me nod like the rube I was, before she decided to give me a break. The wind is blowing from the south, she said, and if it keeps up through the next full moon, there will be a Festival of Layoffs.

So, you’re not hiring? I asked. We’re always hiring, she said. During the festival, every department in the tower has to let go of a quarter of its staff in the darkness of the new moon. Departments like the Priesthood usually hire back most of those people at the next full moon. It’s a collegial department, a little sleepy. The point is there’s not much turnover there, she explained. But then there are other departments, like communications. She offered to send me to interview for a position there. I said, sure, great, of course, please and thank you. She asked what I’d say to them and I said the literacy, numeracy, adaptability and willingness part again.

No, she said, that won’t do it. The woman who’s doing the hiring wants someone with strong internal communications experience, preferably in a court, or the military, or in engineering. She stared down at the tablet in front of her without moving for so long that I began to wonder if she could read, and asked where I was from again. I said Shinursba.

She scowled, and told me that when I was in Shinursba—when there was a Shinursba—maybe an army passed through. She said that maybe that army was full of mercenaries with divergent agendas, maybe with a barbarian flavor to some of them. Maybe I worked closely with the general and his executive staff to craft compelling, high-impact directives to a diverse body of troops that led to deeper corps-wide cohesion, while increasing efficiency and boosting morale to all-time highs.

She said the last part like a question. I asked if it was a question. She told me to think about it, and to be ready to give that kind of answer in the interview.

She said she’d send someone to let me know when the interview would be. She said it was nice to meet me, and paused for a pregnant moment. I told her my name. Right, she said, and wished me luck.

Probationary Junior Associate - Communications, Tourism & Mental Felicity

More than being hired, more than riding up several floors in an elevator only moments after discovering such a thing existed, I was shocked and amazed by the Anti-Abomination Orientation. It was a daylong recitation of what should have been obvious to anyone who grew up in a self-respecting, idol-handling civilization. The content of the orientation hardly seemed worth mentioning, never mind the scrolls, the catered lunch, and all of the candles. The auditorium was on the shady side of the tower, and there must have been a thousand candles. Like the rube I was, I spent the bulk of the day marveling at all the candles.

New to the tower, what I remember best is how impossibly pretty all the women were. Skin painted, blemishes and pockmarks filled, smoothed or never incurred, limbs perfumed, makeup impeccable, hair gleaming in the day and soaking up the night. Each was more maddening than the last. Impassive, sophisticated, full of casual disdain in the corridors and avenues, they seemed as unobtainable as life is long and the tower is high. An idle meander across a market floor left me alternately intoxicated and bewildered.

The young Human Resources woman running the Anti-Abomination Orientation was no exception. She looked out on the class with eyes wide and clear, their whites brighter than anything on the sixth-floor conference center. She spoke about defilement, which was all I could think of, but differently.

The defilement unit took up one of the bigger course scrolls, which we were supposed to read as she spoke. Having worked mostly with clay tablets, I fumbled the hand-worn horn handles on the scroll. Adrian, another new Comms hire, snorted as I struggled to keep the unfurling mess in my lap. He forced a laugh when no one picked up on his snort.

Everyone from my second cousin’s wife to the old men in the mushroom-district taverns told me that the tower was an unforgiving employer. And there were other ways in the Plain of Shinar to make a living, they said.

But there was no question for me. Nimrod’s great tower was the only thing huge and imposing enough to blot out all I hoped to ignore. Being an inextricable part of it was all I wanted. Those days, even at home, I spent my idle moments feeling the ridges on the ID that Human Resources had given me to hang around my neck.

It was a hand-sized tablet of sturdy glazed clay that bore the stamp of Nimrod, with his bow pulled taut atop a stylized tower. At the bottom was my name, title, division and department. Between Nimrod and my name were the names of the Vice Nimrod, Executive Vice Nimrod, Executive Commanding Vice Nimrod, Executive Directing Vice Nimrod, Executive Managing Associate Vice Nimrod, Managing Nimrod, Associate Manager and Senior Associate who connected us and filled the vertiginous gulf in power, status and importance between the Mighty Hunter and myself.

Symbolic power aside, it allowed me to skip the hours-long lines to get in the gate, exempted me from the suspicion of the police, made me desirable to women who would have otherwise denied my existence, and got me into the far cleaner employee elevators. In the most practical sense, it made me a full person.

Squeezing the ID with my free hand in the hall, I reminded myself to focus. There was, the doe-eyed, lazy-legged associate goddess told us, a Defilement Marshall on every floor. You were required to contact him, or her, she said, smiling to break up the tedium of the recitation, if a workspace idol had been defaced or otherwise altered within two turns of the water clock after you observed the damage.

Some of you may worship strange gods, or even a single God, she said—please consult the employee handbook on non-sanctioned prayer during office hours. A few nervous newcomers reached for a scroll. But I’d given up trying to understand the ways of God and the gods weeks before.

I never saw that fresh-faced human resources fawn after that day. She’d get a promotion or two, maybe make it to something like Managing Nimrod of Workplace Piety, before she was knocked up by some Plumbing, Sanitation & Tax Collection middle-management drone with family in the bitumen cartel and she’d stay home with the kids in a lower floor or in some pseudo-villa on the outer rings of the city. Her fate was as sure as the bricks rising on the same elevator that carries down the interns. Her life—all of our lives—are just so much small talk pasted on blind force.

My name is Ishkebek, but that’s just more weather, filler, grease for the axle. I’ll need your forgiveness to make it through my story. As a fragment, I have a habit of speaking in fragments. It’s all a farce, except for the tower. The tower is real.

I don’t guide a plow or pile cheap houses or bake bricks or shape bricks or haul bricks or lay bricks or tar the seams. I don’t command armies or mend pipes or hold a sword to orient the interns. I am what the ancients would have called an unreliable narrator, but not because I mean to deceive. I’ve simply gotten too good at lying, and deceive even myself without meaning to.

My father steered me toward this line of work. We weren’t rich, and by the dismal standards of our backwater, I was a boy genius.

“A stonemason is destroyed by his work, the farmer eaten by the food he grows. There is no profession that is not a thief. Only a scribe steals more than he has stolen from him,” was a quote my father had heard once. God knows where. My father was a stonemason.

Restless in the droning orientation, hands sweating with the effort not to spill scrolls of due diligence onto the polished floor, I asked my father’s ghost if he ever had to sit through anything so pointless as the Anti-Abomination Orientation. No, he responded. And after a pause, he said “But I never got paid so much to just sit there, either.”

Such absurd nonsense, I remember thinking, as I tried to coax deeper attention from the Human-Resources beauty, imagining she could see my keen intelligence and powerful, rebellious spirit. She didn’t. She seemed to wilt as the day went on.

Such unbelievable nonsense. I nearly went so far as to mouth the words.

But two years later, with rumors of reorganization sweeping the whisper-crowded corridors of Internal Communications, I volunteered to become the floor’s Defilement Marshall.

I had to fight for the position, actually. And I did.

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• Chapter 1

• Chapter 2

• Chapter 3

• Chapter 4

• Chapter 5

• Chapter 6

• Chapter 7

• Chapter 8

• Chapter 9

• Chapter 10

• Chapter 11

• Chapter 12

  ⚬─────────✧─────────⚬

  “Seasons Clear, and Awe” chronicles three decades in the life of the Gazda family, whose children inherit not wealth but something more dangerous: their parents’ unlived ambitions and their mother’s gift for psychological dissection. As Stephen and Elizabeth grow from precocious children into neurotic artists in their thirties, Matthew Gasda reveals how post-industrial, late 20th century America created a generation too intelligent for ordinary happiness, too self-aware for decisive action: suspended between the working-class pragmatism of their fathers and the creative and spiritual aspirations of their mothers, capable of everything except building lives.

