As ever, if you believe in what we’re doing at PILCROW, subscribe, share, and consider offering a paid subscription.

⚬─────────✧─────────⚬

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

⚬─────────✧─────────⚬

Jose and Alexa married out of college and got to work. DINKing, he never tired of adding to the end of a sentence relating with false modesty a new professional coup. The union invariably couched in terms of a business partnership: his interests in residential and light commercial real estate and hers in whole body fitness and wellness, her classes taught on the beach near their Manhattan Beach home which they purchased for just north of 3, Jose told Jason, after they had been married for 5 years. Her clientele was 30-50 year old wives of older retired doctors, lawyers and industry types that had bought up the beach front. Their house was one back from the beach front and had a rooftop balcony with an unobstructed view of the ocean, the marina to the north and the pier to the south. He bought his first Maserati in 2012 and she got her augmentation the same year and they hosted parties for their friends in from out of town for the UCLA/USC football game and the Lakers playoffs, plus Cinco de Mayo and Christmas. Jose started convincing several of this friend group to invest in the property business with him around 2016. Several went in for $5-10K with Jose promising 8%, but several went big: Stacie Wang and her Swedish husband (himself a trustafarian of unclear provenance) punted for $150K and Tony and his girlfriend, probably the result of Tony and Jose playing too much golf together, and Pablo being unable to handle his drink, ponied up $200K, basically all of Tony’s inheritance from parents who had died when he was a teenager. When he turned 35, Jose rented out the top floor of the Intercontinental and invited this same group, which had expanded now to include other investors, including some of his wife Alexa’s client’s husbands plus some neighborhood friends they met at sunset walks on the beach, plus some other neighborhood friends from back in the day scattered around LA, plus some family. His mother was there, about 5’ tall and 3’ wide with sackcloth black hair as thick as a Persian rug and who spoke next to no English, and he stood in between her and his wife when he took the mic and announced to the assembled group how proud he was to share all his accomplishments with his friends and family (and he actually at one point used the term partners) and how the party that night was a reflection of his Gatsbian dreams come true. He didn’t actually use the term Gatsbian. In a dipsomaniacal stumble towards the bar later that night he confided to Jason, saying that I need to confide to you that this party cost me $65K, but you can’t tell Alexa. I’m gonna make that in a week but you can’t tell her that either. Double Income No Kids. Six months or so after that it was a party bus to Vegas and the wheels came off. It was for Alexa’s 35th birthday this time and somewhere around Barstow, everyone already knackered to the gills, that Alexa took the mic this time and announced that they had purchased a pot farm in Nor Cal and were adopting two girls from their home in El Salvador to come live with Jose and Alexa in Manhattan Beach.

Ok, back up for a second. Alexa’s mom was pregnant in El Salvador at 14 and escaped her parents and Alexa’s biological father first to Mexico and then through Texas and into southern CA where she met the only father Alexa ever knew, Juan, a Chicano born in Echo Park. Juan was soft spoken, genteel, so totally calm as to seem almost perpetually narcotized. Stable. A provider. He worked at a defense contractor, giving Alexa and her mother (Maria) an upper middle-class decade and a half until Alexa graduated high school and started at USC. Alexa remembered her father, Juan, out of sorts exactly two times: the first time when the photos of the activities of American servicemen and women at Abu Ghraib prison were released on 60 Minutes along with stills of Bush and Cheney having just viewed them, looks of deep consternation and disappointment on their faces and the second time when the Dodgers bombed out before the playoffs in 2007. Both times, Juan had stood up from the TV, placed a hand on the wall and another on his head—as though he might pass out—gave a barely perceptible shake of the head and left the room. By some bargain—tacit or otherwise, Alexa never knew—Juan’s anesthetized personality was a necessary insulator for Alexa’s mother Maria, a woman Alexa found out she barely knew when, at 32, Juan handed her papers and moved in with a white woman named Dorothy McFadden from Simi Valley and she, Alexa’s mother, ostensibly lost her tether and in the parlance of her, Alexa’s, college friends at the time, wilded out, Maria did, buying a whole new wardrobe, clubbing 4-5 nights a week, sleeping with guys Alexa’s age and hoovering up massive amounts of cocaine, while spending her days in the gym and getting a job (she hadn’t worked since taking up with Juan) as a massage therapist, which Alexa didn’t ask about but which furnished rent, clothes money, and the note on a CLK convertible. The SHTF when Alexa’s maternal grandmother died and her mother’s siblings admonished Maria to come back for the funeral and that was all it took. San Salvador had her for two weeks and she turned up pregnant with what turned out to be twin girls and found herself under the thumb, their father’s, of the only type of man that was able to settle her. When the girls were 3, Alexa’s mom retraced nearly identically the trip she took with Alexa in her belly years earlier, through Mexico and Texas to CA, her daughters DACA’d in, and 10 years later worked at a Safeway in Inglewood while Alexa and Jose built their lives across town. The girls—your sisters—are starting middle school next year and they deserve the same shot you had. Are you, reader, still with me? There was no asking Juan (he and McFadden had gone on to have a baby boy, Derek, and had moved to Sylmar) and there would be no second Juan and so Alexa was her mother’s only hope, she said. It turned out that since returning to the US, Alexa’s mother had mostly calmed down, rarely went out with men and in fact became a de facto member of her daughter’s group of friends, but still occasionally supplying her and her friends with bumps time to time and on the sly, and coming to all her parties including the 35th birthday trip to Vegas, to which we will now return in real time narration.

It was the year of the Muslim ban. When they went out for dinner Alexa’s mathematically perfect tits were on display in some MTV Music Awards Red Carpet gown that was strapless with a giant gap in the middle and one breast covered by a tiny piece wrapping around from the back of the dress and apparently glued to her nipple. Jose had taken to calling the twins his empanadas almost immediately. And so Alexa’s mom was with all of us when she, Alexa’s mom, received a text message with a picture of a tumescent gherkin from her daughter, who we’ll call X, followed 3 seconds later by oops, wrong number, and then hope you’re having fun in Vegas and she, Alexa’s mom Maria, may have waited until she got back from Vegas to confront the twins about why X was downloading and texting DPs to her sister, who we’ll call Y, and maybe their friends as well but she, Alexa, just happened to be standing next to her mom at the bar and recognized immediately the kielbasa as belonging to her husband and, snatching her mom’s phone and seeing the message was from her sister X’s phone, grabbed a full bottle of Stolichnaya and nearly crushed Jose’s occipital bone. Did it really matter at that point whether Alexa’s sister X had sent the photo accidentally on purpose to her (Alexa’s) Mom or whether she had meant to send it to Y, and whether Jose had sent it to X or to both X and Y? And did it really matter whether she, X, was just trying to score points with her sister for seeing Jose’s thingy before she, Y, did?

So put yourself, reader, at the bar with Jason and let’s talk about connotations when you hear the word statutory in a nearby conversation after someone’s just been carried away by medics after a bartender had vaulted the bar and pressed a not at all clean looking towel against the wound on Jose’s head, from which blood was not exactly spraying, but flowing nonetheless quite impressively down his neck and onto his back and arm, carried him away like a refugee in a thin foil blanket and Alexa being treated for shock with feet elevated and the crazy dress even more askew and an actual whole breast with tantalizing potential of just falling right out, while you are sitting there watching but not like openly staring, and then not hearing the rest and catching well maybe it was audiophile but probably not and then definitely hearing something-philia and man that means only one thing. It turned out he approached X first, or she discovered him shirtless after a workout and asked to touch his abs, and then told Y about it, details Jose relayed in an initial and hairbrained and highly legally inadvisable attempt to answer the Big Question. But then both Y and X started hanging around the garage when he was lifting and Y asks for his phone number first and then gave it to X and this was even before X and Y moved in with them. With Alexa and Jose. The one that was pushed by the State as indicative of Jose being culpable in the initiation was actually quite banal—to the non-perv, that is—a photo of X’s feet, sent to Jose by Y, to which he replied how pretty, which to a preteen girl translates to what else do you have to show me, and the answer to that was plenty and even though it didn’t progress for another month this was clear indication of manipulation. Grooming. The State argued. A power play by an older authority figure. X and Y were both made to testify. X breaking down and saying she loved Jose and that he said he loved her and Y laughing at this in the courtroom and X calling her a stupid bitch, all of this while Jose stared at his shoes and Alexa cried and Alexa’s mom sat ashen looking at the back of her son-in-law’s head. Everybody getting this so far? It was Y that started it, X said, started the problem and not Jose’s fault, and Y was just being jealous of X’s closeness to Jose, as evinced by the fact that X often got texts from Jose inviting her to come to the garage while he was working out, while Y never received such texts. If not for Y’s interference, X submitted, X and Jose could be happy and it was Y always flashing her stupid boobies which were nothing at all, while Jose was trying to exercise and bending over and putting her coochie in his face, while X was just trying to keep him company and actually bond with him on a deep emotional level, X testified. No, X said, she and Y did not do it with him at the same time but she, Y, did smell her, X, on his thingy one day when X was with him after a workout and this was the last straw and why she sent the picture of his thingy to her mother. No, X said, she didn’t really know whether it was accidental or on purpose that she sent it to her Mom instead of to Y, to which Y blurted out I had that dick way before you did you dumb bitch, to which the judge yelled for order and which elicited no reaction whatsoever from Jose, Alexa or Maria.

And something to think about is the fact that while Alexa was losing her mind, while her entire life was peeling apart in real time in a bar in Vegas as her husband’s head bled and Jason and Jessica all her friends looked on as she screamed and cried and attempted to kick him multiple times and then half-fainted and then actually fainted and then sat up with M. Mason-esque makeup running down her face and hair totally a mess and looking at this point more like a car crash victim, at one point one of her breasts is, finally, momentarily all the way out and everyone either doesn’t notice or pretends not to notice, and then jumps on him again and has to be pulled off and threatened with handcuffs by the police, that while all of this happened, her mom, Alexa’s mom Maria, who received the text, looked at her daughter as though Alexa were executing some act that Maria had paid for lessons for ages ago and she was now forced to watch with equal parts pride, disgust and resignation.

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As ever, if you believe in what we’re doing at PILCROW, subscribe, share, and consider offering a paid subscription.

⚬─────────✧─────────⚬

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

⚬─────────✧─────────⚬

According to the rules the monk and notorious fudger Gregor Mendel extracted from his peas, the likelihood of two parents with brown eyes producing a blue-eyed child (brown being the dominant and blue the recessive allele for eye color) is about one in one thousand, give or take. Now if you examine family photos in your neighbor’s house the next time you go fetch the kids from a play date or while waiting for him to tend grill at the next get together, you may notice evidence of the following fact: the actual occurrence of blue eyed boys being born to brown eyed mothers married to brown eyed men is several standard deviations away from the mean in the positive direction, which means, it has been estimated, that upwards of one out of four, or 25% of US American children were sired by someone other than the man they have known all their lives as Dad. About the time he crashed out of grad school and took the job teaching high school freshman Holden Caufield and the Prince of Danes, his close friend since kindergarten Frank Mustard finished his residency and fellowship in GI and went into private practice. As Jason was upsetting his career’s proverbial apple cart and cutting his earning potential by about 100k USD per year, ostensibly in search of some life-fulfilling reward from serving others or whatever, Frank joined a group outside of Strongsville, Ohio which was one of these towns that exploded with home developments in the late ‘80’s when their parents’ generation started reaping the rewards of several decades of post-war American hegemony and consuming their full meals of comfortable middle class life, with bachelor’s (or in many cases only high school) degrees, two-story homes, plus basements, 3 car garages, large green yards with no fences and no dandelions, newly constructed community centers, yearly vacations to Myrtle Beach or Palm Beach and then Vail in the winter, abundant middle brow fast-food at the metastasizing enterprises of Applebee’s and TGI Fridays, no crime, great schools with free sports and free music and art classes and guidance counselors and aggressive D.A.R.E. evangelism (and the now forgotten groups of M.A.D.D. and S.A.D.D., mothers and students against drunk driving, respectively, the latter later devolving into student athletes detest drugs and then, as harbinger of the evisceration of language into vacuous banality, into students against dangerous decisions, before being scrapped more or less altogether), along with free concerts in the park, Home Days at the end of summer (also free), Veterans’ and Memorial Day parades with fire trucks and the Boy Scouts and the high school band and a couple of well attended and non-born-again Protestant churches, plus a Roman and Greek Orthodox Catholic ones, good snow removal, grass cutting and sharp landscaping in public places during the spring and summer, police that were your parents’ age and clean cut and that would stop by the Dairy Queen and talk with your old man whom they went to high school with on hot August nights as the humidity lifted, the sun still painted the sky orange until 8:30 and all the kids got wistful about the last few days of summer. So, Mustard took a job here straight out of fellowship, starting salary for a GI surgeon of 475,000 American greenbacks per year. The group covered malpractice insurance, the lease on the building, all the kit, admin, billing, patient recruitment, EMR, hiring and firing and HR issues for nurses and PAs, so all Frank had to do was show up three days a week at 7:00am and perform appendectomies and resections and hernia repairs until 2:00pm. Basically cleaning up what the ‘80’s and ‘90’s did to our parents’ abdomens. At 475k per. His 7,000 square foot home on 10 acres of land with a dozen massive deciduous trees and even a small stream running across the back, built as part of a glut after the 2008 shit sandwich, was a three-story, 5 bedroom, 4 bathroom, 4 car garage-containing mausoleum that his wife and he bought for 585,000 using his signing bonus of 50k plus some bread from the old man for downpayment. For perspective, Jason’s house in Vanvleck cost $1,725,000 and is just shy of 2,000 square with a one car garage (where you keep all the shit that goes in a normal person’s house’s basement), single story, concrete patio outback that abuts a hillside. Six months into the private practice stint and Frank is thoroughly burned out, doing essentially the same procedures every day and no longer having the energy to chase nurses or the means to build a patient caseload to take on new conditions and hence to perform new and different procedures given the highly managed and slick business model of the practice group.

A word of backstory is necessary here: while in fellowship, Frank and Candace, Candy, were trying fairly seriously to reproduce themselves, for about a year and a half via the conventional means and then, both being scientifically minded (Candy a mechanical engineer) and fairly type A, through a series of specialist visits to examine their respective gonadal health. There was some lighthearted discussion at some point about Frank being a seed that won’t germinate, between Frank and Candy and between Mustard and Jason. There’s a name for this that won’t come to me. Followed by changes in diet, a teetotal stint, changes in exercise. Followed by hormonal treatments for her, in vitro tries before finally surrogacy was broached before fate saw fit to allow one of the oocytes retrieved from her fallopian tubes and injected with his sperm in a Eppendorf tube, which he retrieved, the sperm, following another painful week long sober stint and with the aid of some truly avant-garde domination porn on his phone, which he found was necessary to execute the procedure in the bleach smelling chamber allotted him for this purpose in the fertility clinic, and the egg, the fertilized egg, was stuck in Candy’s uterine wall and grew for 30 weeks, 209 days to be exact, before it wanted out and then spent two weeks in an incubator that reminded Mustard of research he did on chicken angiogenesis during undergrad. There were some not totally obvious but also somehow impossible to miss physical development issues with his daughter that didn’t exactly make her deformed or hard to look at, but that caused you to look away after a few seconds feeling things didn’t come out exactly right, like someone had assembled one of those really detailed, super involved Lego kits of a village or an F15 or a fire truck without the instructions, resulting in a couple extra pieces being included and a couple pieces left over at the end just being kicked under the bed. It looked like what it was supposed to look like, but not like the picture on the front of the box. His daughter was 3.52 pounds at birth and was 8 weeks premature and had no hair and arms the thickness of a number 2 pencil. And his daughter wasn’t, clinically speaking, mentally slow, but she was physically slow and didn’t talk until her third birthday and didn’t eat much other than hot dogs and American cheese and apple sauce and had a sort of mean streak through her, even as a toddler. Candy took indefinite leave from her job (she and Frank didn’t really need the 275,000 per she brought in) and spent her days first with their daughter, feeding her, reading to her, watching her watch TV, taking her to the park and then when she started preschool and then kindergarten, Candy spent her days having compulsive sexual intercourse with one after another trainer from her gym, and then patrons from the gym, and then patrons at the coffee shop next to the gym until one Tuesday morning she was fellating a 19 year-old trainer, a recent high school graduate and former heavyweight varsity wrestler named Dwayne in his car outside the gym in the gym’s parking lot and the manager, who had been caught up in the Candy maelstrom himself a few weeks back saw them, and fired Dwayne on some shaky, hypocritical fraternizing-with-clients grounds, and then other male trainers caught wind of the dust up and steered clear of Candy, causing her to seek out another gym.

While Frank was repelled by her body, Candy became obsessively in touch with it, intensely physical as though all her senses had been subsumed to tactile, like the way the newly tattooed recognize new ownership of their bodies and become enamored with the large canvas that, unbeknownst to them, they had been carrying around with them their whole life and are possessed suddenly with the compulsion to fill it up. So, she had to find new outlets for this curious, unexpectedly awakened need for rough sex with strangers which it turns out is not as easy to find as puerile fantasies would lead you to believe. When confronted with a request to truly dominate a woman, most men wilted into attempts at clever flirtation and then embarrassed retreat or bullshit apologies meant to save face and not look like a pussy or real apologies that the world had treated her so bad that she had to be in this kind of spot where she could only see her self worth through a man degrading her, or some such thing. Or else she would find some truly psychotic bastard that would damn near choke her out (there was more than one of these) or in the case of one dentist she met at tennis, hit her so hard with his belt while entering her from behind that she needed two stitches in her lower back, just to the left of her L4. She did keep a tally, although couldn’t be sure of all the names and faces.

After one year without visiting her bed, during which time she had one form or another of intercourse with 147 men, Frank and Candy got drunk one night when their daughter was at the grandparents and had uncoordinated but, by his estimation, respectably varied and not brief sex in the kitchen and then again in the bedroom on a Friday in December. It was February when Candy told him she was pregnant and gave birth in July to an 8 pound 14 ounce baby girl, with blue eyes to match her mom’s and with, for all outward appearances, every single Lego in exactly the right place.

Ok now let’s come back to the present, or the near past at least, when Frank has bought a new huge house and is almost a year in at a new group and Kelly is 5 and Krissy is 3 and already reading and Frank invites Jason to stop by for a barbeque when he’s in town visiting his mom. It’s when Frank sends Jason into the spare bedroom that he discovers the AR-15, under a sheet in a large gym bag in the closet, trigger locked and no clip and after dinner, when the kids are in bed and Candy has gone to her mother’s house and after 6 or 8 Glen Livets that Frank tells Jason how he found out about Candy might be sleeping around and that he’s weighing his options and that he doesn’t want to confront her until everything is in place and he can pull off a smooth exit with the kids. He felt a pang of relief that stung for a few days but that then was slightly intoxicating, like some short acting hallucinogen, at the realization that she was starting to look around. Reminisce about previous lovers. Maybe even stray given a few more months of inattention and then he would have her, she would be in the wrong and he could end the thing in an ejaculation of sanctimonious rage. But then he found out what was really going on. The word for a seed that won’t germinate: dormant. Some seeds require temperatures in excess of 1000F to germinate, basically a forest fire. They only grow when everything else is dead. The attorney has basically gotten things buttoned up, Frank’s saying, he’s even got deposition from the dentist about the outrageous carnal debasement he subjected Candy to at her request, plus stuff from the wrestler and a half dozen other men saying some things that he never would have thought he would hear about his wife, including about how some of this stuff took place in his house, like transpired in Frank’s own house, with his daughter in the nursery watching TV. It was a little less than a month and it should be buttoned up, Frank is saying. And I have to tell you this: the intern, or legal analyst or paralegal whatever, she showed up wearing combat boots. I’m not fucking kidding you. Combat boots and a red, white and black plaid skirt and a tight black tank top over junior high tits and told me her name was Nethkoolang, which conjured images of trendy urban cigarette brands or athletic gear or some kind of anime. Or renewable energy. And I’m like is this a test or something whether I try to fuck this chick? But she seems good, she did most of the leg work and the attorney signs off on it.

She has no clue it is coming, he said, Candy, and it was the only way, because God only knows. Under your own roof. He was thinking of moving out of Ohio with the kids and just saying fuck it all, and giving it a go in, hell, California, or Texas everyone is moving to now, Austin, and what did Jason think. What no one would have predicted was that Frank’s wife Candy would pick up the children from school at 3:00pm the following Wednesday, four days after they sat drinking scotch on his back porch looking at the leaves which had begun to turn on the gargantuan maples and oaks, and proceed, Candy did, to remove the trigger lock from the AR and load a full magazine and execute both her children as they sat at the kitchen table, apparently, the coroner noted, with neither having the time to react based on something called a spray pattern and Frank read the coroner’s report which could not distinguish who was shot first but stated that the weapon was fired at very close range, probably within 10 feet and although he never saw the photographs from the kitchen, suffice it to say that the destruction done to hard and soft tissue in a child’s body at that close range, particularly on exit of the projectile, was vast and conclusive. Parthenogenesis is the development of an egg into an organism without fertilization.

But the final act Candy had in store for her husband he would in fact discover with his own eyes: the AR-15 operates also in fully automatic mode if modified with what is called a bump stock. In this way, constant pressure between the trigger stop and the weapon’s butt is transferred, through the recoil after each shot, to fire the weapon again. You basically just use the force of the weapon’s discharge to fire itself again, way way faster than you could ever pull the trigger.

Jason hung up after listening to Frank go on for an hour and there was a text from her.

<What would you have named the whale>

<I know it’s not the answer you’d want but I would not dare speculate on a better name>

<Why did he name it that>

<No idea. It’s not explained in the book. It’s a great irony of a masterpiece that leaves nothing else about the animal to speculation. You can find shit about it on Wikipedia but don’t believe it>

<Do you relate better to the captain or the whale>

<It’s complicated>

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As ever, if you believe in what we’re doing at PILCROW, subscribe, share, and consider offering a paid subscription.

⚬─────────✧─────────⚬

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

⚬─────────✧─────────⚬

Jessica and Randy met during medical school and somehow both ended up specializing in interventional cardiology and landing in LA, with Jessica at the University and Randy in private practice. This was the year when children eating Tide pods—the candy shaped and candy colored soluble packets of laundry detergent—was some kind of national emergency according to the internet, prompting detergent companies to release a battery of absurd commercials focused on how safe the packaging of their product was. You know, in case you accidentally popped one in your mouth. There was a once-a-month girls’ dinner for the female interventionists—they were 1:10 outnumbered by men and thus all knew each other, there were about 15 in the entire county of 15 million—sometimes including civilian friends. Randy was hosting, there were four of them that night, and had turned her kitchen over to a chef hired for the evening.

Prithi’s fiancé says to me while she’s changing out of her scrubs that he wants to be a writer, to which my ears perk up, Randy is saying.

Get in line.

And get this.

He wants to be the next John Grisham.

Man shit. He wants to write about man shit, he says.

A dearth of such, for sure.

Real man shit, for real men.

My old man farted like a foghorn when he pissed. He should put that in there.

Ok, TMI.

How did she find this one?

She’s a magnet.

Was she the ball stretcher guy?

Ok. Details. Hold on. Details.

Hang on, I need a refill for this.

That was the last one.

The last one, ok: she made the guy wear a ball stretcher.

And that does what, exactly?

Doesn’t get me riled up I can tell you.

I’ve yet to be with someone where I said to myself, I wish he had longer balls.

Low hanging fruit.

Is it a control thing, like binding woman’s waists or feet?

She said her boyfriend’s balls were hung a bit too high and tucked up close to his body. I think it’s all about cosmetics. She was a bit off because she was letting this man live with her half the time for the past few months. She broke up with him for his unwillingness to commit.

To the balls thing?

I don’t blame him.

Then she hired a private investigator just to find out he was using a fake identity with her.

The plot thickens.

So, he had a different name, lived in a different city and was married. He was letting her use all his fake credit cards.

Why, ok, why is she using his credit cards?

Judgement!

Should have been a red flag…boyfriend lets you use all his credit cards.

And is living with you.

I know.

She created a fake email address and emailed the wife about what he was up to for the past few months including screenshots, etc. I found this to be quite insane.

Oh boy.

But did she ask the wife about the ball height?

Shit, I didn’t think to ask. She also told me how her 14-year-old son who is on meds for ADHD decided to take acid which catapulted him into serotonin syndrome. He was covered in vomit and violently attacked her.

As opposed to what kind of attack exactly?

He punched her in the face, knocked her to the floor so her head ended up in his bathroom closet. She struggled to overtake him and had to choke him to the point of nearly passing out when he finally calmed down.

Jesus.

These I may be a sex addict or alcoholic but at least I’m not in this person’s league stories always make you temporarily feel better about yourself.

So, he ended up in the hospital and they ended up talking to the cops.

I don’t understand how people can maintain functional careers.

You’d be surprised.

Apparently.

It’s the back and forth. I don’t know how she does it.

There’s momentum. People get going and then you are on that track.

My parents were like that toward the end.

Ball stretchers?

No. But maintaining careers amidst a maelstrom. When I was 10 or 12 and we were still getting together with our neighborhood friends one, sometimes two nights on the weekend and going to my grandparents’ house at least once a month, my mother started bringing up a man she dated before my father. This was when she was drinking heavily and the subject would always be broached by her after she had put away 2 sometimes 3 bottles of fairly cheap red wine…

Hey, this is not cheap wine.

Amen.

No doubt, no doubt. Some things change. The subject was brought up apropos of nothing and for the year or so that it went on, she became increasingly brazen with her lead ins to the point where many of my parents’ friends would start to throw furtive uncomfortable glances at each other and raise eyebrows and scoot out to the bathroom each time she would find some segue between say, the Israelis in Lebanon or Saddam’s going into Kuwait or Perot and whatever.

Ross Perot?

Yeah, Ross Perot, I don’t know, I always remember them talking politics. But she, my mother would say something apropos of nothing like this reminds me of this guy I used to date before Henry. Before my father. Oh, don’t worry she would say, Henry knows all about it. Apparently this previous relationship had been one of considerable contention with my mothers’ parents because my grandfather would turn stone faced when my mother brought it up, invariably with him and her mother and siblings in the room. On several occasions my grandmother left the room and she always went ashen when Robert was recalled. I think she got intestinally ill, my grandmother, when this came up.

Understandable.

Your father was in the room?

In the room. Invariably.

And he knew about this?

Ok. My mother was in college at the time so this was way before my dad and she was still on a fairly tight leash held by my grandfather and since she went to school across the country he expected her to call on a daily basis to divulge on her classes, well-being and, he mistakenly anticipated, her personal life, such that when my grandparents found out, via an allegedly accidental disclosure from my aunt, she had been dating Robert for a year and not told them they were shocked and hurt enough by this ostensible betrayal so as to commence with 3 days of calling my mother’s roommate and then cousin in Pittsburgh, only to finally convince her, my aunt, they were distraught enough to be contacting the police and getting on a plane to fly out that she, my aunt, chose to divulge that maybe that wouldn’t be the best course of action since my mother had dropped her classes that quarter, the first of her senior year, and decamped with Robert to Paris.

Romantic.

Ahh. They went to Paris.

I’m guessing this ends well.

It sounded like the sort of rebellious thing you were supposed to do, right? A straight A senior at Princeton with an MCAT score in the 95^th percentile and an unblemished undergraduate resume of homeless clinics in the summer, an honors research thesis on nitrogen fixation by symbiotic arbuscular micorrhiza bacteria in soybeans and the effects of elevated carbon dioxide and atmospheric temperature, and a double major in art history. This is my mother.

Wait wait. Who’s this Robert.

He’s the ex.

An ex ex. Several before my Dad.

But what’s his story.

He had finished art school in New York the previous year and felt he needed to get away from the city and all its brash Americanness.

Yes! I love this guy.

What a hipster doofus.

To experience the Old World and to escape the hyper capitalist nightmare while he still could. I know how this all sounds, my mother said, so daft, but at the time it was romantic and crazy and I needed to break something. They spent a week in a shared flat near Montmartre…

Oh my God.

I know, I know. I don’t think it was much more than a week before my grandfather finally tracked her down over the phone and demanded she come home. After he asked her if she had had an HIV test, she hung up and for around 24 hours refused to answer the phone and when she finally did her mother snatched the receiver from her father long enough to pronounce her a harlot.

Very Old World.

Very romantic.

Montmartre. In springtime.

It was years later after my parents had split up and I was in med school that my aunt intimated to me, after several G&Ts something about a previous pregnancy scare with Robert and my mother, although she, my aunt, was speaking in such tongues at that point of a late Thanksgiving eve at Vail that I didn’t have the skill to pin her down and am not even sure that she wasn’t making the whole thing up, re-dredging her sister’s one big fuck up to silence her own voices.

And this was discussed. By your mother.

Not the pregnancy part or the HIV test part but Robert in the abstract, yes. It was a terrible experience my mother would say, with a performer’s mirth, sucking down more wine while my grandparents after first admonishing her not to speak that way in front of her husband, my Dad, acquiesced into silence. That a child was in the room never seemed to occur to anyone.

You have to learn somehow.

Sooner the better.

Passing on some serious wisdom there.

She was doing this to show my father that she existed and to show her family and their friends that she was a separate person from him. I think she was also doing it to try to somehow win my father’s attention back by reminding him that even though maybe he didn’t think about it very often anymore, there were plenty of other people interested in screwing his wife and running around the world with her, even if it was in the past.

What was his reaction?

He would mostly just stay quiet. Sometimes he would add a sardonic, self-effacing comment like back in your mother’s hippie days or before she met someone with less personality and no artistic talent to settle down with. The story wasn’t new to him, but it was my mother’s intent to add new details in every retelling to bring out some new, usually salacious component of the relationship and her dalliance away from her education and the completeness with which she ignored my grandparents’ opprobrium.

What a saint.

He was no saint. But he was not to be provoked, at least never in front of me or our guests or family. I think he had already emotionally moved on from whatever flash in the pan him and my mother had. At that particular point in time, she was all that there was and that was enough.

Yikes.

Ok, but at least she had her spring trip to Paris.

But here’s the kicker. That Robert was black came first in response to a barbed accusation from one of my aunts, after which my mother dove into a story of Robert’s mom being a waitress that had him when she was 13, delivered, these stories were by my mother, with some conspiratorial flair as though all fiction and fact were scuttlebutt she heard around the water cooler that afternoon. This fact came up a second time in front of our neighbors. My father’s sudden wistful countenance told me this was in fact a new tidbit.

After all those years.

After all those years. Something new. He tried to hide it, but I could tell he didn’t know.

Wow.

What bothered him, if I try to imagine what he was thinking, is not that the man my mother ran off with during her senior year—years before she met him—was black. He couldn’t have cared less. What would have bothered him was that she felt necessary to remark that he was black to use this fact to somehow injure my father and elevate herself and what did this mean about her and what she thought about what mattered to him.

And your aunt? What did she have to say about this.

The women in that family all sought husbands on bad streaks that they could nurse back to health and then demean for the rest of their lives. Only my father broke the mold, since once rescued from his own skid he steadfastly remained genteel and kind, notwithstanding 30 years of conditioning to belittle him.

Jesus.

I suspect my father already knew at that point that his marriage was unsalvageable and that he was just pursuing a least bad option by staying in it until I was myself in college. I don’t think he had any illusions about the divergence my mother and he had taken since my birth and yet I can’t help but wonder how he must have felt, what impact it had at the time on his relationship to me and my grandparents, who were scandalized, even at 12 I could see that, or our friends who per the social contract took my parents as one unit at least until the divorce was final, my father wasn’t one to lobby people to his side on that issue, before or since, and so the friends from those two decades fell away, for him. I’m also pretty sure, given the transactional way his mind worked, that on some level he was relieved to be emasculated by my mother in front of her family and their friends because it meant he was one up and could come back to even with a clear conscience by leaving her. My father filed shit like that away for future use. I could also see that it freed him to know, like Rabbit said, that having someone sleep with your wife adds some value back to her, even if it was in the past, although he couldn’t care less about the past and never talked about his. I think it did also make him feel hollow, because this woman he was married to was using this thing that would most hurt if he used it on her. The other lover, real or imagined, past present or future. She’s the one that would have been hurt by his past. And yet it didn’t hurt him like it would her, it only made him realize that he only existed for her as she related to him. He only existed to her in the capacity to which she increased her sense of herself and maybe it was a fallacy to believe this was not the rule but the exception. But my father had long since lost interest in playacting such things.