  Matthew Gasda is the founder of the Brooklyn Center for Theater Research and the author of many books, including the recent novel The Sleepers and Writer’s Diary.

  ⚬─────────✧─────────⚬

  2019

  Elizabeth arrived at Charles de Gaulle with gin and Xanax in her blood system. The recording session had gone terribly. She had fought with Louis for three days.

  After spending the first week that they were supposed to be recording, taking her to parties and going to the countryside and drinking in bars, not really thinking about music, and then suddenly pushing her to sing until her voice started to crack. It was ridiculous.

  —You’re a genius, Louis had said in New York. We need to make an album together.

  And she’d been so excited, she’d really thought that this was it.

  The unconscious was life and life was turning against her, dominating her, and had forced her to buy a bottle of gin before she left. She was already starting to forget the songs she wrote. She didn’t really write anything down.

  She spent six weeks in her apartment in Bedstuy, writing them, preparing the album, gave up her apartment, went to Europe, worked on the farm in Switzerland, went to Genoa, went to Paris, started recording the songs and just broke down. The manic energy started to falter; Louis started to push her; she broke down; and the natural luminosity, what she felt when she sang, when her fingers plucked at the guitar, almost as if it were a harp, started to fade.

  The reality around her started to explode. The lights in Charles de Gaulle were so bright, she almost felt like she was dead and had gone to the moon, had become a moon person or like she was in a space station.

  Only a few generations back in this experience, there would have been unimaginable fluorescent light, glass and steel, plastic, sealed off from nature, giant steel birds taxiing around the glass, taking off into the sky, to her great-grandmother from Verona, who she’d been learning about lately.

  This would have been a terrible nightmare, and it was a terrible nightmare.

  ---

  Adele opened her iPhone with a four digit code, the year of her birth (1955), and called her son, who had just turned 30 at precisely 12:12 that afternoon, and though it was around one (Stephen hadn’t picked up and might have been asleep at 12:12), she still felt how special this moment was; it had been thirty years since this newborn had been carved out of her belly by the surgeons, balled up and blue. Her husband was beside her; she put the phone on speaker:

  —Hi son.

  —Hi mom.

  —I’m here with your father; I’m just calling to wish you happy birthday.

  —Aw, that’s very sweet, I’m touched.

  —I’m sure you’re busy but we wanted to hear your voice.

  —It’s nice to hear yours too.

  —Hi son, happy birthday, Michael piped in, in a voice that had grown lower, and lost brightness, over the years.

  —What are you up to Stephen with your big day? Adele asked.

  —Well I had a party last night at my apartment; it was really fun; I mean we probably had about 30 or 40 people.

  —Oh yeah that’s great.

  —Who was there? Michael asked.

  Adele glared; Michael always wanted the factual details about his children’ s lives, in a rote way, even if the names wouldn’t mean anything to him.

  —I mean not a ton of people you know; Weintraub, Gates, some people from my theater company.

  —Madison was there?

  —Yeah of course.

  —I never know with you two.

  —I mean.

  —I don’t get this whole open relationship thing.

  —What is there not to get?

  —I just don’t know how you do it.

  —Can we not talk about this Michael groaned.

  —Yeah it’s my birthday!

  —I’m not judging you my sweet love. I’m just asking.

  —Okay but I’m with Dad; let’s change the subject.

  —Okay, well, you don’t even have to stay on the call with us for too much longer if you don’t want to; we just wanted to say happy birthday.

  —How’s Elizabeth?

  —She called from the airport, seems like she’s having a tough time; your dad is going to pick her up in an hour.

  —Sorry to hear that.

  —She says she wants to stop drinking.

  —I think drinking is a good thing, Stephen said.

  —Well not everyone is able to set limits with themselves the way you can, Adele said.

  —Fair.

  —I’m still reeling from the Eagles loss, Stephen, referring to the Divisional round playoff loss to the Saints (when folk hero Nick Foles’ pass to Alshon Jeffrey bounced off the receiver’s hands into the hands of Saints cornerback Marshawn Lattimore) announced (both changing the subject and reaching out through the phone to his father).

  —Pretty terrible Michael said stoically.

  —Do you think Foles is going to be back?

  —I’d like it if he were, Michael said, with the stoicism of a lifelong Eagles fan, —but Wentz has that contract, so.

  —Fuck Wentz, Stephen said. —I can’t think of a single Eagles fan who doesn’t want Foles starting at this point.

  —I guess we’ll see.

  —Okay Stephen, we’re going to go for a walk.

  —It must be strange without Calvin around, Stephen said, referring to the dog, who had died over the summer, at age 13.

  —It’s very strange, but your father and I are trying to take walks both in his honor and to keep ourselves in shape. We really enjoy them. Don’t we Mike?

  Michael grunted in assent from across the dining room table.

  ---

  Elizabeth’s flight from Paris arrived at six, and by 6:57, Michael was able to locate his daughter at level two of the Terminal B arrivals. She carried a book bag, a larger duffel, and a guitar. She had her hands as she got in the car. “Eczema,” she said. —I’m fucking exhausted.

  —Long flight, Michael said, afraid to pry.

  —Well, I haven’t slept for two and a half days, she said, as if under a spell of dark enchantment.

  —That’s a long time,” Michael said.

  —Well, I fought with Louis about the recordings, and he kept telling me to keep singing, and I said my voice was tired. I got drunker and drunker and ended up in the airport with gin and Xanax in my system, wanting to never have a drop of alcohol again.”

  —That might be a good thing, Michael agreed, cautiously.

  —I want to get a sobriety drink tomorrow. Can you take me somewhere like a vintage?

  —Yeah, that’s fine, Michael said. —Of course.

  ---

  It was one in the morning. There was a bottle of organic red wine open on the floor. Stephen felt a deep bodily contentment. It was January 22nd, his birthday, and he planned to take the Transbridge bus from Port Authority to Bethlehem the next day, or the day after that, so he could be back in time for his birthday dinner at his Aunt Rosemary’s. His apartment was big. The bedroom was big, and there was a second, smaller bedroom that he used as an office, which had a cot in it that his sister had left in New York ostensibly to travel or crash at when she passed through. The office had a standing desk made of a marble tabletop that his father had made using steel stilts, which he was quite proud of, which had Stephen’s books and his typewriter. Between the cot and the long standing desk stood an IKEA bookshelf.

  In the living room: a small table in the corner where Stephen ate dinner. More bookshelves. A metal entertainment center with the record player and records. A shitty couch with blue painter’s tape on the walls where there were pages of books and notebooks. A few prints: an Egon Schiele, a Picasso, a Giotto that Stephen had ordered.

  Stephen’s lover (and very much not his girlfriend) Albina, two-thirds his age, 20 to his 30, stretched out on the blue floral patterned rug on the floor of his living room, all 5’ 10’’ of her in her underwear and his flannel. They were listening to a Brahms quintet in B minor, Op. 115, for clarinet and strings (on the record player that was the property of Madison, Stephen’s girlfriend of three-and-a-half years). Albina struggled to rationalize the arrangement (even though she had her own girlfriend at NYU, and in theory looked at the polyamorous and, in her case, queer lifestyle as rational, if not entirely functional or preferable). Monogamy, the social category of ‘the monogamous’ as Stephen explained, was a mystery to him. He didn’t understand why people did it, how they could do it, but the point was when the soul, the body was always reconstructing and regrouping around other attractions, other sources of energy, more or less unconsciously and sometimes consciously.