Who’s rabbit? What rabbit?

Nothing. No one. No ball stretchers. Just a fucking man.

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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

⚬─────────✧─────────⚬

When he was in high school a friend’s brother, the lead drummer in their high school marching band, paid for his own ticket to fly to the city to audition for the recently vacated drummer position in the then enormously popular band White Zombie. His brother and him (he played bass) and another guy down the street (lead) had a band, with both his brother and him singing (they were also in a barbershop quartet, which was quite something in the Midwest in the mid 1990’s) and they used to play free concerts for friends in their parents’ basement. He remembered showing up to one of these and expecting the house to look like a Mötley Crüe tour bus. But instead, both his friend’s parents were slightly older than his own, and conservative looking, the mother still sporting a bouffant hairdo and the father dressed like he was watching the Saturn V clear the tower and the décor of the house Rockwellian and the father was actually reading the newspaper by a table lamp and smoking a goddamn pipe when his mother answered the door and the house smelled warm and like supper. The basement had been cleared out and was unfinished which in a Midwestern early century home means concrete floors, concrete and cinder block walls, glass block windows and particle board ceiling. They played Pantera and Sepultura and Sabbath and Cannibal Corpse and his brother took the mic while sitting at the drums between songs and said I see a lot of you standing against the wall and not in the pit. And after a pause, It’s a real shame. His brother didn’t get the gig with White Zombie, I’m not a hundred percent sure if he ever even got an audition, but Joe remarked nonetheless that he, Joe, was planning to move to the city next year after he graduated from high school because that’s where everything happens and that Jason should head out there if, he wanted to.

Jason went to undergrad and then started a PhD in English at a massive school nestled in a hillside in a town of 20,000 in a state where a college football game is the NBA, the NFL and the MLB all rolled up into one every Saturday in the fall. A year into his PhD the wheels came off what had looked to be a sure marriage and three kids with a girl whose father was a dentist in a town called Stalnaker and who herself was in the final throws of a hygienist degree and he realized at the same time that he didn’t have the stomach for a dissertation, which was supposed to be on existentialism in pop culture, which, to even think now about this topic and the proposal he submitted and had approved, makes him dyspeptic. In a fantastic move of pure caprice, he moved to the city in the fall of 2000, to write, he told his parents and began looking for work (he had nothing lined up and simply drove across the country with a carload of books and clothes). When 9/11 happened he was asleep, sleeping off his usual 12’er from the previous night and he realized while watching the story unfold on television that the world had changed and that he was an aspiring writer and that he had absolutely no venue to participate in the biggest journalistic event of his lifetime and that maybe this was pretty undeniable evidence that he ought to do something else. His father had basically tapped out of his marriage when Jason was a senior in high school: his sister had gone off to college the year before and the old man, premeditated or not Jason never had the chance to ask him, up and moved out, moved across town into an apartment and bought a motorcycle, leaving his mother the car and Jason the truck. A month later he was dead, having wrapped the bike around a tree down by the Cuyahoga River riding around midnight. His father had been off the drink since Jason was in middle school and a tox screen came up negative. He wasn’t wearing a helmet, so it was quick, everyone spared protracted vigils. The man had no formal training beyond high school although he could seemingly fix anything mechanical, yet he lacked the soft disdain and uneasiness espoused by the self-taught around those who had gone to school. His father thought it was a great thing that his son loved books, even though he had no use for them himself, preferring to learn by teaching himself and the closest he ever came to scorn or almost passing judgment on his son’s comprehensive ineptitude with all things mechanical1 – with using his hands to actually make something work—came when Jason was 15 and had just purchased a first beater that needed a brake job and oil change and had invited a friend, Jason had, to come over and work with the old man on the beater in the driveway. His father told him to place the plastic funnel under the oil pan pin and when he registered in his son’s eyes a complete ignorance of where on a vehicle one might find such a feature, and the accompanying crippling shame, paused for what may have only been an extra few milliseconds, perhaps to swallow his confusion at how someone could exist in such a state, his not disdain but disappointment, probably more at himself, for somehow not imparting that knowledge, through imprinting or nurture, on his offspring, and then a millisecond later his acceptance that this was a person he ergo probably was never going to understand, his own son, but then a millisecond later there’s a John Wayne smile, contented but focused eyes and he’s saying actually why don’t you let me handle that and you guys go grab the oil off the back of my truck to save his son from losing face in front of his friend. But also save him from ever knowing his father. Sometimes you have to really be dressed down by someone to know that love is reciprocated. When the grandfathers fought the wars and the fathers worked at the factories and the children were philosophers, what then of their children? Philosophers have no business reproducing themselves was the only conclusion Jason could come to and how much different was he than a philosopher as an unemployed English major? You needed another war to reset the system but when it came, he just watched his friends go. Most days you didn’t even think about it, even dialed in as he was to news after 9/11. There was not enough time after his father moved out and before he died to process any of the whys for this occurrence and afterwards his mother refused to speak of him, not out of disrespect or hatred, he felt, but out of the sheer meaninglessness of everything that his death made so blatant. Was the purpose to raise children, to pay a mortgage, to have a career, to someday be able to buy a motorcycle and call the game on your marriage? All these things he thought she must have wondered but could never get her to speak about in the first years after it happened and then whatever thread still held her to the social contract with family and community was not worth risking on this subject, until it too had finally, abruptly, snapped. There was no other woman, that much Jason had surmised. It wasn’t the old man’s style. He tapped out and just left, leaving her to stew in it. Jason didn’t even remember a blow up—his mother was the shouter, anyways. So he wakes up one early autumn morning in a city where fall doesn’t exist and turns on the TV to find out that some bastards from a cult he’s never heard of, or heard of and not paid attention to, and from a religion that half of his country could not distinguish from that practiced by Gandhi, have declared war on us, the media is telling him a couple hours later, on his country and that there would soon be hellfire raining down on that part of the world and he realized he claimed to be a writer and had nothing to say about this and no vehicle to say anything, even were he not saddled with a shameful, enveloping ignorance, and so with that realization he started applying for teaching jobs and within a month was subbing and then another few months full-time teaching freshman English literature and not thinking at all that he belonged doing anything else. No one held him to the fire. The rule for report cards was no C minuses because that was too close to a D but even when he brought home a D his mother would just frown and light a cigarette and mutter something about life being about choices. His father never said a word. The incapacitating listlessness in the absence of expectations. Not knowing what failure is, even when you are failing.

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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

⚬─────────✧─────────⚬

Having run the experiment once and obtained quantifiable results, there was no need to repeat it, she heard her father deadpan to some of his physician cronies at a dinner party when she was 8 or 9. Just old enough to understand that she herself was the product of the experiment but too young to understand that her father’s dry humor concealed no displeasure in the results of getting her mother pregnant. That, quite simply, he had already done this and thus saw no reason to do it again. It remained, even after she was old enough to recognize all these things, one of those seeds of her personality, a single event to which she would attribute innumerable shortcomings over her two decades of education and relationships, romantic or otherwise. At four she had begun piano lessons. Her father had played the trumpet in high school and could bang out a few showtune ditties and her mother had come to love Mozart in college, she would report, Jessica’s mother would, to anyone who asked, although she didn’t play an instrument. Her mother would sit in the kitchen when the piano instructor would come to the house to teach Jessica, from age 4, on the baby grand Steinway the old man purchased before Jessica was born. But the child didn’t take to Mozart after she started learning individual movements and then whole pieces. I don’t understand, her mother would say to her, of her Chopin nocturnes and Debussy symphonies, circa age 10, why you choose to play such dreary, morose music. It’s such a tone of depression. Mozart and Beethoven and Tchaikovsky, they wrote music that celebrated the virtuosity of life. The brilliance of living. Her father heard her perform for an audience precisely one time, in April 1990 when she was 12 years old, in front of ~500 people at the California Theater in San Bernardino: she gave a solo performance of the Moonlight Sonata—a compromise with her mother, who upon hearing the second movement only was indignant that her daughter was just being obstinate, but then acquiesced when she heard the third. She had won a competition the previous Fall amongst performing arts schools throughout San Bernardino county and the surrounding areas of 17 and under pianists. Most of the kids in the competition had painting or photography or sculpture or writing or performance portfolios that reached back from when they could barely tie their own shoes and many of the older ones she beat out were already on the radar of the best music schools in Boston or Berkeley or across town at USC. Jessica went to a public middle school and was admitted to the competition after her mother petitioned in person both the principal and the music director of the high school she would enter the following year. She had no portfolio and although she nor her parents knew it at the time, in less than two years she would give up piano and not touch one again for almost 20 years. She rode her bike to the auditorium 4 days a week plus Saturday for a month prior to the performance, which her teacher insisted on recording for Jessica to start building the aforementioned missing portfolio to spread more widely what everyone who heard her play that night agreed was preternatural brilliance and which was clear evidence of either divine intervention (there are pockets of the faithful in the Inland Empire) or a severe genetic mutation or mental instability but which regardless heralded a virtually limitless future career in professional performance. Her mother drove her to the theater the day of the performance, helped Jessica dress and apply some clownish makeup to counteract the stage lighting and gave her a flower for her dress and was in general just uncharacteristically sunny and agreeable and supportive and present. Remember, her mother told her as they pulled into the parking lot, you belong here. You earned this. And then in the way parents do when they don’t know when the hell to shut up, she continued, Just don’t forget to smile and I’m sure you will perform perfectly, no mistakes. As she walked on stage to welcoming applause from the full auditorium, she saw her father’s silhouette at that moment entering the back of the auditorium, his trench coat over his suit and hat in hand, having come straight from his medical office no doubt.

Athletes and artists will relate that when they perform at a certain level—with such concentration and intensity and apparent abandon—the experience does not even register in their consciousness. It’s an out of body experience that you hear about from others afterwards, a total loss of time, the performer’s conscious control rendered moot and having to essentially wake themselves up at the end of the exercise and to be convinced by others that it actually happened. Until watching a video of the performance or hearing about it from someone in the audience, the performer is not really confident that she didn’t get up there and hammer out Mary Had a Little Lamb over and over for 30 minutes. The comedian is so convinced that he stood up in front of the crowd and screamed or recited the Pledge of Allegiance and somehow hallucinated the applause and laughter. The golfer is not completely sure he didn’t take all his clothes off and run around the green making simian noises and gestures. So it was with this performance. Jessica received a 5 minute standing ovation, during which she embarrassedly took two dozen bows and was showered with praise in the hallway after the event and at the reception, for a 12 year old an even stranger concept, which was held in her honor where she fielded questions and accepted praise from adults many times her age that looked at her like some majestic tropical bird or space age humanoid robot while assaulting her with words like transcendent and brilliant and remarkable and virtuosic, all of which she knew the meaning of in the abstract but could scarcely connect them to what had just transpired. That’s what you’ve been working towards all these years, her mother told the 12-year-old girl, who had only recently had her first period and whose growth spurt had but one superficially redeeming quality of making Rachmaninoff easier to play, in a momentary interlude as they walked to the reception. All that practicing. I told you, see I told you, her ebullient instructor chimed in when she found them backstage. It really paid off. It finally paid off. Her father did not attend the reception and they got home before he did and she finished her homework and showered, still trying to process and organize the packets of memories that were appearing in her mind. She went downstairs to find him sitting in his study, her mother having retired early to some other part of the house, with his two fingers of neat Glen Morangie and whatever biography he was devouring at the time and he looked up at her when she walked in and smiled so effortlessly, exuded such warmth and ease and self-assurance and he put his book down and placed his hand on her shoulder and said, Jelly bean, that was really special today, and she decided that night to never play the piano again.

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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

⚬─────────✧─────────⚬

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 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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⚬─────────✧─────────⚬

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

⚬─────────✧─────────⚬

It’s not the sort of thing that you actively return to conversation, having by some means gotten past it, the fact that you and your father on several occasions fought quite viciously, on some occasions leading your mother to call the police. Getting past it is not the same as forgetting or discarding the instincts and animosities that made you seriously attempt mortal injury to a family member. Maybe it was his mother’s cancer when they were in college that brokered a tacit truce, that fueled the new détente. His father was a lifer in the machine and his son discovered, sometime in his early teens, that the old man had maneuvered himself into logistics and support as an officer in Vietnam through some never fully disclosed deal making, only to later, during the 1990’s, when his son was old enough to start asking questions, continue to bang on about the pissing and moaning of the vets from that era and how they didn’t have the patriotism and sense of duty of the Greatest Generation, capital G’s. When the events of 2001 changed ROTC from a wise financial decision and resume padder into a speaking role in the spectacular goatfuck that was the battle of Fallujah a few years later, he had no quarter for the old man’s comments and only contempt for the way he continued to lament Americans’ lack of respect for the military and their foreign adventures. When he was 14, the old man threw him through some drywall in their mother’s sitting room. The room that you never sat in, to the right when you walk in the front door of the house, with ornamental furniture, covered in plastic, where you placed guests’ jackets when they came in during the cold months. When he was 27 and the old man started up…he just left the house. The sorts of banal worries and ultimately inconsequential arguments and slights and considerations are instantly revealed for what they are when you start getting shot at.

Jason visited him when he was home between deployments that time. This one was no longer fun, it never really was that anyways, but there was reward in duty and being needed, which was now totally gone, he said. They walked down the street from his parents’ house, just wandering, Jason didn’t think he could relax in that house, and ended up reaching the end of the suburban Beltway development, with its huge midcentury style colonials on sprawling green green yards and surrounded by tall, new growth forest, American flags on every house, Don’t Tread on Me flags on quite a few. NRA stickers on every Honda, every Toyota. They walked onto a manmade bluff running under the power lines on an area cleared of trees for that purpose, a corridor running over the hills towards the horizon, rising and falling with the mounds of New World earth walked not long ago by terrorists against the British empire. This is what the army does. It fucks you, he said. Jason had some premonition that he wasn’t going to see him again, that this was going to be the tour where his luck ran out and he didn’t come back or came back horribly changed. You said to me once when we were in college, I love my country but I fear my government, he said. And you were fucking right. The fucking army will fuck you, they don’t care. I am done after this. They can go fuck themselves with retirement in 10 years and promotion and hazard pay. They watched Fight Club that night, quoting every other line. There’s no way you can make that movie or write that book after 9/11, he says. There’s no way someone born after 1995 could understand how that book ever made sense. To them it’s just a story about beating people up. Later, during his time back between the first and second tours in the just war in Afghanistan, he came to visit Jason and spent the weekend watching movies and walking around the mall. Doing things that, as a military brat, he grew up loving. Every new city in every new country had malls to cater to the GI’s and their families, imported brands and imported air to breathe, the video arcade, Spencer’s Gifts, Foot Locker, Orange Julius. I got an email from a writer in Kabul last week who is now looking for a position in America, Jason told him. He was a writer and teacher, in his late 30’s but because of all the shit over there is applying to come work here as a PhD student. And so I wrote him back and said I didn’t have a position but I admire your pursuit of knowledge and learning in that terrible, in that awful situation you and your countrymen are living through. And I wished him the best because imagine the strength of his spirit to overcome that terrible lot he was cast and still seek a higher purpose, Jason said.

His friend didn’t say anything, but his back stiffened and his gaze shifted away and the weakly concealed disappointment Jason saw on his face has made him wish, every week or two since then, when his mind returns to the conversation and he thinks about how ultimately he died, torn apart by an IED during a patrol outside the Green Zone around Baghdad in advance of a visit of Hillary Clinton, then Secretary of State, in 2010, and he wishes he could just tell him that I get it, I understand, not everything, but more, and I’m trying to at least work out the landscape of my ignorance because the hard truth is that the more you read about something, written by people who haven’t lived it, the less you know. The more peacemakers write about war, the more likely another war becomes. It was the year In da Club and spinner rims were the shit. That spring break Jason was in Palm Beach Florida in a night club near the beach with sunburnt shoulders and salt-stiff hair drinking a beer and watching, in night vision footage, men his age jump out of a helicopter somewhere in the Levant, headed for nothing nice.

Those who can, do, his father was wont to admonish. Those who can’t, teach. And so, when Jason went to teach high school English (the county had passed an ordinance, to abate a teacher shortage and flummox the teacher’s union, that anyone with a bachelor’s degree in anything could teach anything) he felt he got the message. There’s a whole complex web of horseshit that you can tell yourself to justify taking public money to do middling work in service of putting food in your belly. Stimulating the economy, mentoring the next generation, creating jobs, my entire lifetime’s salary is less than one armored tank and how many of those do we have. Lead follow or get out of the way, they say in the ROTC and he was doing none of the three which is not ok. It’s ok to fail big his father would tell him when he was in high school, before his father bet big on a new caprice and died weeks later, but it’s never ok to be content with continuing to fail small. And so, he drew a line under it and rolled a decade of small fuck ups into one giant one, deciding to try for something authentic, right around the time he met Jessica and was threatened with permanent tethering to one failure.

Jason was leaving school after completing the following week’s lesson plans when a text came through on his phone.

<Was the whale vindictive>

He laughed silently. Texted back:

<No. He just had to kill him>

<But why. He could just dive deep and peace out, let Ahab get his>

<That’s not the way it works>

<I know>

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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

⚬─────────✧─────────⚬

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 were 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 on 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 enough 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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⚬─────────✧─────────⚬

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

⚬─────────✧─────────⚬

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 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 of 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 if 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 one, 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 on 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 too 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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A reminder that friend-of-the-Substack Anthony Marigold (of Magazine Non Grata) has released a Chrome extension for those who prefer to enjoy their Substacks offline (on Kindle, etc.).

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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

⚬─────────✧─────────⚬

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 Rockside 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 the 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 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 5^th, 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 going 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.

For our next cycle - and for your summer reading pleasure - we’d like to try something different. After the conclusion of our last voting round, we received several emails from subscribers asking where they could read the remainder of runner-up Martin van Cooper’s Don't Disappoint. Having read the rest of the manuscript, we shared their enthusiasm for the novel’s subtleties of style, its Franzenesque ironies and fidelity to the cult of the sentence. Our mission here at PILCROW is to be a vector and a platform for novels to reach a broader audience of discriminating readers, as well as publishing professionals who can shepherd a manuscript into the physical realm (a growing number of such cases).

Starting tomorrow we will be moving forward by serializing the entirety of that novel, for approximately the next eight to ten weeks. Then we will return to our normal quarterly contest format (and will be posting about those guidelines soon). We appreciate our readers and submitters indulging this bit of editorial prerogative. We think you’ll like what’s in store.

Excelsior,

Tom Watters

Editor-in-Chief

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• Prologue

• Chapter 1

• Chapter 2

• Chapter 3

• Chapter 4

• Chapter 5

• Chapter 6

• Chapter 7

• Chapter 8

• Chapter 9

• Chapter 10

As ever, if you believe in what we’re doing at PILCROW, please subscribe, please share, 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.

⚬─────────✧─────────⚬

There was a gentle rain out on the water as if the fireworks had bombarded it out of the sky and the water was a sullen violet. The mood of the night in violet. The rain vanished just above the purple and I could not see it touch the surface. The harbor lights looked like fallen stars that bobbed the waves and could not sink down in the darkness to that last depth that fords into purple. The boathouse party went until ten or eleven and then migrated to the Yacht Club a mile down the road where a big party was going on. The weather picked up slowly and now the harbor was spread in a great rain. A wet singing. We spoke into the rain.

“Frank’s back tomorrow.”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t want you to be there. It’s not your responsibly.”

“My dad’ll be here first light.”

“Probably better you’re gone. I don’t want any of it falling on you. I’m going to kill Chris too.”

I sipped my whiskey. “Have you thought it all the way through?”

“It’s the only thing I’ve thought about.”

“I know. But you’re gonna go to jail.”

“I don’t care man. All my life I’ve lived in this restraint. I’ve never had to force myself to live. I’m 21. I’ve got a long life ahead. I’ll be out by the time I’m 30. Look, I was born into all this wealth. I owe it in a way to do this, because I’ll be fine on the other end and if I don’t do it my soul will be dead by the time I’m 30.” He drank deep and refilled his glass. “When I went under I was in this place where I was gonna die. And I couldn’t tell what voice it was, if it was me, or God or something, but it said we’ll get you to shore, you will live, and when you get there, you have to kill Frank. It was like killing him was part of the pact of living. I think really that I’ll die if I don’t do it. Die in some way. Somehow my dad will die again if I don’t do it. The light of him. My name. I’m doing it for Brock, for Rosie. For Jamie. Show him what a man is. Our family name. Our dad. Be a man.”

The whiskey had gone to the ends of my fingers. I was heavy with uncharted weight and felt the eye of the needle. I wanted to tell him about Caleb but the depth the whiskey dropped me into warned me it would use up some vital strength to do it.

“So this is goodbye then.”

“Yeah.” He said it tentatively. Then he accepted it. “Yes. It’s goodbye.”

“It’s going to be real strange.”

“I know.”

“You’re not gonna be at Londonberry in the fall.”

“Neither will you.”

“I know. But when I’m back from Italy you won’t be there. You won’t graduate or make your film.”

“Maybe I’ll do my last year when I get out. Really focus,” he laughed.

“Yeah, be 30 on campus.” I laughed. “What should I tell everyone?”

“You’ll think of something in Naples.”

“Yeah.”

“You’ll come visit.”

“Yeah.”

“How are you gonna clean the gun? Do you know how?”

“I found a video for it.”

I grabbed his palm and squeezed it, numb with whiskey. The whiskey had gotten into his hands too.

“Proud of you man.”

“Proud of you too.”

When Elvis had gone up to bed I checked the time on my phone and drank the last of the whiskey until I fell through into a weightlessness. The whiskey was in my toes now and the crown of my head. But the pain of the swim was like ballast and kept me balanced as I walked through the house and into the garage. I took a rag and engine oil and a fold of screw drivers from the garage and then filled a bucket with dishsoap and hot water and grabbed all the tools of the maid’s trade from below the sink in the kitchen. There was a toothbrush for small holes and rubber gloves and I mounted the stairs with them.

I passed our bedroom door. The stairs to the fifth floor curved just past it. It was strange never to have gone up there. To wake everyday and walk past an unexplored stairway but I had followed it like a vow.

Its steps were carpeted and I took them as quietly as I could. The key was under a fold of carpet, wedged into a divet.

The door gave on a creak, an intimation in the old timbers of Mayflower and I felt I was opening a door in all the hearts of the Gavins, ajar in the middle of their dreams. The door opened on an old widow’s peak of dark rose and brown wood. It was the original wood of the house which I’d never seen. There was a divan and a wooden desk at the window that overlooked Chappaquiddick. The bullet that killed Rosie had passed across the glass of this window. A telescope canted toward the moon and I wondered if the telescope was still used or if in the curve of the lens could still be the last thing Elvis’s father had ever looked upon. There were photos of him all over the room, and a large safe at the back and framed awards and old clothes on hangers and on the desk in the moonlight the silver front leaf of the gun glowed.

I hit a creak in the floor as I stepped into the white moonlight where it lay. The creak was above our bedroom and I remembered the creaks I could hear in the room when Elvis was up here and I was in bed. I slid my feet to the chair which was pulled out just enough that there was space to sit without sliding it against the floor. I put the bucket of oil and cleaning tools next to the desk and I sat into the chair’s old flexings. Hello, Ed.

I peeled back the plastic bag which Elvis had ripped open. It lay over the components of the gun like an awning. Much of the duct tape had lost its stickiness. I leaned forward to look and the chair flexed and I felt I was flexing Elvis awake. The gun was in better shape than I’d expected. With the rubber gloves on I looked over the parts in the moonlight. I weighed the creaks I made against dawn’s distance and the shape of the gun and made a decision. I took the sideplate and lined it against the grooves of the frame and it slid together. I found the screws and tightened them in a criss cross. I thought the hammer moved easily but was in a rush. I inserted the crane and clicked the cylinder closed and screwed the crane screw back in. I only checked that the cylinder swung open after I screwed the grips back on. There was the silver mark I had asked Elvis to make. I took the two bullets and loaded them into the chambers and lined up the chamber with the silver mark.

I had taken off the gloves and was about to wrap the gun when I heard footsteps behind me. They sounded to me like the footsteps of a giant and there was a swing of light. The door swung open all the way and I was like Jack up the beanstalk.

“Jamie?”

I didn’t answer. He had his phone flashlight in his hand.

“Adam? What are you doing up here?”

There was no course left now but to come clean.

“I’m reassembling the gun.”

“I was gonna do that.”

“Yes,” I said. “But I’m taking it.”

He waited to speak. “What?”

“To Brock.”

“No you’re not.”

“Yes, I am.”

“But you agreed with me about Frank.”

“Only to get you across the water.”

There was an anger in the silence. He tried to whisper but anger caught against his voice.

“Oh yeah? You swam for me? Fuck you. Get out of my dad’s fucking chair.”

I stood up. “You’re right. I mean as motivation. I wasn’t going to argue about it in the water.”

“How many times have you been up here?”

“Never.”

“Who the fuck do you think you are? It’s clean this way. I do it. You’re fucking everything up.”

“It’s not going to happen that way.”

“And you know what way it’s going to happen?”

“I think I’ve known the whole time.”

He screamed now. “Who the fuck do you think you are?” There was violence in his voice and I could see his eyes in the dark. “You’ve done nothing but sit around and get wasted on my liquor in my house with my family.” His face was close now and his finger was in my face. Dawn too was close. He had broken that magnetic perimeter that exists between men where only violence was possible a step further. He grabbed for my shirt and I blocked one of his arms but he followed through and pushed me and the flashlight in his hand strobed my eyes. I stumbled back. I did not want to fight him. It would wake the house and destroy the room and my strength was not for this. He shoved me again but it angered me and I lost my mind in the light and shoved him back. My arms ached to push him but the adrenalin was welling again. We were clumsy in the whiskey and the soreness of the swim and the hour of early morning. He began swinging wildly at my head, winding up and curving big roundhouse swings and I backed from them and then took a gap to clinch him but we spun with such force and held on tight to each other and I ran him into a timber in the wall and some of the frames fell. I wanted to speak some calm into him but he was gone. He would not kill Frank or Chris and vivify some light of his father in his heart and as I had taken that from him here I was to field the violence. I had him in a clinch where I could have given him an uppercut but I did not want to punch him and he pulled out of it. He was throwing punches with all his strength at my head and the light from his phone kept flying by my eyes. I wanted to grab him and restrain him but it is a hard way to fight when you don’t throw any punches back. I ducked inside of a swing and grabbed him in a headlock and his punch travelled around my head and bent around my neck and the phone in his hand clipped my front teeth and the light blinded me and I felt my teeth fly out of my mouth across the room. I rammed him into another timber and made for the gun. He reached for it too and it came away in my hands in a dull pop and a blow to my stomach that put a rage in me. There was a sour smell in the air and it had not been the sound or the smell of when Chris had fired it. I didn’t know someone could punch that hard. It travelled a pain right through the original pain of the swim. In the wall behind me there was a hole and an ejecta of moonlight pouring through and motes falling. I played my finger through it like a string and felt a burning in my stomach where Elvis hit me.

“Adam.”

“You coulda shot me man.” I grabbed my stomach. “I’m your friend. You wanna kill your friend? You’re gonna kill your friend.”

“Adam.” There was fear and sadness in his voice. I walked backwards to the door. “Did it graze you?”

“No it went through the fucking wall you crazy bastard. Leave me alone. Leave me alone now.”

I stepped over the doorsill with the gun and felt for the banister. My hand was wet. I put the gun in my waist band because I needed both hands for balance. Every step down tugged at the blow but I went fast to get clear. There was a tunnel of pain tearing through me and fire at the end of the tunnel. I didn’t know someone could punch that hard. The muscles in my stomach were seizing around the punch and I thought I might vomit. I rounded the fourth floor and felt a burning tug in my back and pushed through it. I got down to the third floor and here when I rounded into the moonlight I could see my shirt was soaked in bright blood. I felt over the front of it at a small hole.

“Ah shit.”

My pant legs were running slowly and my heels felt damp in my socks. I took the sidedoor no one used and opened it with my dry hand and was out in the grass. I paused to catch my breath and held down hard on the hole in my stomach and let off in the pain. Not here. There was no layer now between the pain and the outside of my body. I could smell my blood in the saltair and my breath was burning and twisting the tunnel in me. My heartbeat high up in my ears and it throbbed the pain and I thought I would pass out. I had never felt that deep inside myself before, but I could feel every inch of the tunnel. I reached my arm around my back and felt flaps of skin under my shirt.

“Ah shit.”

I felt a little more bravely and it was a large and ragged hole. Good. It went through.

The rain had stopped and every step through the wet garden to the boathouse tore and throbbed at the tunnel of my wound. Keep going. I looked for the tourniquet in the hatch under the cushion seats. With shaking hands I unzipped it and brought it out in the sand and the moonlight to see. I clenched my teeth and lifted my shirt to see the front wound. I felt with my hand and the gush in the back was worse with blood. I did not touch it with my fingers but could feel the edge of the hummock and folded skin and I shivered and the shiver shook my wound. Don’t spook. I wadded the gauze pads and pressed them into my back. I let off in the pain and wadded my t-shirt and bit down on it and pressed again, screaming through my teeth into my shirt. The roots of my broken teeth were exposed but I bit through the pain and moved the cloth to my molars and clenched until I thought I would break my teeth. I pushed all the bruise and pain into the wound as long as I could, but there is always another layer to pain and I pushed harder until the bleeding seeped. I felt my breath heavy against the pain. I did it to the front and saw orange stars and electric blue. I rolled the gauze around the pads on the wounds tight until I could hardly breathe and then pulled tighter. Then I went into the boathouse and laid on the cushions and the lights went out on me.

I woke at false dawn and my head was down in the cushion and I couldn’t breathe. I swiveled and a wave of nausea blurred my eyes. I reached for one of the solo cups and put it to my mouth. The wall of my stomach and back tore at the wound as I retched. Nothing much came out and I mostly screamed in rage into the cup. My eyes watered. No blood. That’s good. Alright, don’t be a pussy. What’re you whining about?

The long cushion I’d slept on was soaked in blood. I felt the bandage and it was dried and crusted and the vomiting had not opened the bleeding. Good, let’s not apply pressure again, alright? Not crazy about it. I took the gun and opened the cylinder. I emptied the last round in my hand and held the cylinder to the moonlight. The chamber I’d asked Elvis to mark was black and smelled foul. I looked down it. The water must have gotten into the powder of the round that shot me. I always knew being lazy would save my life one day. I looked at the last round in the light. The primer was clean and smelled right and I could hear the powder in my ear when I shook it and it sounded dry. The casing was tight. I closed the cylinder and cycled through. The hammer was gummed but came clean. My prints were all over it now. I opened the cylinder again and loaded the last round into the cleanest chamber.

What now. Don’t stop.

I stripped off my bloody clothes and unzipped the soaked cushion and shoved the clothes inside. I walked out onto the dock. The silver was going out of the sand and the moon was over the island in the Sound. The harbor was taking daylight. I walked down the dock and threw the cushion in the water and my stomach tore. You’re gonna start bleeding again, friend. I walked back into the boathouse and took one of the spare cushions out of the hatch and placed it where the old one had been. My Larsen sweats were in there too. I tied a random shirt left from the party around the bandage so I wouldn’t bleed through and tied it with a pink Vineyard Vines tie. Now you’ve got style. I put my sweats over it and wrapped the gun in another shirt so its shape wouldn’t show in the sweatshirt pocket and started out on the sand, kicking over the dark spots from where I’d bled earlier.