  Desire moved in measure like a dancer and that he had to obey where it went.

  —The day I broke my violin was the worst day of my life, Albina said when the record ended (they hadn’t spoken for the last movement).

  —How’d you do that?

  —Oh I mean I did it on purpose because I was struggling with a piece and then my mother freaked the fuck out.

  —The worst thing you can do as the child of a Soviet is fail at music, huh.

  —There are worse things.

  —But did you fail or just feel like a failure?

  —There is no difference, Albina said in her blunt, rational voice that Stepehen knew masked a more suspicious, irrational, and emotional self (but maybe this was also just being Russian or ‘Soviet’).

  —My last piano lesson was the last week of high school; I basically kept taking lessons because I knew my teacher would be hurt if I stopped, but I really stopped practicing whatsoever the last two years; I mean I was playing in bands so it sort of helped to keep the scheduled time, but.

  —I would literally kill to hear your high school band.

  —Yeah you literally never will.

  —I bet I could internet stalk you.

  —It’s not on the Internet; some stuff I recorded with my sister in our early 20’s is online, but even that I think you’d have trouble finding.

  —What kind of music did you and your sister make?

  —Like dream pop stuff; I dunno.

  —Dream pop. Highly dubious.

  —What do you want to listen to next?

  —I am not against good old Bach, Albina said, sitting up to receive a kiss from Stephen.

  —We can take a chunk out of the Mass in B Minor.

  —My friends think I’m crazy for trekking out to Flatbush every weekend.

  —It’s not so bad on the B express.

  —There’s no express on weekends.

  —Right.

  —I wonder if I’m crazy.

  —We have nice times together.

  —We do.

  They let the music settle over them; Stephen poured more wine out into both of their cups.

  —Your friends are only scolding you because they’re trying to mask their boredom.

  —Sure. But you hide me from your friends.

  —Not entirely.

  —No but you introduce me as your ‘friend.’

  —Well.

  —Yeah you’re not gonna say the hot twenty year old you’re fucking.

  —No I’m not gonna say that.

  —It’s fine; I don’t need acceptance on the Millennial dinner party circuit.

  —It sounds like you do Bina.

  —I just... Albina clutched the glass which contained her wine, and Stephen watched her frantic, unknowable, inner-process manifest itself in front of him; it reminded him of his mother; it reminded him of his sister. —I want um... I don’t know... I don’t know...

  —Use your words.

  —Shut up Stephen... insufferable...

  —Sorry.

  ---

  Having returned home from her son’s play, a family drama called Model Citizens, in New York, which was staged in a small townhouse in Chelsea, Adele, after Michael (who hated driving into the city) went to bed, went rummaging through the metal filing cabinet in the basement where she kept the family’s most important documents (a file for Stephen, Elizabeth, Michael, herself). It took her about ten minutes to find a small, yellowing newspaper clipping:

  A Bethlehem woman, Adele A. Rossi, will make her professional stage debut at the J.I. Rodale Theatre, Allentown, May 11.

  She will appear as Millie, one of four sisters in “Scenes and Revelations,” a new work by playwright Elan Garonzik, a native of Lancaster.

  Prior to the Rodale appearance, Ms. Rossi had a brief part in a Pennsylvania Playhouse production, “Play It Again, Sam.” Before that, her theater experience had been in high school plays.

  She attended Freedom High School before entering Moravian College where she was awarded a bachelor of arts degree.

  Ms. Rossi lives with her parents, Arturo and Maria Rossi, who reside at 814 W. Union Blvd.

  “Scenes and Revelations” will run through May 21. Performance and ticket information is available at the theater box office, 837 Linden St., Allentown, or by telephone at 433-3394.

  The next morning, having not slept, she called her son, who, to her surprise, picked up at 10:35 a.m. (he was a late riser and usually started tutoring work late afternoon).

  —My son!

  —Hi mom.

  —I couldn’t sleep last night after I got home from your play.

  —I’m sorry to hear that.

  —It’s very good; and you know I don’t always think so.

  —Well gee thanks.

  —I mean that sincerely, it was very moving; even the mother character.

  —Okay I believe you.

  —I think you’ve really matured as a writer, Stephen.

  —Is there a non-back-handed...?

  —I’m your mother after all.

  —I know.

  —So you have to let me...

  —You should try to go back to bed or something or take a nap this afternoon I mean; if you haven’t slept.

  —Oh I can’t do that; you know that.

  —Mom... I worry...

  —You’re turning into your mother: a worrywort.

  —Can’t be helped I guess.

  —How’s New York? How’s your apartment?

  —It’s fine.

  —How’s Madison?

  —It’s fine; we’re seeing other people now; but we’re still seeing each other, so.

  —How does that work? Do you get jealous?

  —I dunno Mom; no; not really; I’m not a jealous person.

  —Does she?

  —Probably a little.

  —I guess I’m not hip to these things.

  —How’s home? How’s Dad?

  —Pretty grumpy. I think he misses Calvin.

  —You guys should get another dog.

  —We’re old.

  —You’re not that old Mom.

  —It’s a lot to take care of a pet.

  —You always say that; you said that after Hobbes died.

  —I think your father was very attached to Calvin; I don’t think he’s ready for another dog.

  —Well, eventually.

  After getting off the phone with Stephen, Adele made coffee in the Mr. Coffee in the kitchen, which they’d recently done over, so now it marked the blue marble countertops. She added a little raw milk, the kind the kids insisted they buy and drink, claiming it was better for you, and which she had grown to like. With her coffee, she walked through the dining room and the living room, onto the porch, and then down into the stone patio that Michael had built by hand in the summer of 2010. She sat down on the green Adirondack chairs that looked out onto the fenced backyard, which had been fenced after they got Hobbes.

  And then everything was so quiet without children or without a dog. The neighborhood had been largely emptied of children over the years. In the ‘90s, the summer evenings were filled with the sounds of playing children, and the cries of their voices would continue long after dark as they darted between houses, playing hide-and-seek and manhunt, racing their bikes up and down the alley, the sounds of teenagers listening to music in their cars.

  Now it was just old folks, boomers, living in the empty coral reefs. A human being could only be oriented, she thought, toward past, present, or future at one time. When she was a teenager, and even into her 20s, she had looked toward the future. When she was raising kids, she had looked toward the present. And now that her kids were in their 30s, or approaching their 30s, she had started to look toward the past.

  Her parents were dead. Michael’s parents were dead. Michael had survived cancer. Neighbors had started to die, the folks a little older than them. Gary next door had died suddenly of a brain aneurysm. Art Wallander had pancreatic cancer and didn’t seem to have long to live. Irene was going blind on Henderson Street. It wasn’t easy aging.

  In addition to insomnia, Adele had osteoporosis. She was still thin, but she’d gotten a little stout around the waist, not like some of her friends, like Mariana or Susan, but she’d never been less physically active. She wanted to retire. She didn’t enjoy driving into Allentown for work at the law office, especially since the merger with the New Jersey firm.

  She still missed her father almost 20 years later. Actually, the more time passed, the more the awareness of the loss and its ever-present possibility increased. In fact, an awareness of time and its forward directionality was its own function. There was nothing really now to deflect or divert that awareness of the flying arrow.

  And she almost welcomed one of her children having a crisis, because it would give her a task to displace her melancholy and terror.

  ---

  It was January, and a very cold day outside. Stephen was hanging out with his sister, who was staying in his guestroom/office, a small room with a standing desk that his father had built, and a sofabed (taken from Elizabeth’s old apartment).