Ok, here you go. Get going. You got more time than you think. More time than in the movies. I walked slow. I was moving through honey. Thick slow honey. Dear neighbor throw open the blinds and see me shambling over your beach. A raw tunnel straight through me. Go in and out. Yes. Thee. Ah Thee, I smell Thee. I smell Thy breath and Thy neck. I smell Thy arms. Why do You sleep in my dreams?

The beach was canted and if I took a wrong step my stomach throbbed and nausea waved. Wave back. You better walk a straight line or you’re gonna start whimpering again. Say the alphabet backwards. Follow my finger with your eyes. Fuck you.

At the Harbor Master’s I cut up the road. The pain was worse without the give of the sand and going up hill gravity pulled on it. My sweatshirt was still clean and it was still dark. The stars were clear in the sky. I wanted to get out of the tight wrapping. It made me sick. I felt it with my hand and there was a slow bleed opening. Warm. Keep going.

A mist was caught in the street that led to the ferry. I was sweating in it. The downhill was shallow but felt sheer and steep on my wound. I almost fell forward. The door was open to the small ferry office and Brock was through the door standing at the desk looking out the window at Chappy. Steam rose out of the close of his hands. He sipped his coffee.

“Brock, I’m real sorry I haven’t been to see you.”

“Adam.”

“I thought you’d want to be alone but my heart has been broken about Rosie.”

He looked me over. Speaking now I could feel my bottom teeth tap the open roots of the top and it hurt.

“Adam,” he said again. “You look worse than me kid. Sit down.”

“I’ll never get up.” My voice came to me in a new arrangement. “I have something for you.” I took the gun out of my sweatshirt. The front leaf poked out and I held it open for him in the loose shirt. “A .44 Magnum. Belongs to someone I know. Went to a party at his house about a week ago. Nice house, in Chappy. Bout half a mile from the camping grounds in Cape Poge. Kinda guy who likes to shoot his gun straight up in the air during fireworks. You know what I mean?”

His eyes widened and he took the gun from my hands. I saw his eyes read the engraving. Chris McConnell.

“You might’ve heard of him.”

“I know him.”

“You might return it for me. He left it on Pasque Island. Lives down North Neck, last road on the left before the golf club.”

“Adam, sit down.”

“I can’t. Bear left between the white pillars.”

He saw now my hands were bloody. “It fires,” I said. “But apologize to him there’s only one round left. It’s been through the elements so to make it count you’d want to get real close. Failing that, he’s got plenty of rounds under his bed.”

Brock looked at me now as if a part of him had been waiting for this. Indeed the justice in him had drawn and tugged all week on this possibility, and had put a fever into its delay.

“Which room is his?”

“Bottom floor boxed out to the left of the porch, facing the beach. He’ll be asleep so you’ll have to wake him. Tell him Adam thought he should have it back.”

He grabbed my hand despite the blood and shook it. The light of the dawn broke through the window. “I gotta go now. My dad’ll be here soon.”

“Good, I won’t breathe a word, kid.”

“Preciate it.”

He took a rag and wetted it in his coffee and scrubbed at the blood.

“Take care of yourself off island.”

“Yeah, you too.”

I was shaking going up the hill of Daggett Street. The mist was gone and I knew it would be a hot day. Now the bottom fell out. There was a new pain from fighting the pain. I wondered could the body have anticipated the pain of being shot or did it react with creativity to the bullet. I had no desire to move. I felt the lassitude of a very deep sleep and was dropping through myself. What would you rather, be shot or swim the Sound again? Maybe be shot. See, there ya go. You’re lucky. Well, they’ve both got their drawbacks. What are they? Well they both suck, for starters. Alright, don’t stop. I rounded the Harbor Master and walked back along the sand. I was leaving a little blood now and the eye of the needle caught a glint of light and walking toward the vast beginning of sunrise I smelled Her breath. Our first kiss was on my lips and my legs buckled in the pink. Why did You leave me? Which road did you take to the quarry? The highway or Route 9A, through the country and the woods? I’d like to know that. I’d like to know which path you walked to the jump, because there are two. There’s two ways, you know. And which side of midnight? You see, it makes it hard to know the exact date. But my grievance gets in the way. I know, it blocks me from you, how upset I am. You ask a lot, you know, to accept You took Yourself away out of the world and not to be upset with You. Do You know my heart broke when the flowers in Londonberry bloomed this Spring, the first Spring since You were born in Bethlehem without You in the world? Do you know I kissed Your cold lips goodbye? I pretended You were sleeping in my arms. I sat in Your empty dormroom where the bed used to be. I put my hand on the spot where Your head had laid and I kissed the spot. I laid on the ice of Lake Paran looking up at the snow falling and I couldn’t see past it to where exactly it fell out of. It never touched what it fell out of it just fell and I never cried so. And if I start now I’ve got no chance. Keep going. I stumbled in the sand and caught myself on a dock. Do You know a part of me will be waiting for You forever? Is that what You’re doing now, waiting? I can smell You through the gate. Why don’t You come through it, to me? I’m not going in. I’m going to be a very old man. With children. I thought You’d have so many. I thought they’d be mine. I’m not coming in. I know You don’t ask it of me. I ask it of You, to meet my lips and kiss me into You. I’ve done all this just for a kiss. Can’t you come alive just a little? For the seconds of a kiss? To say goodbye. You never said goodbye. You know You jumped without saying goodbye. You called me the day before You did it and we spoke about our argument and You said we’d talk again in a few days, let’s give it the time it needs. Here’s me, giving it time. Here, I’ll die a little and you live a little. You feel that? I’m dying a little. No not the whole way. Now you come alive.

Elvis was on the dock, jogging through the boathouse. He was in a panic looking for something. Oh yeah, me. He must have seen the blood now in the light and knew he shot me. I stood a few docks away and waited for him to go. Let’s give it the time it needs, I said to him in my head. Feels like a dream, don’t it? Standing here at dawn dying. No, you’re not dying. Why’d you say that? I rested against a pilon and heard the Chappy Ferry behind me. Brock was at the wheel and his truck was the only car on. Keep going.

I got to Elvis’s dock and wrapped my arms around a pilon. I vomited into the water. No blood. Maybe it went right through and didn’t touch a thing. Blessed am I. And here you are whining. I started to leer backwards and caught myself. My wound tore inside when I grabbed on so tight to the dock. Don’t sit down. All you gotta do is wait for Dad. Don’t sit down. And don’t let’s think about the last kiss. When You were unravelling and I couldn’t see it until the knot was gone. When You bit my lip so hard You drew blood. When You got out of bed and walked the cemetery on campus in the December moonlight and you came back and you laid in bed with me stiff and cold like a puzzle piece that would not fit. Did You know then? That You would do it when semester ended and I was home? Was some part of You already dead then? Was I in some last nerve of a last cell screaming against it as You jumped or was all of You in it? The way that part of You was already dead when You walked the cemetery, is some part of You still alive? Is part of me already dead to talk this way? Where will I be when You come back? Here, in the harbor. I’ll leave a part of me in the harbor. In the sand. Like the rose you must drop to leave a dream. When you love someone deeply they enter a layer they can’t get out of without leaving a part of themselves. Like a dream you must drop all the drowned flowers you’d spent the night gathering to leave, and leave it in that layer, in the sea, in the grass. You must leave behind your memory of it. The swath you cut deep as a seam and trust it knotted into other dreams and other seams. Was it the sea conceived in sorrow, and the elegy of her tides? The tides from the old wound of the moon. Yes. The ocean filled the hole of our lost soul, after we’d gambled her into the sky. Maybe the soul is not inside us but orbits us, hides from us, shocks us in full sight some nights in a field, in a clearing. It has a face we’ll never see. It is on the dark side of us and then eclipses us in the day and hangs ghostly in the blue sky. It keeps its mysterious schedule and gives us once a month to study its seas and mountains and floodplains but it pulls on our tides all the time and there is a side we’ll never see. We don’t gain a soul until we’ve lost it. The soul is something we’ve lost. It is born in this loss. The memory of waves. The mourning of the tides. I’m not going to die but I’ll leave part of myself in the sand. Where the water touches. Let’s drop it together. Out of the same hand. Come now. Yes, I knew You’d had something for me. The layer I left in You. I promise I will forget it. I will keep it inside without remembering. We’re dropping it. Look, it’s dropping. Ah Thee, I love Thee. Watch how I love Thee.

And there was my father drifting up in the Key West. His hair was blonde and blown back in the wind, and his eyes had taken on the blue of the water.

I got up onto the dock and shuffled down it. My sweatshirt was wet in the back and the blood was coming down a small trickle in the back of my sweatpants. It was only wet in spots.

“Morning Adam.”

“Hey Dad.”

“You cut your foot.”

“Yeah, on the dock. Not deep but lots of blood.”

“No bags?”

“Nah.”

“You’ll be back.”

He laughed at me.

“Early night?”

“I’m sick.”

“Didn’t I teach you how to drink?” he joked.

“Yeah, drink too much.”

I put my hood on as I walked and tightened it a little hide my face and teeth. I grabbed the teetop as he held onto the dock. I was behind him so he couldn’t see me grimace in pain. I had mastered a little of it so I didn’t make much noise.

He’d see through it soon, but we just had to get out of the harbor first. I sat in the back. Just get out of the harbor Adam. I knew I’d never deepen into such concentration

We drifted back and he put us forward. I liked the familiar sound of the engine changing. I looked over and the Chappy ferry was snug against the ramp and Brock’s truck was gone. There was a short file of cars in line. Keep waiting.

We drifted forward and I heard the suction sound of the balcony door to Mayflower open. Too much pain to twist and look back.

“Look at these yachts Adam. Christ.”

“Yeah,” I said. But I turned back and Elvis was at the edge of the dock. He held my Bally shoes in his hand and the fifth floor was high above his head looking down. I raised my hand to him and knew I’d never bring myself into such concentration again in my life and some color went out and Elvis did not move but stared at me going away like coming a layer awake in a dream and trying to hold it and hear it and the actors of the dream knew you were trying to see it and they stood still. The tide was coming in now and filling all those secret channels and beaches and islands of the mind that had opened and the corridor was closing and the feeling saying Goodbye, Goodbye, Goodbye Elvis.

The last pink of dawn was in the sea in the direction of home, and my father spoke to me now. “Now, if you’re my son, then I bet you know all about the craziness that’s been going on here.”

“I do. I’ll tell you when we get home.”

“I told your mother you’d know. I’ll take it nice and slow for ya back there.”

“Dad?”

“Yeah.”

“What time do you think we could make to Falmouth?”

“Day like this? Twenty minutes.”

“And home?”

“Hair under an hour. Why, you wanna go to Falmouth?”

“Just curious. There a hospital there?”

“There is. Why?”

“Oh, I’m just whining about my hangover.”

“You’ll make it. It’s a flat calm.”

“That’s nice.”

“Yeah, gorgeous. Look at this beauty Adam. What the Hell, thing’s insane.”

“It’s called a Gidal.”

“I’ve never heard of it. How’d I never hear of it?”

“It’s custom made. I’ve been on it.”

“You’ve been havin a time, haven’t you?”

“Yeah. I’ll tell you about it.”

“I’m looking forward. Hear that? Someone’s still shooting fireworks.”

“Is that what that sound was?”

“Sounded like it.”

“Does look calm out there.”

“Yeah, no rips. I’ll go slow for ya though. Ready?”

“Dad?”

“Yeah.”

And there, free of the harbor, long past the no wake sign with the Vineyard behind us and Chappaquiddick far enough to haze, I stood up and opened my hand, and showed my father my wound.

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• Prologue

• Chapter 1

• Chapter 2

• Chapter 3

• Chapter 4

• Chapter 5

• Chapter 6

• Chapter 7

• Chapter 8

• Chapter 9

As ever, if you believe in what we’re doing at PILCROW, please subscribe, please share, 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.

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I tried to reach for him as he staggered forward. He collapsed nearly on top of me and I put my arm around his back and could not feel it I was so cold. We shivered together banked behind the rock in the sun and I gathered my arm back into me. We spasmed badly and I thought my back would break in the spasms. I knew we had to get our wet clothes off but I couldn’t find the strength to hoist up and remove them. Still we had to and after my body accepted it was out of the water I sat up and tried to wield my arms. They were numb and heavy. When I lifted them just a quarter of the way they began to shake. I laid back down and tried again after a long while. I bit the neckline of my shirt to get a purchase on it but the shirt was wet so it clung to my elbow and I couldn’t get my arm through. My arms did not belong to me. Elvis had sat up now and he put his weak arm through the short sleeve of my shirt and held it open and I got my arm back in to my torso and sat panting and shivering with one arm through. I started to push the shirt up with my free arm and Elvis helped me get it over my head and then I let it fall to the sand and helped Elvis in the same way with his shirt. Our pants were harder because we had tied and taped them at the knee and our fingers could not close themselves on the edge of the tape and pull. I got a finger in the small space of the belt loop and Elvis helped me pull until the prong was free of the holes. I wedged my hand between the loose belt and my pants and pulled until it was free. I helped Elvis with his too and then put a finger above my zipper and pulled down numbly, and then like crowbars pulled on the hole with my hands until my button popped loose out of the buttonhole. Elvis did the same and we rolled them down to the tape edge and pushed until they finally slipped over the knee. It was hard work and took long and we must have looked quite strange doing it. And then we laid down, and we were so cold we looked like a pair of ancient statues with the groins cut out, and laid in the sun huddled together shaking and sleeping.

The stretch of coastline was private and we were lucky no one came down this way. We were behind a rock from the public facing side and could rest here comfortably for awhile. When I woke from a tired nap my head was heavy and I needed water and tea badly. I chugged what was left of both and then got very dizzy and nearly collapsed. I grasped my head in pain and my vision vanished and came back and was still blurry. Elvis’s water and tea looked very good to me but I didn’t have any. I sat rubbing and slapping and clenching my body. I saw our clothes in damp clumps and grabbed them one by one from a sitting position and rung them out best I could with numb hands. Then I got up and spread them on top of the rock to dry and lay back down and huddled into Elvis.

The pauses between the shivering grew longer but I was still cold and my jaw ached because my teeth had not stopped chattering for several hours. My neck and shoulders were in the most pain and the hardest to get to move. My legs were heavy but they were ok and the toes had uncramped. I made fists with my fingers and I felt a warmth of blood under the cold skin. I smacked my body and rubbed as much as I could and I tried to walk a little.

When I could get to my voice I heard how alien it had become. “We’ve got to get some food, El.”

He didn’t say anything and I laid back down against him.

“El. We gotta get to town. Buy food.”

He moaned into the sand.

I could feel my fingers now and I started rubbing and massaging his shivering body. I grabbed handfuls of his skin and kneaded them. After a few minutes he rolled over, dazed.

“Can’t.”

“You can.”

“Ok,” he said.

I massaged the front of his body and handed him his water and tea. This woke him up. He drank them down and his head fell back and his teeth stopped chattering for a moment. The chattering came back and he exhaled heavily over and over.

It was hard work to get the tape and laces of the pants. We had tied them very tightly and effectively. We finally ripped them off and put our legs in. Our legs were so cold we didn’t feel the sand as we put our legs through, nor on our backs as the shirts went on. They were still damp but I thought they would dry as we walked in the sun.

We were not about to sit there and try and work our shoe laces back into the eyelets of our sneakers so we left them. We wobbled about a mile down the beach with heavy bodies and our arms tucked inside our wet shirts, hugging ourselves. We were slow and heavy and dazed like right before a big cold comes on and rested against tall rocks. Elvis leaned against a rock and I saw he slept. I slept too for a moment against a rock and jolted awake as I felt my balance go out. We were shaking. But there were soft pauses now between the teeth chattering and we walked barefoot and the sand was warm on our feet. We came finally to the public beaches of Menemsha and walked into Larsen’s fish market. There was an old fisherman behind the register. We ordered two quarts each of clam chowder and four cocacolas and waters and two large French Fries and a pound of raw bluefin tuna cut into sashimi and two lobster rolls each. We also put down two sweatshirts and grey sweatpants with Larsens’ name down the sides from the small alcove for tourists.

“You sell socks?”

The fisherman furrowed his brow. “Do I sell socks?”

“Yes.”

“No, I don’t sell socks.”

I turned to Elvis. “We should double up the sweats.”

Elvis pulled his damp wallet from his zipper pocket and I got two more pairs each, double-XL.

“You have triple XL?”

The man laughed. “What are you trying to dress, a bluefin? No.”

Elvis held the wallet below the counter so the fisherman wouldn’t see his shaking fingers. It was hard to wedge the card out and because it was wet it didn’t read, so the fisherman had to enter the number manually with his large, callused fingers. We must have looked drunk and blue but there was over three hundred dollars hanging on the card so he wasn’t about to send us away.

“What,’d you two fall off a boat this morning?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Did you?”

“Yes.”

“You better take some coffee.”

“Thank you.”

“Take the clothes for free too, you look rough and they cost me nothing.”

“Thank you.”

He put everything in bags for us and brought us two hot coffees and packages of ketchup for the fries. Elvis and I walked to the public restrooms eating the fries and took turns holding the bag of food and changing into the grey sweats. We threw our wet clothes in the trash.

Then we sat down behind Larsens’ out of the wind and in the sun and ate. We were very cold even in the sun. My hair had dried and felt warm against my cold forehead and I started to fog eating the food and taking in the sugar. Blue lights were exploding against my eyes and my forehead hurt. We worked quickly through the first quarts of clam chowder and even dipped the fries in it. I drank the coffee like water and started on my first coke. My stomach was exploding but I kept eating. I worried about a fever and I thought we ought to feed the fever to stave it. Don’t stop. I didn’t use any of the soy sauce for the raw tuna because I didn’t want to dehydrate and soon my bladder called me back to my feet to pee. I held onto the table for several seconds before I took off lumbering and limping for the bathroom with a coke. I was too tired to stand and sat on the toilet and peed and sat there for five minutes, drinking my coke. The floor was wet and sandy and my feet were cold. I held my head in my hands and I felt false energy climb. I knew we were in the twilight of pain and it would come for us tonight. My eyes hurt badly from the sun and there was an electric warp laid across my vision I couldn’t see around. It throbbed when I closed my eyes and I thought I could still die.

The fisherman brought us more coffee and french fries and we finished as much as we could of the food and then we laid in the sun in our sweatshirts and tried to sleep in the midst of all the small children and families playing and sunbathing around us. I felt still the open tunnel, the same gate as sleep but forked back of the entrance. Falling into it for sleep felt like dying and my body kept jumping with the feeling of a plane falling during ascent. It was hard to sleep like this and I felt flecks of sand in my face. Elvis had turned the inner sweatshirt around so the hoodie covered over his face. I copied this and pulled it down once from my eyes to find a blonde child on his knees smiling at me.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hello.”

He and his siblings were jumping over me as some obstacle on the beach.

“We’re playing,” he told me.

“What are you playing?”

“It’s called, Jump Over the Man.”

“How do you play?”

“Like this,” and he walked away from me, turned toward me and ran and leapt me.

“Huh. I’m still confused how you play it. Maybe go jump over my friend and show me.”

“We haven’t tried him yet.”

“I bet you can get good air over him.”

“Ok.”

And I fell asleep watching the children jumping over Elvis.

We took the bus back from Menemsha eating our lobster rolls, and had each a quart left of clam chowder. The fries and tuna were gone and I thought our breath must smell horrible and we must look like a strange pair. We tried to sit away from the air conditioning and open a window for warmth and the passengers looked at us sweating and irritated. My body’s heaviness was too strong and I fell asleep quickly, my arms inside my grey Larsen sweatshirt and my feet tucked into the rolls of the sweatpants, but I kept jumping out of it.

Elvis was asleep too but he woke me when we got to Church Street in Edgartown. We left our trash on the bus and lumbered forward with what was left of our food. It must have taken us thirty minutes to make the five minute walk back to Mayflower. We shuffled and dragged our feet going up the smallest hill. I was cold still but my head was sweating and Elvis looked dead, and I must have looked the same. He had bags under his eyes and his skin was pale and blue in the cheeks.

When we got to Mayflower we took the side entrance that no one ever used to sneak past any Gavins. The side door was right by the stairs. Elvis peeked through the windows and saw no one. He took a key out of a fake rock and opened the door quietly. He put the key back and we entered and he closed the door and we took to the stairs. The last leg of our journey was up three flights. We went quietly on the carpet and slowly. The washing machine was whirling and we could hear Laura and Michelle in their bedrooms. We got to the top of the landing and then Elvis felt for the gun in his pocket and he went up the last flight of stairs to open and hide it on the fifth floor. I turned off the air conditioning and fell into the bed. Elvis came down with a gallon jug of water and closed the door and pushed his dresser over it so no one could come in. He opened the skylight for the hot air and drew the shades down over the sun and he fell next to me and we bundled under the blankets. It was hard to fall asleep and I knew once I did the pain would come alive and it would be a hard sleep. For sleep binds bodies and if Elvis and I were ever to lay awake in the moonlight of the same dream it was tonight. Could we chance a glimpse of what we may see and would there come a second swim to be made tonight in the work of sleep, as the pain twined us up to our crowns and sleep sewed it to the bone.

We slept for only a first smooth hour. Elvis ripped his side of the blanket off in a sweat and my body was too stiff to turn and do the same. I laid in a great heat with the last of the daylight in the room and I did not fall asleep so much as drop out of myself. My eyes were still injured from the sunlight and that opening was still in me. It was the eye of the needle of death and it was stabbed across my eyes. It was the same clean gate as sleep, all untouched. I felt I could enter it and die if I chose, and I had the sense every time I began to sleep that I was hurtling down toward its rim and I panicked and threw myself on the outside of its dark halo and lay around it and slept. Then I would gasp awake and realize I was sleeping on my back and I was not breathing. The pain of the swim was coming into its early strength and I could not bear to move my body and get to my side. I tried to turn and my abdominal wall shook as if to fall apart. A turn of the head could move the mood into fever and I feared a change of direction might leave me more vulnerable than others.

The way was open. I could choose it. The exit which chambers the soul. It was like the drain of the tub when I was a child. I would lay under the water and listen to the sound of the drain and was afraid of getting sucked down into it. Afraid of coming out of the water. I fought it and sweated and took the top layer of my sweats off. There was something loose and unknown in the dream material and it was stealing pieces of me. Who could say there were not certain dreams where you could lose your life. That the omegas of the soul could not open to you in a duct of dream and you could thread through to die if you chose?

I fought it all night. In my dreams I still swam with Elvis and I had others that were like librations of the soul that I forgot on the instant of living them. I was deep in an original layer of memory and ascended from sleep like the levels of rest a diver must make. Yes, a rose off the moon gates the first dream, and you must drop it in the sea before you can leave. I woke sometime in the dark shaking with light boring through my eyelids. It was as if to have swum out of the light of heaven buried at the bottom of the ocean below the dark and yet the light was still boring into my eyes even in the dark of the room. It still had some grip on my death and the bright eye of the needle awoke the awe and absorption of the child in me who cannot stop staring into the sun. My inner eye would go blind if I didn’t stop and I didn’t know how to turn from it and it kept pulling on me. I felt the bonds of my soul take on gravity and pull away. I was breathing like mad and hyperventilating and Elvis was groaning next to me on his side in pain. Then I became very cold and reached in pain to bring the blanket back over me.

Again I dropped into sleep against my will and without my knowing it. What was awake in me merely dropped out of me completely, over and over. I jolted out of its pull to discover it had already sucked me down. The hole was not closing up but settling in me, becoming more clear. Like a scratch on the iris you see when you close your eyes on the beach, against the inner red of the eyelid. When I shifted my eyes it shifted too and drifted with the drift of my eyes. The way was open, and I could go in anytime.

Sometime before dawn I woke in a panic that I had slept. My body had pulled me under and to wake was to wake into total pain. But now my bladder throbbed and I had to get up or I would wet the bed. I was still on my back and tried to turn toward the floor. It was going to hurt. It was going to hurt very badly. I turned against a riot in my body and my vision seemed to come in a delay round to my eyes. My shoulders and neck and abdomen screamed against it. There was an odd calm in my head. I lay there on my side as the pain in my body subsided and then the pain in my head rushed round like a swell breaking over a seawall and I groaned loudly as it washed over me.

I heard Elvis say my name. I slowly slid my leg off the bed and onto the floor. From my side it hurt less to get my stomach flat.

“Adam.” There was concern in his voice.

I groaned and got my arm and leg over the side and slid my other leg all the way over. My back ached now as I did this and my head was fogged. My body was a bond of pain and gravity worked against me. I had never felt before gravity’s intimate bond with pain. They are made of the same physical law and sleep had married them.

“Are you gonna pee?”

“Yeah.”

“Me too. Use the emply jug.”

I laid and caught my breath.

“Where is it?”

“Our feet. It kills.”

I lifted up against the bed onto my knees, feeling the full length of the pain. My head swam in flashes of harbor lights. I was shaking in the cold and an old spasm from the swim worked through the exhausted locks of my body. I found the jug and crawled sideways with my arms on the bed. I pulled my sweatpants down and put myself through the lid and peed for a long time. Elvis began to lift up in his pain and it took his breath away how much he hurt. I was dizzy, but took solace in the pleasure of peeing. It did not all flow and I had to push with the muscles of my stomach and I groaned aloud in the sound of the stream and he had spirit enough to laugh at me.

“What’s our lie?” I asked.

“We went over to Astana’s in Falmouth.”

“Ok. And we’re massively hungover.”

“Massively.”

“Is the gun safe?”

“Yes.”

“And about the boat we play dumb.”

“Ok.”

I woke with the smell of daylight on the ocean. The windows in the room had been shut for the AC ever since the Gavins showed up and it was nice to smell the sea in the house again.

The pain was worse in the morning than the night. Only if I laid very still on my side was the pain ok. But my right leg was sore from not moving off it for hours and I couldn’t help but yelp when I turned over. It felt as if every bone in my body was broken. But the sense of fever was gone, and I could see again and think a little better. I wasn’t shaking anymore but my muscles hurt from all the shivering I’d done.

I felt my hair and I could hardly put my fingers through it. There was a thin caked layer of sand on the side of my forehead under my hair and I wiped it away. The bed was also full of sand.

The jug was full too and I had to pee again. I got up very slowly and shuffled to the door and pushed the bureau away. It woke Elvis. I couldn’t bend over to grab the jug and dropped to my knees instead and stood back up with it. The work of a long minute. The food was on the bureau and I had some last cold bites.

Jamie and Serena were coming out of their room. There was an afterglow on their skin and a daze in their eyes.

“Bruuuuuu,” said Jamie. “Damn, you look destroyed.”

“What time is it?” I asked, chewing lobster.

“10 dirty bru.” He looked me over. “Nice Larsen’s gear.”

“Thanks man.”

“That’s a sick fit. You just pick it up?”

“Yeah. Pretty fire, right?”

“Where have you guys been?”

“Larsen’s.”

They laughed. “The whole time?”

“Nah, we went to Astana’s in Falmouth.”

“You guys get trashed?”

“Yeah. Did a ton of Molly. So hungover. We got back yesterday and slept all day.”

“Sick. Yeah, Laura was freaking out about you guys.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah she thought you guys were dead or something.”

“Ah, well. El forgot his phone and I don’t have your numbers and then we were just gone off the Molly.”

“Is it fun there?”

“So fun.”

“You missed some crazy parties,” said Serena.

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah. Celebrating Chris’s rescue.”

“He got so drunk he forgot where he docked his boat,” Jamie smiled.

“No way.”

“Yeah. He was walking all up and down peoples’ backyards looking for it.”

“Well,” I said, “every good deed deserves a bad turn.”

“What does that mean?”

“Just an expression. The guy’s been up to such good, something’s bound to happen to him.”

Jamie looked confused. “Why though?”

“It’s just an expression.”

“Parade’s today,” said Serena.

“For Chris?”

“No,” Jamie laughed. “For the Fourth. It comes down Northwater Street.”

“Oh sick.”

“What’s in the jug?”

“Urine. We’re collecting it.”

Jamie laughed. “It’s Gatorade right?”

“Yeah, for the hangover. I have to go to the bathroom now very badly.”

“Ok bru, we’ll catch you downstairs. I’ll let Laura know you guys are up. I heard you guys get back yesterday and I kept her from barging in.”

“Thanks bru.”

“She thought you guys stole Chris’s boat.”

“Did she really?”

“Yeah.”

“Nah. We swam over.”

“Nice.”

I shuffled to the bathroom and Jamie and Serena laughed at me.

“Damn, you’re really hungover, huh?”

I laughed too and shuffled melodramatically for them and shut the door. “Hung as, bru.”

Elvis and I had come back to the same axis but I wondered if we had merged at such speed that it would not hold and we’d swing apart again. I did not know what pacts he may have made in his sleep, what promises sworn to for we were too tired to recover them and talk. By midafternoon we appeared downstairs.

I sat out on the balcony and looked at the innocent glitter of the harbor. Without the fever the pain was agreeable. I was proud of it. I watched the Chappy ferry and thought I could see Brock at the wheel. I wondered at that. But I could not stand up to get a better look. I looked ahead a few steps. The sleep had given me a distance. Elvis was inside fielding Linda’s questions. There’d be a pride in her at the hangover, the sporting of it. She might not have noticed Elvis was gone but Laura would have terrified her.

Tumbling Dice came on through the speakers. I was alone in the song until voices came out and took to the pool below.

Baby, I can’t stay, you to ro-oh-oll may

And call me the tumblin dice

I stood up and looked down at Serena’s tan breasts swimming in the pool. Laura and Michelle were sunbathing in the lounge chairs and there were Gavin children in the pool too.

One of Elvis’s uncles climbed the stairs.

“This was one of Ed’s favorite songs.”

“It’s a good one.”

He went inside and then Sweet Viriginia came on next, like it always did.

Made it through the waste stormy winter

Jamie called up. “Adam, that you up there?”

“Yeah bru,” I said, sitting down again and moaning loudly for them.

“Come on down sweet virginia.”

“I will later. I’m afraid of the sun right now.”

“Yeah and you should be. You vampires had to party your cocks off and scare us to death,” said Laura.

“Ah yeah. Elvis left his phone and I don’t have your numbers so—”

“So you couldn’t text. Yeah yeah yeah. Astana has my number. If you guys cared at all about the people who loved you you’d have had her text me. We were all scared to death.”

“I was chilling,” said Jamie.

“Sorry Laura.”

“And then mom took down all the photos of Dad the same day. It felt like a bad omen.”

“Bad juju all over the place,” said Michelle.

“Yeah but the photos of dad were just cuz she repainted,” said Jamie.

“Well, they’re not back up yet, are they? It’s been two days.”

“Did you hear the woman Chris saved died?” asked Mark GF.

“No!”

“Yeah, yesterday morning.”

“Alright, that’s it! No more messing around. No more sneaking off. No more staying up past midnight and going out on boats. There’s a bad energy going around. I want everyone in bed at a reasonable hour.”

“It’s the Summer of Trump,” Michelle quipped.

“No, for real! It’s the first summer of Trump and it’s killing everyone. They still haven’t caught the guy who killed that little girl.”

“Well, whoever it was didn’t mean it. It was a freak accident.”

“Still, he killed a girl. He’s got to face something. It’s the daughter of the Chappy Ferry captain. That sweet man, Brock.”

“Is that true? Adam, do you know him?”

“Yeah, he’s a great guy.”

“Have you seen him since? How is he?”

“Rocky.”

“I cried this morning when Hugh showed me her picture in the paper.”

“I told Chris. He’s got that stupid gun he shoots off when he’s wasted. I told him be careful, he could kill someone by mistake. Like that poor girl.”