  His sister had just returned from Europe, where she had been itinerant: working on a farm in the Swiss alps, renting a flat in Genoa, and finally, Paris, where she was supposed to record an album, but had, instead, fought with the producer, Louis, a friend from New York, the details of which she had just recounted to her brother. Now she was floating between Bethlehem and her parents and Brooklyn and her brother’s. She had no plan as far as Stephen could tell.

  —God, it’s warm in here; I need to open a window.

  They were in Stephen’s living room: a recliner-couch, a record player, small dining table in the corner, pages of books, movie stills, taped with blue tape over all the walls.

  —Yeah, Elizabeth said, moving to the window.

  —Actually, it is hot in here, but I kind of like it.

  —I think you’re right.

  —I already have coffee anyway, Stephen said.

  —Dad seems... Elizabeth started.

  —Hmm?

  —Dad seems bad.

  —Yeah?

  —He’s on antivirals. He’s on SSRIs. He’s on statins. He’s on everything. He’s on too many drugs.

  —Yeah.

  —I know. Mom was saying she’s been so dizzy and everything. I was like, well, what drugs are you on?

  —She’s like, oh, well, my doctor increased the dose of my statin.

  —Mom’s on statins?

  —Something. Whatever. Her blood pressure medication, Elizabeth said.

  Stephen went to the kitchenette and started opening cabinets, looking for something...

  —Yeah, and I was like, maybe you should think about that instead of just saying, I’m getting old. It’s like, no, you’re on drugs. Those can cause side effects like dizziness.

  —Yeah, Mom criticized Dad, but then she also...

  —Yeah.

  —You want some royal jelly? Stephen asked, holding a yellow jar.

  —What?

  —Royal jelly.

  —Yeah. Sure. Just a spoonful.

  Stephen grabbed another bottle from the cabinet.

  —You want some sheep thymus?

  —What?

  —Sheep thymus?

  —No.

  —You want zinc?

  —I’ll take some niacin.

  —Okay, I’ll give you a zinc and a picolinate and a niacin.

  —Yeah. I did a niacin flush last night, Elizabeth said. It was nice by the fire. Oh, and your closet’s so well-organized now.

  —How are you and Gideon? Stephen asked.

  —So, I think I’m going to end it, Elizabeth said.

  —When?

  —I don’t know. I just... There’s just no emotional involvement. After three months, it’s like, what are we doing? This is not going anywhere.

  —Does he know that? Sense it?

  —I don’t know. The last 48 hours, it seemed like he’s been a little distant, and I thought, I don’t know. I think the clock’s run out on it. Which is okay.

  —Where are you going to go?

  —I mean, my original plan was to spend another three months somewhere in Europe and travel more. That’s what I was going to be doing in February, March, April. I already miss it. I guess. But then I was seeing Gideon, and I just kind of put it off. But it’s a little tricky because he offered to buy me a hurdy-gurdy for $1,100, and called his friend in Poland about the one I wanted, and the guy called the luthier in Poland and he’s going to pick it up for me in Krakow, and bring it here with him, is the plan. I mean, I’ve offered so many times to just pay for it myself, you know? But he says no, no, I’ll get it for you. It’s a present. I want to do it.

  —Do you ever see Anthony? Stephen asked.

  —I saw him on Christmas Eve at his parents’ house.

  —How was that?

  —He’s still living at home. Still in his childhood bedroom, Elizabeth said. —At 30. But if it wasn’t for Gideon that would be me too.

  —Jesus.

  —Yeah, with all his film equipment. And he goes to Jungian analysis twice a week.

  —Of course he does.

  —He should have been a priest, Stephen said.

  —That’s the right place to put your unwillingness to claim your sexuality. Take all of that libido and put it into something else.

  —I mean, who knows? Maybe Dan Boettner will eventually end up in a monastic community or something. Upstate New York, I think there’s a bunch of them. I wouldn’t be surprised.

  —But I’ve been saying that for years, like, I wouldn’t be surprised if he finally... Yeah. He’s in Bethlehem, too. He texted me in January when I was in Miami.

  —Really? He just texted you out of the blue? Didn’t he come to the Into the Sea workshop in the spring?

  —Yes, he was basically just rude. I was polite, but I tried to engage and it was pointless.

  Stephen, still perusing the cabinets, took a mug down, and picking up a glass, half-full French press from the counter, poured his sister a cup of coffee.

  He returned to the living room bearing the cup, which she, sitting on the couch which faced the table and record player, took into her hands.

  Stephen, kneeling in front of the record player, selected Mahler’s 4th Symphony.

  —I think a lot of these men, from our childhood, boys who’ve become men, with maybe the exception of Ben to some degree, although he didn’t make it either, have just retained their liberal worldview from 2009, Stephen said.

  —How do they... What do they think?

  —They all kind of phased me out once I didn’t do the super progressive ideology stuff and I haven’t heard from any of them since. With the exception of Drew, about sports, like, once in a while when he’s lonely.

  —I got the same ‘I’m non-binary now’ text from him, Elizabeth said.

  —Yeah, he texted me like, I’m just letting you know I’m non-binary now and then something about how he was terrified that Trump is gonna win a second term.

  —I said something like, I have no idea who’s going to win and since then he’s texted me about the Eagles and Sixers a few times which is fine.

  —I signaled that I had no interest. I’m sure he was testing to see what I would say.

  —For all I know, Nick is non-binary too.

  —I don’t actually think Nick was. He was always too innocent in a way to actually care that much about...

  —No, but for Anthony, it’s just admitting that there was ever a worm in the apple of the ‘90s and 2000s, Stephen said.

  —Yeah. I think there’s this strange phenomenon in our generation. Like, for a man so loyal to his family, his grandparents, his traditions, just ever questioning that loyalty actually requires some kind of aggressiveness, some kind of pride.

  —Like, you know, part of being an Italian child is having testosterone. You can’t just passively worship the past, Elizabeth said. You have to have some muscular view of how to create a world in which you participate, Stephen agreed. It’s not enough to be a sensitive, liberal subject of the empire and expect your life to work out. First of all, the empire thinks you’re bad, and you’ve been sacrificed to it.

  —Yeah. There’s this strange cohort, and I’m included within that cohort, although I think I’m always actively looking for a way out, at least. But this cohort of people, we’ve just ended up materially totally dependent on our parents, Stephen said. We never gained material independence and thus are unable to lead mature lives anywhere. Not in the hometown, not in the big city, not anywhere. And I think that’s, in a way... I’m interested in writing these quasi-political essays right now about this. I’m trying to answer that question for myself: what birthed this cohort of people? Why? It wasn’t a foregone conclusion that people like Nick or myself... there’s nothing so terribly wrong with us that we can’t make it in life. Or some of our cousins, you know? Someone who is alive, living her life, but where’s the capacity to build external structure for oneself? What happened?

  —Well, that’s what I mean. Nick and Boettner, they were just men who needed to go to church, either become a priest or get married. They don’t have the capacity... I mean, maybe you fought your own capacity, but we have the capacity to create our own. Or, like, I especially have created something, but they show no... like, they’ve always been in some way hostile towards it or felt that there’s something nefarious about it, Elizabeth said.

  —Or even the idea of using charisma, sleeping with actresses, being charming, it’s like, well, in a way, that charisma and masculinity is part of it. Maybe that’s not liberal-coded, which it wasn’t, Stephen suggested. Like, Nick’s having an affair with a 22-year-old, I heard, apparently, like... but for him, he would never, in a sense, build something in the world. He would never have the idea of masculine erotic power being part of his artistry, his way through the world, that he would have to deal with malign people and institutions and fight. Like, he’s escaped totally into his unconscious rather than battled with New York reality or any place where if what he wanted to do was be a filmmaker or an artist. Someone in his position had two paths: he could have stayed at home, gone to church, got married, been an art teacher, which is a completely wonderful way to live. He absolutely could have done that.