I went looking for Elvis in the kitchen. The walls of the dining room and living rooms had all been painted now and their old L-shaped couch replaced. Even the doorframe in the kitchen where they had measured their heights as kids. My height had been marked there too. I could feel a place where Elvis had been in the room like a patch of cold water and I knew that his mother had painted over his soul.

I looked through the fridge and pulled out left over pizza and orange juice and sat at the island. Chris and Caleb came in then, reeking of weed.

“Adam bru! Where you guys been?”

“Hey guys.”

“Go on a splurge with the Frank coin?”

Chris and Caleb dapped me and I winced to raise my hands.

“What’s the matter with you? Where have you been?”

“We’re hungover. Partied hard in Falmouth at Astana’s.”

“Oh yeah, I remember her. She’s a babe.”

“Yeah.”

“She could do porn.”

“Yes.”

“So you guys steal my boat or what?”

“Huh?”

“My boat. It’s gone.”

“You lost your boat?”

“Look, it’s ok if you guys borrowed it, but I need it back. And you gotta ask first. Almost swam home a few nights ago.”

“Oh, Chris.” Caleb grabbed his forehead and put his hand on Chris’s arm. “I can’t believe this. Frank had it brought to the marina that day. I forgot to tell you. Shit.”

“What?”

“Yeah. He wanted to engine tuned while he was gone. The marina guys came and got it.”

“He did?”

“Yeah. I’m sorry bru. He caught me when we were leaving the Gidal that day and told me to tell you, and I said I would. But then we got to the Atlantic and the Yacht Club and I forgot. I’m sorry. We’ve been chilling so hard I haven’t been able to think straight.”

“Oh, Jesus.” Chris nearly collapsed as the tension left his body. “What a fuckign relief. I was getting close to calling him and admitting I lost another boat.” Chris shook his head and rolled his eyes. “Daaa-aaaad.”

Caleb laughed. His eyes were in crescents and he caught my eye.

“Dads, am I right? One day we’ll be just like them. Crazy.”

Linda came in then holding Chelsea. She screamed with laughter when she saw me. “Adam! You look terrible!”

“Yeah,” I smiled. “And I feel even worse.”

“Elvis told me all about the party in Falmouth. You guys are crazy. You’re not partying in the boathouse tonight are you?”

“Oh, when the hour strikes midnight, you’ll probably find us down there.”

She screamed again with laughter. “I don’t even wanna know what goes on there at night.”

“No, you don’t.”

“So, Chris and Caleb, to what do we owe the honor?”

“Caleb’s saying his goodbyes,” said Chris.

“What? You’re leaving?”

“Yeah, duty calls in LA,” Caleb said.

“An emergency on set?” Linda joked.

“That’s right Linda. The film I’m working on is a like The Godfather meets The Social Network, but with Mexican cartels. And Don Corleone and Mark Zuckerberg are just not getting along on set right now. Plus, I gotta get back to my harem.”

Linda screamed.

“The girls here are so fake. The chicks in LA are just… more real, I don’t know. Anyways, I’m off to the airport now to get ahead of the parade traffic.”

“But it’s not a Fourth of July without Caleb Stone!”

“I know. But I tell you what Linda. After the parade, around four, look up into the sky, for a red plane.”

“No.”

“I’m having my pilot fly over Chappy. Give me a wave.”

Linda screamed again. “Well, everyone’s out by the pool. Come on.”

Linda led them out of the kitchen and as Caleb passed me. “Keep it real bru.”

“You too Caleb.”

“By the way, you dropped this the other day on the yacht,” and he handed me the check, folded between his fingers.

I couldn’t find Elvis in the house and I didn’t have the strength to climb the stairs to look for him. The parade had started down Northwater and Mayflower was empty. I felt him through the timbers and the feeling put a message in me about his father and the photos. There was a webbing over us from the swim but with his father I felt him being tugged in a direction I couldn’t follow. I was cold and achy and I thought a hot shower might help. I shuffled down the balcony stairs into the sun and to the outdoor shower below. I hadn’t seen my naked body since the swim. My arms and stomach were coated white with sand and dead exfoliated skin. My hair was matted and I had seaweed stuck to my shoulders and everywhere below my waist.

The showerhead was monstrous and the hot water massaged into my neck. Every time I felt pain I was proud. I was proud of how I hurt. Every time my shoulders or my neck or my back hurt I said to myself, “Yes, they hurt because you did something big with them.” The pain was like a tattoo. And it felt a little looser, a little more comfortable in the hot water. And maybe I would miss it when the pain was gone. But there was new pain to feel as I moved my body in the water and I laughed out loud when I felt a new tear inside me.

I brushed into my hair slowly. It was knotted from the salt and its curls and blonde streaks looked like a Renaissance work of sculpture in the mirror. I looked at my tan body in the small mirror and I looked Roman and lean from the swim. The Sound had put an extra tone into it and it was the first time I thought my body looked truly beautiful. I was sad to destroy the artwork of my hair but it was nothing but sand underneath.

The hot water felt good and when I finished I left my underwear on the hook and put on my sweatpants and draped the hoodie over my shoulder. I lost a second of vision in the temperature swing. I fluttered my eyes. The sea air felt nice on my warm skin. When I opened the door finally, Serena ran into me. I had been standing so long gathering myself that she must not have thought anyone was there. We were both frightened and held each other in surprise. The fold of the towel had loosened and fallen to her feet and we held each other seconds longer than we needed, second long enough to kiss in. I looked down at her breasts and my head swam in the way she smelled. She looked down at my chest and we both said sorry to each other. She had that afterglow on her and I knew she and Jamie had hung back during the parade. It is a sin to kiss someone if you’re not in love and the last thing I saw was the sheer gold of hair in a vale below her waist and then I felt very lonely.

Elvis was sitting on the balcony. I was surprised to find him drinking a whiskey and I joined him. He put a look into me about his father and I didn’t ask about it. I felt around him.

“I was thinking, if they ever made a movie of what we did, it would be a great line when we land on the beach after the swim for one of us to pat our pockets and go, ‘Shit, you know what? I think I left my wallet back on Pasque. We’ll have to head back real quick.’”

I laughed. The whiskey had never touched me before but now it did. I was spent. It brought evening a few hours closer and the eye of the needle rose in me again. I was talking with Elvis but I could walk straight through it. It played over my soul like sunspots. It was the deep turquoise of a sunspot pinched tight below the eyes in the sun. I could smell Her breath through it. Seasweet. I could kiss it, sad and shadowed. All I had to do was put my foot on the sill. It was just further down the direction I’d been walking. I was one step from Her now. We had drawn now the distance of a kiss. I hurried another whiskey down and wondered if Elvis could see this needle too. Did he thread it for a moment when he almost drowned. Was there a door blown ajar in his swim. Did he hear the voice of his father in the old timbers of the house now shorn of his face coming through it?

“What happened when we got lost from each other?”

Elvis sipped his drink. “I got sucked under. And I swallowed a lot of water.” He swallowed the whiskey again to replace the taste of the salt in his memory. “I thought I was gonna die and then something pushed me back up. I thought, if I go down, I can’t kill Frank.”

“Yeah,” I said. I sipped my whiskey and refilled the glass. “You still wanna do that?”

“I didn’t know when I first said it but after the rips I knew. I saw it. I saw myself doing it. It’s what saved my life. I thought of it while I slept too.”

I didn’t say anything.

“I just gotta make sure I can lift the gun,” he laughed. “I could hardly pour the whiskey straight.” He sipped. “He’ll be back some time tomorrow.”

“Yeah,” I scratched my jaw.

The harbor was packed with yachts now for the fourth and the sea was deep green. After Elvis went up to the fifth floor I shuffled along the beaches and the docks to avoid the parade. I walked around the building of the Harbor Master. There is a public launch on the other side and I walked up the road of the launch until I hit the parade crowd further down Northwater. Ancient firetrucks were going by, the kind twenty men had to push to a fire. I wedged through the crowd and down Dagget to the hut at the Chappy Ferry. Jill was walking up it.

“Adam.”

“Hi Jill.”

“You haven’t answered my texts.”

“Sorry, my phone’s been dead.”

“There’s a service this weekend for Rosie.”

“How’s Brock?”

“It’s so sad Adam. He’s so angry. The police won’t do anything about it. They say it’s impossible.”

“I know that’s bullshit.”

“It’s a .44 magnum. That’s all he could get out of them.”

“I’d like to see him before the service.”

“He’ll be in tomorrow morning.”

“What time?”

“First shift.”

“He’s not piloting is he?”

“No, he’s going over to the spot where it happened and see if he can figure anything.”

“I’ll see him. I’ll come tomorrow morning.”

“Thank you.”

“Did you hear that woman died?”

“I did.”

“Devastating.”

“I know.”

“These things come in three’s and I’m just getting nervous what’s next.”

“It’ll be ok. Would you tell Brock I’ll be here tomorrow morning to see him and to wait if I’m not there right away?”

“Yes. He’d like that.”

“Thank you. Let’s go see the parade.”

“Ok.”

I put my arm out and she took it.

Linda had a catered barbecue set up in the backyard. High top tables were set everywhere. Chris and his mother were there and some of the boathouse crew and they walked with bottles of rose in their hands. Chelsea tiptoed through the grass. One of the frat guys had laid out in the sun all day with his hat on backwards and his forehead was sunburnt in the shape of the hat. Elvis and I sat on the balcony drinking together. We were going to get drunk tonight. There was something there at the end of the bottle for us.

“It’s Caleb! It’s Caleb!”

Half the crowd rushed up the balcony. There was a red plane in the sky and you could hear its motor. I looked at Elvis watching the plane and I thought of his father and the reach of other seas.

“The strangest thing happened, remind me to tell you later,” I said to him.

“Goodbye Caleb,” everyone said. They were waving and taking photos and Laura was on a FaceTime call with him.

“Stay chill while I’m gone,” I heard him say.

“I can’t believe he left today of all days.”

“I called in for work next week,” said Chris. “I can’t leave this place.”

Jamie and Serena and Mark GF stayed with us on the balcony after everyone went down to dinner.

“Caleb left me his conch,” said Jamie. He and Serena had their sunglasses on.

“You’re conched already, aren’t you?” I asked.

“Conched iz bru,” Jamie smiled.

The dinner passed and the light slipped away and at early evening the family gathered on the deck of the Boathouse. Linda asked me to get Monty a blanket because he was cold and he had to go to the hospital the next day to check his heart. Apparently he had been having pains all week and didn’t tell anyone. I ran in and grabbed a blanket and gave it to him and he very kindly accepted it and held my hand for a moment.

“Thank you, Adam.”

The first fireworks shattered green in the sky. I looked for Elvis. Jamie and Laura were standing alone together in the corner of the deck.

“Remember when that random couple was out here watching the fireworks on the dock, and dad came out and gave them a blanket and a bottle of wine?”

“Boy George, that was so funny. That’s the kind of guy you’re gonna be.”

“I know. I hope.”

“We should have done something for his birthday last week.”

The sky was darkening and the fireworks getting stronger over the black treeline of Chappquiddick. I imagined a war on the beaches of Chappaquiddick, and felt a warlike proximity to death. I went to look for Elvis and he was in the pool. His skin glowed red and green in the fireworks.

“Come in Adam. It feels so warm on the body. It’s melting my pain.”

“Ah, I’m chilling bru.”

The explosions burned into the pool. Later they mounted and all were sent off at once for the last minute and Elvis and I watched it from the balcony. Then there was a slipping away of the lights of the boats that had anchored to watch the fireworks and the light in the boathouse went on and slowly a party began. The older family members trickled back up through the balcony and some sat with us and drank. Chris came up for a bottle of wine and entered a magnetic ring with Elvis. I sat in the middle of it and I felt Elvis rotate in a circle with him like a fighter not yet ready to strike.

“Elllll. Heard you were at Astana’s.”

“Yup.”

“Good haul. She’s hot man. Why doesn’t she ever come and party with us?”

“She’s got her own place in Falmouth and a lot of family.”

“Don’t you want her here?”

“Yeah. I do.”

“But she’s like, ‘I wanna be with my family.’”

“Yeah.”

“And you’re like, ‘I just wanna fuck you.’”

Elvis didn’t say anything.

“Sorry, you’re more like, ‘I wanna kiss you… Where you pee.’” Chris laughed heartily at himself. “So what are you do butt buddies gonna do with the Frank coin? I took a look, that’s a lot of cash. I was thinking like, ‘Daaaad, let’s not go crazy.’ But nah, I really appreciate you guys. Legends. You’re legends, for life. You invest it right you never have to work. Well, you probably don’t have to anyways. How’s that all going? Are you guys well taken care of after Ed died?”

The moon slipped the clouds and was clean. Michelle and Mark GF came out to the balcony and Chris put a finger to his mouth. “We’ll chat later. Come down and play beer pong. I’ll wax you two. You guys grab the wine?” Chris asked Michell and Mark.

“You think twelve bottles will do?”

“Yeah, for the first hour. I’ll see you two later.” He winked at us.

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• Prologue

• Chapter 1

• Chapter 2

• Chapter 3

• Chapter 4

• Chapter 5

• Chapter 6

• Chapter 7

• Chapter 8

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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 water was violet and there was white in the violet where the moon lay and we swam in the white. The currents ran through the moonlight and the waves were white and my arms glowed above the water. We waded out into the white waves as far as we could before we swam. The last my foot touched the floor it was in a soft bed of eelgrass. The waves were low but I could feel the early strength of the flood against my legs. The water at the shoreline was cool against our legs but when we went up to our necks it was warm to be under it and Elvis and I talked about how it felt. The wine had given some momentum to the warmth and lifted us beyond hesitation and I felt deep into myself. We were in the white waves of the moon now, in the webbing of the Elizabeths. And there was a promise in the bond between the islands and the moon over the Vineyard and the whisper of Her voice to make the transit before daybreak. That the moon would protect us that far.

So we aimed for the harbors of the moon and sidestroked to the Lunet. The Lunet had wrecked in the 1800s in a snowstorm, just a hundred yards from the protection of Tarpaulin.

I flinched at the feel of seaweed on my legs and chest, like pieces of that webbing of Naushon making its last soft touch of me with its fingertips. We swam through ribbons of sea wrack and the kind they call dead man’s fingers. Last threads of connection looking for final knots in us. Fingertip what is leaving. The waves were small and bright but they looked bigger from down in the water and the Vineyard looked smaller and much further away too. It was black even in the moonlight and the deeper we got in the water the further away the Vineyard drew. It looked like a black hummock in the horizon that did no more than warp over low stars. The calm of the sea was delicate, as if the style in which we swam might decide its force and I felt an implication to make this swim honestly and without fear. The tide was in its early strength and I realized now just how long of a swim it would truly be and it hit me like looking up at the peak of a very tall mountain when you’re cycling and feel the knowledge flutters through all the muscles of your body of how much strength was going to be required of them. It fluttered through your spirit too because you are going to need your spirit to push on when your body wanted to quit, and you can’t waste energy on fear. It will drain you. I knew that moment would come, when there’d be no thinking and we’d be pushed into ourselves and it would be just our wills making the swim. There were random patches of cold water and in one of the patches I felt a wave of flame go up my neck and into my crown that the sea would answer to our mood, but it could have just been a surge in my warmth against the cool water that floated and took a superstition in its surge. Winter was in my mood again, and it felt like winter laid down just over the edge of summer. I tried not to think about it and the wine helped to ride me over this fear, and soon we were above the Lunet. We tried to look down at it but you could not see through the darkness and through the white strobe of the water. But I could see there was greenness in the darkness, and the darkness was deep.

“What is the Lunet?” Elvis asked.

“Some schooner that wrecked a long time ago.”

“Ah. So we’re not the only ones.”

“No, not even close.”

“So they had swim to shore?”

“No.”

“They didn’t make it.”

“Nope.”

“Great.”

He fidgeted with something below the water. “This piece is on my piece man.”

“Chris’s piece is on your piece?”

“Agh, horrible.”