  —It’s just really the question of... I have to defend the childhood bedroom a little bit because I don’t have my own apartment right now. But no, I don’t have the same relationship to it that Nick does. It’s the question of: what happens to the family? In some ways, it literally drove me crazy, Elizabeth said.

  —Well, he does go to his Jungian psychoanalysis. But it requires some kind of conscious engine. And I think it’s very... I’ve come to like Jung a lot, Stephen admitted as he laid down on the floor a few feet away from his sister on the couch.

  —A lot of successful people are Jungian therapists because it’s a very passive orientation to the world. It’s not anything like Jung would have really recognized as normal. For people in the West, in modern Western society, it would have been considered completely abnormal, Stephen said. I think that’s the way we live, not that it’s by fault of our own; it’s just how things are made up. So when you look at the Boomer generation, they did the external ego-building. It was a lot easier for them. And you see all the rhetoric online about the Boomers stealing all the wealth and ruining it for us, and they all have five houses and everything. But it was easier for them, and so they were able to build their material lives out. But then the unconscious process never happened for their generation. It never happened. Which is the crazy part. That is as crazy as both inversions are crazy. And so they end up miserable, they end up divorcing, or on tons of meds, or what have you, without whatever is missing for them to engage with the fact of their existence. That is totally absent for their generation.

  —So, I went to a concert, an album release. Do you know Katie Pink at all? Elizabeth asked.

  —I feel like she came to something I did; you guys are acquainted?

  —I think she’s actually quite intelligent. She had an album release party at The Sultan Room in Bushwick. It was a cool space, and it was packed. I actually ran into some friends there, and it was nice. And she put on a show. It wasn’t just mumbling into a microphone, she put effort into it. At the same time, the material she was singing about was very simplistic feeling. It wasn’t like smarmy love-song folk music, it was just... And I was sitting there, or standing there, and I was like, she’s singing to her mom. I was looking around the room, and I was like, all of these people are doing unconscious mommy worship. Or daddy worship, depending on who they are. And I realized at that moment that the room was filled with all of these people who had never, never emotionally matured. And I was like, that’s what’s always turned me off about Brooklyn. Not like fucking Manhattan, because Manhattan has ego. It has ego structure.

  —It does, Stephen said. I feel like I’m a totally different person now that I’m living alone. This apartment has an ego structure.

  —As Jung said, Elizabeth explained in her slow, strangely precise way of speaking, early adulthood is for building ego. That’s what people do here. That’s why it’s important to live here. They come from families that have money here, and they maintain the ego structure of the family through their individual lives, which is really the natural course for Western people. Whereas Brooklyn collects the inverted ego-unconscious structure. And that’s such as our young selves. And that’s why it turns you off so much when you live there. And it’s just such a shame because Katie is intelligent and talented, Elizabeth said.

  —But yeah, I don’t know what I’m saying, Stephen paused.—Yeah, I think that’s why people don’t like my plays. The common criticism of my plays is, ‘That’s not how people talk.’ But that’s kind of the point.

  —It’s how our family talks; that’s the thing; and we very distinctly grew up in a structure of extreme ego structure. Dad, and then total unconscious chaos Mom. That, in the end, turns out to be very dramatic when you put those tensions on stage.

  —Totally.

  —Do you mind if I crash here and read if you go out or whatever?

  —Alright, I’m gonna take a shower and then head out, Stephen said, standing up.

  —Yeah, sounds good.

  —I love you.

  —Love you too, Elizabeth said.

  —Have you seen my new boots? she asked, showing them off.

  —Nice. They’re really good.

  —Yeah.

  —Alright, see you. Bye.

  —Bye.

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Later this week we’ll wrap up our serialization of Matthew Gasda’s novel Seasons Clear, and Awe. Catch up with the previous chapters here.

Submissions for our next contest are open until this Wednesday, January 28th, after which we’ll introduce a new round of Finalists among whose excerpts our subscribers will vote to select the next novel we’ll serialize in full at PILCROW. Do please spread the word.

Stay safe out there in the maelstrom.

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⚬─────────✧─────────⚬

To communicate with Mars, converse with spirits,
To report the behaviour of the sea monster,
Describe the horoscope, haruspicate or scry….

-T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

Astrology tells us about time’s qualities. The planets and their angles bespeak textures, atmospheres, and light that might be likely to hold certain sorts of events. It’s a weird and trippy task to attempt to read the astrology of a whole year ahead. (Who knows WTF is going to happen?!!) And January 1 is not the astrological beginning, anyway. The zodiacal wheel starts with Aries in late March—early spring, first fire, high sun. Even so, January feels like a psychological restart. A psychoactive mix of daunting, exciting, and comforting to see the calendar dates and ephemeris spread out before me as I try to read the year ahead.

Speaking of Aries: the biggest (?!) celestial event of the year—the Saturn Neptune conjunction—is unfolding at the very first degree, the zero point, of Aries, which also happens to be the first degree of the zodiac. (“Where is the summer, the unimaginable zero summer?” T.S. Eliot asks in Four Quartets.) On February 20^th, Saturn and Neptune will conjoin, join forces, come together. They haven’t done this since 1989. Saturn, lord of time and winter, is associated with structures and limits—the hard edges of so-called reality, and Neptune with oceanic dissolve, cinematic imagination, and redemption. Most astrologers talk about Saturn and Neptune as contraries, and about their upcoming meeting as a sign that longstanding structures—literal and figurative—will dissolving. (The last time Saturn and Neptune were together was 1989—around the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall…)

Aries, host of this once-every-thirty-six-years happening, rules the head, as we come into the world headfirst. Aries—the emboldened, youthful portions of our sky and selves—likes to rush ahead. Saturn, however, goes slow—taking 2.5 years to move through a sign. Renaissance astrologer and priest Marsilio Ficino said we encounter Saturn through mourning and magic farming. So: a very wintry planet, damp and contemplative, will spend 2026 in Mars’s hot house. It reminds me of how T.S. Eliot opens “Little Gidding” (the fieriest portion of Four Quartets): “Midwinter spring is its own season.” That wild stanza ends with zero summer—unimaginable, charged, gaping.

This year, many planets are leaving earth and water (“feminine” elements) and entering fire and air—overtly dynamic, action-oriented. Mercury—planet of language, speech, poetry, and trickery, goes retrograde three times in 2026. Its backward, downward trips will all take place in water signs. Traditional astrology tells us that Mercury struggles in liquid: waterlogged, bogged down, sad. Slow and swimming lingo. Reflective, maybe, of some turn away from AI or fast utilitarian fixes. The weirder, thicker, more ambiguous route.

In Eliot’s Four Quartets, water shows up at the start of “The Dry Salvages,” in the form of a muddy river, “sullen, untamed and intractable” and “almost forgotten by the dwellers in cities.” This water stores everything, but it’s not like iCloud storage. Rather: “seasons and rages, destroyer, reminder of what men choose to forget.” The water watches and waits. The water is mad and primary, its rhythm “present in the nursery.” Treading water while reading and re-reading our primary texts: dreams (this is partly why I’m teaching this yearlong study of dreams!) This is also Saturn-Neptune merging: the mind-altering, suddenly poetic dimensions at the edges of scrolling, repetition, clock time’s drudgeries.

To take reality undiluted—and to suffer, is the trippiest thing ever. Saturn turning into Neptune, sea god, and god of sea turning back into Saturn—father, mother…Time. Yeah, maybe that’s it—?!—2026: the year of dealing with time straight-up, uncut. Like one of Simone Weil’s most hardcore takes: “Human misery would be intolerable if it were not diluted in time. We have to prevent it from being diluted in order that it should be intolerable.” We can take it. But what’s the point? Well, Weil doesn’t love her suffering “Because it is useful” but “because it is.” (!!) Suffering is the relationship, Weil tells us, between past and future. Which is both nothing and everything. Hmm. I began this reading by with astrology and time and am ending with the immense necessity of suffering! (I’m a Virgo! It was inevitable.) I’m watching the astrology of 2026—moving the planets through the signs as the year rolls on and on and they make conversations, go invisible under the beams of the sun, then emerge—sunburnt and new.

Here are brief horoscopes for the year ahead. Horoscope means HOUR MARKER. So, these are ways to mark the long-short hour of 2026. I think of them as like, tarot cards or screen shots—little moments to read, walk away from, come back to, amplify, delete, riff on.

Read for your RISING SIGN and/or SUN SIGN ☺

ARIES

A shimmering, alchemical darkness at the year’s start, which might, if you explore it fully, turn into solid gold later on. Old memories and repetitive thinking, or the awful, helpless sense that you’ve wasted lots of time. By the end of February, the dreariness may begin to lift, and it’s like life’s in technicolor again. The sense that you’re in your body and the world, not to the side or hovering somewhere above. Pay close attention to your body’s movements, desires, breath. Come summer, Jupiter enters your house of romance, children, play, and partying. What seemed f*cked or hopeless at year’s start enters the realm of the possible.

TAURUS

There’s a feeling of earthy sainthood about your 2026 transits. E.M. Cioran called saints “God’s insomniacs.” So: a sense of otherworldly insight brought to you via facing the most occluded parts of your soul and the world via Neptune and Saturn converging in your 12^th house of hidden knowledge. Said otherwise: you might stay up late at night. You might want to devote lots of time to your dreams, taking them very seriously while also using care not to take them too literally. Read them, instead, as dense texts to be returned to again and again and again until year’s end, amen.

GEMINI

Come springtime: some lightbulb, holy ghost moments brought to you by Uranus, planet of electricity and sudden revelation, who is moving into your sign. Venus will already be there, acting like a pretty welcoming committee. Unexpected romance, new insights into an artistic process, or epic synchronicities. Light might get shed on what it means to you…to be a Gemini. Twins, doubles, and double motifs, Jung observed, often show up in dreams that have to do with synchronicities. Where are your doubles? What pair of creatures guards your consciousness? How do they talk to each other?

CANCER

Saturn and Neptune are coming together at the very top of your chart—at the brightest, most lit part. How do you want to be seen? How do others regard you? What about your legacy? Something you’ve been studying, researching, writing, working hard on for the past two or three years may reach the hot high light of noon in the near future, so make sure you give it your all, leave it all on the field. Later, when Jupiter enters your house of finances this summer—you might receive an unexpected gift that further clarifies these questions of visibility.

LEO

An emphasis, this year, on mental and physical trips, along with questions of fate and free will. Maybe you’ll take a road trip and/or get very into astrology. Jean Baudrillard (a fellow Leo) wrote that one’s astrological sign is one of the last vestiges of fate in an age so obsessed with “making things happen” as opposed to “letting things happen.” Like, you can’t surgically remove your Leo-ness. You just can’t. So how do you relate to it? You might seek, this year, to “let things happen,” to study and seduce the stars and the weird zodiacal movements of fate as they unfold and shimmer. Baudrillard wrote: “No one should laugh at astrology, for he who no longer seeks to seduce the stars is the sadder for it.”

VIRGO

“A kiss is the beginning of cannibalism,” wrote fellow Virgo Georges Bataille. This is the sort of freaky and sacred thing that’s getting spot lit for you in 2026—intimacy, limits, and those mind-altering dissolves and separations between you and your loved ones. Sex, death, other people’s money, karmic and financial entanglements! Write down your dreams, reveries, and random access memories—scribble them in an allotted notebook before you forget! Dreams, according to Bataille, belong to the illegible and hard-to-grasp arena of the sacred. This year, revelations and new starts might arrive while you sort through another person’s stuff and/or heavy gifts you’ve been given, energetic and/or financial.

LIBRA

Jung says that everything in the dream is you—your enemies, friends, sky, curtains—all of it. This year, tons of planetary energy in your house of THE OTHER: relationships, partnerships, collaborations. Mystical merging, unions with a human other that feels divine, or generative new creative partnerships. Careful not to project your own sh*t onto your partner, collaborator, spouse. One idea: study the mirror and mirror images in fairy tales, movies, and the drama of the dream. All the while: lots of action along your axis of art-making and friends/networking. Translation: a social year. The art of hosting and entertaining. Décor as depth. Gossip as high art.

SCORPIO

Work. Work in service of the other. Work that’s not for accolades or likes. Work that opens you up, helps you forget yourself, and lets the beyond enter your frame. Saturn and Neptune are coming together in your house of service—the house where the self slides away, no longer centered. You might begin to volunteer more or delete your social media. The second half of the year might see unexpected breakthroughs and a ha! moments in your career and public life—

not as a reward, per se, for all your behind-the-scenes work, but as a kind of grace.

SAGITTARIUS

Emily Dickinson (a Sagittarius) said that nature is a haunted house and art is a house that tries to be haunted. This year, there’s new life force (ghost?) in your house of art. It’s melting old structures and making new ones appear. It seems benevolent and joyful. All this haunting, all these ghosts, might help you locate new depths of joy in your creative practice. Collaboration. Letting go. Letting go, especially, of any kind of knowing, and any sort of self-satisfaction. You might want to start by reading Emily Dickinson and paying close attention to the joyful playfulness haunting the houses of her poems.

CAPRICORN

Your year starts off with a big bang—Venus and Mars (emissaries of love, art, action, drive) meet with the sun at the opening moments of your chart and get cleansed, reborn. A brand new direction is felt, but maybe not known. Things start to clarify late February, early March—but might come to you in unexpected ways and hidden messages. Pay attention! Like, to what’s immediately around you, using care not to daydream into infinity while forgetting what’s right under your nose—so close it’s hard to see. From this attention (Weil said attention is the “rarest and purest form of generosity”… new ways of working, being, and finding the mind-bending mystical hidden in everyday muck.

AQUARIUS

Is it the age of Aquarius yet? I forget. But, 2026 is very Aquarius-heavy. Eclipses are coming to your sign this year, beginning in February. And Pluto, Lord of the underworld, is already there—as if you didn’t know—moving glacially as it transforms your body, boundaries, and notions of self. Aquarius is an edge-dweller and eclipses change-up what’s centered. What was at the edges might find centerstage and what was centered may get pushed to the margins. Meanwhile, questions of language, speech, and your past creep up. What were your first words? Who was around when you were first naming stuff? And how does that inform the way you speak and write now?

PISCES

At the top of the year, you might feel you are losing your mind. By March, you might get it back. Mercury will move backwards through your sign—the mind slowing down and going back for what it lost. By early spring, you might re-remember your body and its tremendous connection to your mind—getting grounded and more alive via yoga, running, dancing, jumping! You might find yourself reconnecting, this year, with your finances—daring to look at the numbers each week—maybe even creating daily or weekly rituals around all things $$. Spreadsheets and financial planning might offer unexpected routes into the spiritual.

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“Seasons Clear, and Awe” chronicles three decades in the life of the Gazda family, whose children inherit not wealth but something more dangerous: their parents’ unlived ambitions and their mother’s gift for psychological dissection. As Stephen and Elizabeth grow from precocious children into neurotic artists in their thirties, Matthew Gasda reveals how post-industrial, late 20th century America created a generation too intelligent for ordinary happiness, too self-aware for decisive action: suspended between the working-class pragmatism of their fathers and the creative and spiritual aspirations of their mothers, capable of everything except building lives.

Matthew Gasda is the founder of the Brooklyn Center for Theater Research and the author of many books, including the recent novel The Sleepers and Writer’s Diary.

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The day after Thanksgiving, Dan Boettner, who Elizabeth hadn’t heard from directly in almost a year (though he wrote regularly to her brother), asked to go for a walk, which had been their habit since early high school. And so they agreed to meet at God’s Acre Cemetery downtown, where all the original Moravians were buried.

—You’re going to meet Dan? Adele, who believed that the two young people were meant to be together, but had been told many times by her daughter to back off, asked.

—Just for a walk.

—That’s nice.

—Thanks Mom.

—You look nice darling.

Elizabeth wore a grey peacoat with a thick red scarf she had knitted herself during the school year; her long hair (she had cut it short freshmen year only to let it grow unabated since) falling over her shoulders.

—Thanks Mom.

—Dinner will be ready for you when you get back.

She was still with John, but she was glad Dan had texted her; and he wasn’t a threat, sexually, really; in a way she needed both men, or both types of men, in her life, to be happy.

Boettner was the opposite of her boyfriend. Extremely thin, emotional, and perceptive: an individual who possessed an inner core that made any kind of falseness or feigning untenable.

Because she had divided her romantic energies into similar archetypal categories as her mother had; Elizabeth’s feelings for Dan and John occurred to her, formed in each least symmetrical parallel with her own mother’s relationships with Tom Villani, her first love, and her father: there was the hypersensitive local boy artist, who was lover material, and then the tall, strong athlete who was husband and father material.

The lack of respect their mother showed their father, or at least often did, too surely influenced Elizabeth. That lack of respect in flagrant ways, but in small, significant ways (always letting the kids know that Michael’s masculine way of ordering the household was too inflexible and could be safely ignored in favor of more creative, outside-the-box solutions).

It was about 46 degrees. Stephen said Syracuse had already received 100 inches of snow by Thanksgiving, but it hadn’t snowed here yet in Bethlehem. Boston had also gotten some snow, but Pennsylvania just kind of looked grim and bald.

God’s Acre was a small cemetery, less than the size of a football field.

They would maybe start here, she imagined, and then walk over to Nisky Hill Cemetery, which was bigger, more of a 19th-century rather than an 18th-century cemetery.

These cemeteries were two of the most special places in Bethlehem. Bethlehem could be so ugly and modern, and so old and sacred in the spirit of the Moravians, depending on the direction you were looking or where you were standing.

Some streets were colonial, some were Victorian, some were industrial, some were mid-century.

There are so many interesting features to the city that have been silently erased. Streetcars once run through downtown. Her mom used to take an old diesel train to Philadelphia from the station that ran along the Lehigh. Her AP U.S. History teacher in high school had told her that there used to be a magnificent island-park in the Lehigh River, but it had been actually removed and leveled to make room for barges that needed to dock at the steel.

It almost seemed unfair that she didn’t get to experience these different Bethlehems with streetcars and trains and horse-drawn carriages.

Bethlehem had once been an industrial, polyglot city; now it was a deracinated, almost Disney version of its past self, and that made her angry.

And this was why she was going to Dresden in the spring for BU’s study abroad program, because she wanted to try to experience the town. It had actually, in some ways, rebuilt itself along 19th-century lines (this was both a conscious and unconscious thought).

After about ten minutes of waiting, just when she was getting angry and ready to send an angry text on her flip phone and storm off, Boettner appeared. He was wearing a gray jacket, slacks, New Balance sneakers (because he refused to wear anything nice like leather shoes or boots), and a knit cap.

He was probably underdressed; the jacket was thin, he was just wearing a t-shirt underneath. There was no chance he was wearing long johns. But Boettner liked to underprepare, to unthink, to just be. That was his thing.

—I walked over here, he said.

—I drove. I would have picked you up.

—No, it’s okay, Dan said.

—Long time no see, she said without smiling.

—Yeah? Well, do you want to walk?

—Yeah, we can walk.

They began a slow stroll between the flat graves.

Boettner smiled. She sensed that his version of emotion was impossible, or rather that he considered emotion impossible. But to feel this way, to feel anything close to magic or dream was impossible, and so that she would have to, in effect, give him permission to enjoy this, the half-sickness, the strangeness of the faintest hope of what? Was it kissing, was it holding hands, was it collapsing into the snowy loam of the graveyard and making love, was it the gradual descent into death together, husband and wife? Was it a cold distance, saying hello, catching up, resigning themselves to talking three times a year at holidays and oversummers, was it summer, all of these things she didn’t know he didn’t know? It was embarrassing not to know.

—How’s the semester going? she asked.

—It’s fine.

She took a deep drag of air, swollen, terrified, happy. —Are you seeing anyone, or like in love with anyone?

—I’m not in love, Boettner said, matter-of-factly.

—You were last year.

—That was last year, he said.

She felt a rush of unforgiveness, —you hold onto things for a long time.

—I do, but that doesn’t mean.... And his voice disappeared.

They were walking down the stone path through the diametric vertical center of the graveyard.

—Doesn’t mean what?

—Nothing Boettner said.

—No tell me.

—Are you still in love with me? she asked. —Do you love me? Is that what you’re trying to say?

—I something you, Boettner said. —And I think I’d be dead if I couldn’t see you or talk to you Elizabeth.

—Oh, dramatic, dramatic, she said, —dramatic, dramatic, dramatic.

—Honest.

—You’re so dishonest, she said, contradicting him, wanting to cry. —You’re disgusting,

—Thank you.

—No, I mean it Dan, you’re disgusting.

—Happy Thanksgiving, he said.

She felt a sense of spatial lostness, disorientation. She hadn’t gotten in the car, driven here, nine minutes away, to repeat the same blunder that she’d been repeating with Boettner since 10th grade: stinking, bloodless, romantic formality without bodily contact; nauseating, faux seriousness without directness.

(And yet, she clearly had.)

—If you loved me, I don’t think you would act like this, she said, after ninenty seconds where they both walked looking at their feet.

—What’s like this? he asked.

—I don’t know what to call it. Abstract. Theoretical. I don’t think you really want to know me,.

—That’s all I want...

—What’s really on your mind, Dan?

—I went to see my dad this morning.

—How was that? she asked.

—Unpleasant, he said, —disturbing. He’s a hoarder. He’s on disability. His apartment is disgusting.

—I’m sorry, she said.

—He seems very happy. He has no complaints. He couldn’t be happier not to be a doctor anymore. He couldn’t be happier never to leave his apartment.

—Do you envy that kind of life? she asked.

—I think I’m drawn to it, he said.—And I know I shouldn’t be.

—Do you think you’ll end up like your father? she asked.

—It’s not impossible. Do you think you’ll end up like your parents back there?

—I don’t think I could possibly end up like either of my parents, Elizabeth said.

—Then who are you afraid of ending up like?

—Do I have to be afraid of ending up like someone? Elizabeth asked.

—I think everybody has someone... that they’re running from... becoming... I don’t know, it could be a character from a book or a movie that you’re running from that you don’t want to become. It could be a neighbor or a friend, I don’t know. It could be your brother.

—It’s not my brother. Elizabeth cut him off. —Maybe my grandmother.

—That makes sense, Boettner said. —How was your Thanksgiving, or how was it?

—It was fine. My Uncle Don came over for dinner. My dad and brother watched football.

Boettner was the only child who lived with his mother. He didn’t have a brother and a father. Everything she took as normal and perfunctory was extraordinary to him.

She looked over at Boettner: he wasn’t looking at her; she could feel the gray hush of his mind remembering, running away, digesting everything, and turning it into purely intellectual phrases.

She looked at his slanted, Magyar eyes. She wanted to kiss him. Or for him to kiss her, but he never would.

He only had once. The summer before college. And only then for a second.

It occurred to her that he almost certainly was still a virgin. That his only talent really was virginity, and that he had no idea of how to grow up, or any idea of what to do after college (any idea of how to be anything other than a precocious, know-it-all, teenage boy in Bethlehem).

They passed out of the south gate to the cemetery, headed downhill towards, now on the sidewalk, out of the cemetery towards downtown Main Street, which was a half block away.

Bethlehem was simultaneously small and big at the same time. You could hit most of the major landmarks in a day or night, walking in at the same time. And yet, you could never really feel like you knew the town.

—Your brother’s mad at me, Boettner said.

—Why is that? she asked.

—I guess I criticized his writing.

—I don’t think he’s mad at you, she said —he wants to hang out.

—He’s avoiding me, Boettner said, in that infuriating, matter-of-fact voice of his.

—You guys can figure it out. I don’t want to get involved in your who’s a bigger genius competition.

—Do you think you’re a genius? Boettner asked sincerely, like it was the most important thing in the world.

—I have no idea and I don’t care, Elizabeth said, angrily and uncomprehendingly.

His thin face had a glamour to it, almost like a greyhound’s. Boettner was a lean creature, sleek, as aristocratic as someone from Bethlehem could be.

But he was just a boy in New Balance shoes, she thought, with his father’s craziness, his mother’s philistinism.

She felt seasick from trying to love him, from mirroring his neurotic deflections.

They were walking along Main Street now. There were a few people out, besides smoking or drinking at the few restaurants and bars. The Tapas restaurant, the ice cream store, the Hotel Bethlehem, which they crossed in front of now.

—Should we would walk up towards the library? Boettner asked.

—Sure, why not? she said.

The library was three blocks up a hill. Boettner loved the library. She thought it had some kind of nostalgic attachment. Maybe his father took him there when he was young, before his father lost his shit. But the cramped, grey, modernist Bethlehem Public Library never really appealed to her. Boettner, and indeed her brother, loved it. Probably for the same reason it was a place where they felt safe with their fathers, where they remember feeling safe and protected and special.

—Does it make you feel powerful?

—Does what make me powerful? he asked, flatly.

—Offering nothing of yourself to anyone?

—I offer so much of myself, I offer everything, he said.

—No, you don’t, Dan.

—Then you’re not paying attention.

—All you do is withhold.

—Have you ever read Narcissus and Goldmund by Hermann Hesse? he asked.

—My brother gave it to me this year, she said. —He said that you guys decided you were the characters in the book. That made me not want to read it.

—Okay, then never mind, he said.

—I don’t think it’s healthy, she added, —that imagining that everything in your life is part of some scheme connected to the history of Western literature and philosophy. Because what happens when you discover that it’s not?

—I think everyone has the right to place themselves in some kind of larger pattern, or to think their way into that larger pattern, Boettner said. —If you have skill enough to identify the pattern, then no one can say that you aren’t participating in it... and you don’t need reference to God to assert that.

—I’m much more willing to believe in God, Elizabeth said, —than to believe that any of us are destined for anything special.

—That’s fine, Boettner said. —It’s totally fine. It’s probably true.

—I just think it’s dangerous to elevate your own ego like that.

—Again, you’re probably right.

They were at the library now. The city was dark and empty. The house was on Market Street across from the library. The old colonial brick houses, though they were inhabited, seemed like mausoleums, houses of the dead.

A century or two before, there would have been beeswax candles in all the windows. These homes would have been full of warmth and light. In the 21st century, they housed the blasphemy of the TV.

It’s hard to believe that anyone was really alive in Bethlehem. The living spirit of the place, she estimated, had died out when her parents were kids, or maybe even before then. The old, truly human humans, her grandparents and their parents and grandparents, the steel workers and the steel executives and the Moravians, further back, had given way to rational, modern beings who were not entirely human in the way that the people of the past had been. Cold, sly, contingent people with a calculating treacherousness, suburban people who watched TV, who read the morning call, who took their dogs for walks, who gossiped about their neighbors and coworkers, who were in all likelihood sexually inadequate, desperate for real companionship and tenderness.

Young people like herself and Boettner or her brother rebelled against this, but they had no practical notion of how to refute or avoid it or transcend it: the pitiable, unrelenting ordinariness of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania; the casual, melancholy animosity of the living citizens towards the old, traditional, ancestral liveliness of the place, which had been muted, suppressed, ignored, and forgotten.

The modernist library was built on the site of what was once the home of the poet Hilda Doolittle, or H.D. (ironically, the only poet ever produced by Bethlehem a modernist herself). In 1890, H.D’s family would have taken a carriage down Market Street to get home in the snow. Now there was no snow, no carriage, no family closeness (only the strange, calculated ruthlessness of the middle class and the children of the middle class, who were all competing for places in schools and honors and awards and fantasies and praise, all imitating their parents who had done the same thing).

She wanted very badly to throw up.

—You and my brother just feed each other’s egos.

—Do you not have an ego Elizabeth?

—I do, but.

—But?

—I dunno Dan.

—Do you want to sit here?

They were at the “Garden of Serenity” next to the library, built by Bethlehem’s sister sister Tondabayashi in the early 1970’s. The Garden of Serenity contained a wooden Ceremonial tea house with benches and a small gravel box surrounded by shrubs. They always seemed to end up here.

—What’s on your mind? she asked, only half-interested.

Michael, standing on the porch, watched Calvin the dog sniff around the backyard, hemmed in by the wooden fence that Michael had installed himself, looking for a place to pee. It was cold, and Michael was in his pajamas and sweatshirt, and he shivered. Just inside, in front of the fireplace, his son, Stephen, was reading. As he had almost every night of the school break. Tonight, Stephen was reading Plato, which was at least a name that Michael recognized. But there were many nights when Stephen was reading an author that Michael had never heard of before, and that he had no opinion on. And Stephen, in his contempt for his father’s more limited education, could not or would not bother to explain to his father who. He was not sure how to admit to himself that his son had surpassed him in many ways. And suddenly, he seemed to know more, just generally, to have far more information and more ideas.

Calvin, who was five, who Adele and Michael had gotten the senior year of high school, partly to help spare themselves from the emptiness, trotted up the stone steps of the porch and pawed at the screen door. Michael opened it. Calvin trotted into the kitchen, away from the fireplace, wanting water.

—How’s the book? Michael said, closing the door behind him.

—It’s fine, Stephen said.

—Your sister’s not home?

—No, Stephen said. —I think she’s still out with Boettner.

—Sounds good, Michael said. —Mom’s upstairs. She wants you to come watch some BBC show with her.

Stephen said, not looking up from his book,

—Okay. Can you just make sure the doors are locked if you come up? Go to bed before Elizabeth’s back.

—I think she’ll be back before I go to bed, Stephen said.

—Okay, Michael said. —Sounds good. Calvin needs to go out again, just let him out.

—Yeah, of course.

Michael felt wounded and embarrassed. Almost victimized by his son’s bitter indifference. He really had no way to talk to this person except about sports. Which his son had made a point of talking about less and less. Almost as a referendum on the way that he’d been brought up (as if to say, he, my father could have taught me something more useful, deeper, but he never did).

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