“Give Chris’s piece a chance,” I said. Elvis gave a gasp of laughter into the water and we kept on with these puns as we swam over the wreck. We aimed toward West Chop going with the tide so the moon shone on our right as it continued to climb over the Vineyard.

“Make Chris’s piece, not war.”

“Keep the piece, El. Keep Chris’s piece.”

“Glide on the piece train,” Elvis sang from Cat Stevens.

“Oo-ah-ee-ah,” I sang back.

“When we get back I’m going to enter into some piece talks with Frank McConnell. I’m gonna give that cocksucker a piece of my mind.”

“What you gonna do El?”

“I’m gonna put his son’s piece in his mouth and blow his fucking brains out.”

I could see now how violent it was for Frank to have tried to own the center of Elvis and use his father like that. I couldn’t tell if Elvis was serious or not but murder to avenge the name of one’s dead father was the kind of motivation one needed to get across the waves of the moon and I encouraged Elvis and I shared in the energy of it. He was in reaction against the cancer McConnell had tried to put in his blood.

“And then what about Chris?”

“I’m gonna blow his brains out too. For Rosie. For killing that little girl.”

“Good,” I said.

“Maybe I’ll kill Chris first, in front of Frank.”

We fantasized about it and the first half hour passed without us feeling it. We went slow and methodically. We would have to ease into the wall of fatigue that would come for us and push past it. There was an odd euphoria in pushing past the early wall and the early fatigue and I thought of this for a moment. I tried to look forward to the high and the pride on the other side of it.

It was strange to swim at night and look back at Naushon growing away. The shores of the moon. We were in the Sound now and the waves came from our side and slightly behind. They were not so high that we had to turn our backs to them, so we continued crawling on our left sides. The current and its waves moved almost elliptically around the Elizabeths like the wake of orbit washing back on itself. Outside the moonlight the water was black and looked like you could fall straight through it. There were lights out on the water and when I stopped to tread and look through the waves I could see they were boats.

“Let’s keep our eyes on the boats,” I said. “We’ve got time so let’s swim slow and take breaks and keep an eye.”

I looked back. We had already drifted East quite a ways, for Tarpaulin Cove was directly behind us now and we had launched West of it. The cove still glowed, though the moon was climbing higher and losing some of that early impossible brightness.

“Maybe one of us should face West and the other East.”

“Good idea,” said Elvis.

We were spaced about fifteen feet from each other. The water was calm enough that I could see the wake of a large yacht coming silently over the water. It was moving fast and when it undulated it became very dark in the trough because it curled away from the moonlight and no light could get into the curl. Still you could see dimples in it and some of the water on its shoulder was white and flowed smoothly over it. Then it rose and it lifted the moonlight high as it could go before it was erased in the height.

“Here comes a wake,” said Elvis.

“Don’t fight it.”

We tried to lift our heads above the wake and take it gently. The first wave was the smallest and wetted the bottom of my hair and the next wave washed over our faces though we swam up into its white crest, and then it dropped us down four feet into the trough of the last big wave and this glowed and went over our heads. The water was white and glassy on the other side and it felt nice now to have my whole head wet. I had been waiting for it. The wake pushed us back several yards and we swam now to make up what we’d lost. The backs of the other side of the wake were dark and carved deep toward the Vineyard.

Two boats were coming from either side of us. Elvis saw his first and I saw mine last. We had to tread and figure which direction they were heading. They looked like they would converge on us and they were getting faster the closer they came. We had to wait patiently a long time to tell which direction they were in and I felt something bump my legs and my hackles went up. They were almost upon us when we figured we couldn’t stay where we were and we couldn’t swim backwards either. The one on my side was coming from Wood’s Hole and the one on Elvis’s was heading for Tarpaulin. It made for a narrow channel to swim and we had to swim it fast. We turned against the current and the moonlight and front crawled into the darkness forward of the boat headed to Tarpaulin and got over the other side of its path and then used the bright current to swim lateral to the boat coming from Wood’s Hole. It was about thirty yards from us and its wake was not so large as the yacht’s. We bobbed it and then rested, treading and breathing heavily.

“We’re in a lane of traffic here. We gotta get out.”

We deepened into focus and pushed forward for about ten minutes, I facing East and Elvis West.

“Let’s take a break. One of us floats on his back while the other treads and keeps an eye.”

Elvis went first. He leaned back but his legs did not float up easily. He treaded again and put the gun and water and tea which had gone around to the back of his thighs over his groin. Then he leaned back again and his legs came up a bit better and he lay there with his ears under the water and he glowed white like a glob of starlight fallen on the sea. The tide was gaining strength and we drifted in it but the waves were still calm. It was strange to feel all that dark empty space below you. Nothing to hold onto over eighty feet of depth. I felt alone when Elvis floated and he lay so long without moving I played with the thought that he was dead. I wondered what was in his ears. It occurred to me I could swim away from him while he lay there, his ears under the water listening to the darkness, and he wouldn’t find me. This thought spooked me and I wanted to make him lift his head but I thought he hadn’t rested enough and waited.

“Adam, you gotta listen to the water. So relaxing. I almost forgot we were in the middle of the ocean.”

“Ok,” I said. I put my water and tea into my groin and leaned back and I could not agree to the balance of its warped sound. My ears felt to be in a wrong field, listening to the wall of sound approach its vanishing point at the bottom of the ocean. That’s where the tide went. It drew back on its origin and I lay in a quiver of rising panic and could not rest listening under the blanket. I was listening to more than eighty feet of darkness below me. I was listening to the wound of nature. First memories and oldest dreams. The tides of the old wound of the moon. When we gambled the moon into orbit and the ocean filled the hole of our lost soul where she had been. The tide was the cycle of this memory. And I feared that at any moment something might touch me from the darkness. But Elvis was there. I remembered that Elvis was there and he was keeping an eye.

Every now and then the water lapped my ear and I could hear the silence above the blanket. I had just about let go and calmed and Her voice slipped into me. I could hear my name under the water. “Adam.” I raised my head and Elvis was swimming to me and he pushed my shoulder.

“Boat Adam, boat!”

I looked up at the white hull of a yacht barreling soundlessly toward us. There was a center of silence about it, just enough to not believe in it. It was about sixty yards away and coming fast and felt already to be towering over us. We bolted forward of it in a front crawl with our heads down. I swam thirty strokes without raising my head for a breath and raised it only when my lungs felt like they would explode and the first wave of its wake undulated me. I couldn’t think and I raised it in the direction of the waves and swallowed water. I treaded and coughed in the wake and turned around to watch the boat going past against Tarpaulin Cove.

“El!” I yelled. “Elvis!”

Its wake was steep and this time because it faced the moon it had its brightness in the curls. I turned my back to the white waves and let them push me under.

I turned around again and heard my name out on the water.

“Elvis!” I called.

“Adam!”

Elvis was ten yards away now and breast stroking to me. I hugged him in the water, but it’s hard to hug someone and tread in the water and we let go.

“Jesus man.”

“I swam from it and then went under and swam down. I stayed under as long as I could.”

“Christ. Let’s get our bearings.”

We caught our breaths, resting an arm on each other’s shoulders one at a time, and then swam. All the sprinting had lifted us past the first wall of fatigue and when we started up again my body ached in a good way. I had it in me. We put our muscles into it and we got free of that lane of traffic and it grew well past midnight and the traffic disappeared. The moon was peaking and moving West over the island. I breaststroked for a time and there was a plasmic feel in the cups of my hands and I saw we were swimming through a field of jellyfish. They were comb jellies which do not sting, and they caught in our hands and in the moonlight like weaves in the water. They tickled as they trailed my body.

We were still far from the Vineyard but we were quite a ways East which was better than West and the open ocean. The Vineyard looked short and pitch black from the water. It was no more than a lift above the horizon. Only the tops of its trees bore a faint ring of moonlight. Lambert’s Cove was straight ahead of us by many miles and the moon was over it. If we didn’t put in a good effort to get halfway across by ebb tide we risked being pushed back onto the Elizabeths further South. We would have to tear through its webbing and break its bonds. This next hour was where that voice spoke inside, “Hey man, what’s it to you? Look how far there is to go. Know how tired you’ll be? Just stop and turn around.” But there was no home or rest back on Naushon and we had gone far enough to avoid having thoughts about hiding the gun again, and flagging a boat, and drawing up some lie to Chris. In our minds Chris was already dead, and the transit across was just to confirm it. It was all in front of us and we swam through the layers of fatigue. My neck ached from keeping it above water for a couple hours and I did a kind of side stroke with my head half submerged to rest it. I switched off with my back to the waves and then facing them and the tide was coming into its strength and worked with us. Elvis and I didn’t talk much. Later the waves got too big to face them in a sidestroke so I kept my back to them until I tired and then breaststroked and the waves lifted me from my side. They were mostly gentle. I was thirsty but I wanted to save everything for the last leg when we’d really be tired and needing it.

Elvis and I tried to stay a good distance apart but every now and then we touched underwater in the darkness and spooked each other because we did not know what we touched or what touched us back. When we did drift apart we would call for each other and if one was too far ahead we would wait. When we rested we would pat each other’s shoulders as a way of hugging against the loneliness and the cold of the swim. I rubbed the top of his head once and his hair was silver and my fingers were silver in it. I swam for a time looking at him and he seemed just to coast and his lashes were very long and pretty in the water.

“How ya doin man?”

“Good.”

But his voice came from behind me and I realized his skin was black and that it was a seal floating along and stopped with my hackles up. The seal blinked her lashes at me and her eyes were bright white. She looked very human.

“Elvis. It’s a seal.”

Elvis swam to me.

“There’s another one.”

I looked over the shoulder of the one swimming with me and saw the whites of another seal’s eyes. I understood why fishermen used to think they were mermaids. They swam with us for some time, dipping in and out of the water until they dipped and never came back.

The presence of Naushon still drew on us and the Vineyard was still so far away. We must have gone over a mile in a couple hours but it drew no closer in our eyes. It almost made the heart fall to see it so far out.

“Don’t look at it,” I said.

It was cold and when the flood had peaked and we were resting I felt a quick spasm in my body. It was not a shiver so much as a shake and it started in my shoulders and the muscles of the fetal position. In that spasm my body wanted to curl inward for warmth. I didn’t say anything because I thought if I didn’t introduce the cold into our conversation I could keep some of it back, but I did rub my arms and torso underwater and slapped my cheeks and shoulders and arms. I flexed my muscles to try and circulate the blood. We waited and watched a bloom of moonjellies drift by. They were delicate bells and the stars were belled above us too and with the sound of far off buoys I thought I could hear them ringing. When I put my ears under the water I could hear them ringing. I knew now what I was weightless above, eighty feet over the origin.

Another wall of fatigue came upon me but I found the inner gate of the wall and pushed through it. The mind was crushing away and the body becoming warm again from the effort, or at least it did not know it was cold, and we stopped talking to each other for a long time. Every now and then Elvis would say, “Come on” to himself in a kind of hoarse bark. I could hear the loss of breath in his voice. The soul was being pushed in at the edges. Then the mind was gone and there was nothing to think about and the disappearance of the mind put the body into an elation. Without the mind there was nothing that was afraid in you. I was now only a body pushing across and I was addicted to moving and proud of the pain. I was sore and hurt but would not have wanted to stop now even if we’d come across an empty boat to take us back. We were at the last delicate touches of Naushon. We would not be pushed back onto them. We were halfway.

Lucas Shoal lay halfway across the Sound. A ridge that leapt from eighty feet to twelve, in some places six feet. There was no chance we’d stand on it on our tip-toes. In ebb tide a tidal rip would form and it would grow in strength until the next slack. We had to get across it before that but I had no way of telling if we were over it already. It ran for miles through the Sound. I still felt the faint pull of the Elizabeths, about to loosen forever. I also had the reckless thought that if we caught the shoal by ebb tide, the rip might shoot us West and across the Sound but that would be a dangerous swim and I didn’t know how we would fare in it. If we came across the tidal rip we would have to follow its direction no matter what and I couldn’t think now where that would leave us until we faced it. But I was warm in my efforts and brave enough to face it now. I wanted it now.

The moon was passing to the West of the Vineyard. It was low now to the horizon and I saw that it would set at the bottom of the Sound in the open ocean. There was a halo around it. A midnight rainbow. And there was a promise in it that it might be a wall for us so long as it hung in the sky, keeping us from draining away into the ocean.

We readjusted our direction East after a rest. We now swam into the darkness with the moon crossing over us from the side. The change of direction took the moon out of our eyes and we no longer swam in into the white waves of the moon. Rather we swam into a change of color and the change of mood. We were slower now in the pitch black and I had to remind myself of the moon’s promise rather than look into it. It was on the dark side of us.

A boat slowed past us about a hundred yards away and dropped its anchor. It kept its running lights on. It was haloed in the water. We treaded and watched it. It was a thirty-foot Viking.

“If we could just grab a rest on that,” I said.

“I know.”

I couldn’t tell what it was doing but it didn’t move for a very long time and then as we swam slowly towards it I could see the man at the top behind the glass with his feet up on the console.

“He’s taking a nap,” I whispered.

Elvis looked at me. “We need a rest.”

“Yeah.”

We swam to its tender and I put my arms on the back and lifted my head to look for a ladder. I dropped back into the water and reached up with my hand and swung the folded ladder slowly into the water and pulled its rungs down until it was fully extended. My hand was almost claw-like and a little dull of sensation. I lifted up and my legs felt so weak on the ladder I almost fell back into the water. My heaviness shocked me, and my head began to ache. I could feel my heavy breathing now and my heart and my chest was contracting and ballooning rapidly. Weight was coming into my body and it was giving me knowledge about how much my body hurt. I was woozy and cold in the night air and the breeze and I moved my legs slowly up the rungs until I could grab for a cleat and pull myself out. I sat down and began shivering violently and wanted to go right back into the water. I looked for a hatch or a cooler. I walked quietly checking them all and I could hear the cascade of water from Elvis’s body as he raised up. I looked up at the glassed helm and saw the captain’s feet. They didn’t move.

I found us towels and water and a cocacola. We sat down and dried ourselves and shivered uncontrollably and drank. Elvis had struggled as I had to get onto the boat. Our hands shook as we raised the bottles to our lips. We flexed and shook our bodies through the shivers trying to warm. My skin tingled now that it was dry but then it took the cold again and I wrapped myself the best I could. My body was heavier than I could remember it feeling and we sat there looking at the Vineyard until the shivering calmed. We were little more than halfway across and slowing and the tide would soon be against us. We were halfway in nautical miles alone. We had many more hours to go.

We didn’t have time to gamble on the captain’s nap and walked back to the water. I put the towels back and took another soda for Elvis and I and we put them in our pants. Taking the towel off and walking back to the water was one of the hardest things I’d ever done for how cold I was. I remembered the water as being warmer than the air when we got out but this time the water was freezing and I reached my foot back.

“Fuck,” I whispered. “It’s really cold.”

We had to lower ourselves slowly to avoid making any sound and it was a torture. I turned to face Elvis as I lowered and grimaced the whole way, pausing every now and then on a rung. “We have to, we have to, we have to,” I kept saying to myself. My body had goosebumps all the way up to my ears and cheeks and my forehead ached in anticipation of the coldness. “Don’t be a fucking pussy,” I told myself. It was the voice of the ego and every physical feat I had ever done added itself into this voice. The voice had been training my whole life. “Are you a fucking pussy?” “No,” I said. My body did not want to go back in and begged my legs to stop. It was disheartening to only be halfway across the Sound in this state, but I had answered no to the inner taunt.

The cold was the worst at my chest and shoulders but I pushed myself down and gasped and exhaled loudly in the water. I treaded there watching Elvis and my toes cramped in the shock and folded in toward my heel. I tried to breathe smoothly. My head ached badly. I grabbed onto the tender with my arm and lifted my foot to my other hand and massaged into the sole of my foot where the cramp was. I did it with the other too and then treaded as long as I could with my arms wrapped around my torso, treading only with my legs. I knew this was a waste of energy and I let go into the cold. I let go the defense of my tensed muscles and made peace with the cold and it hurt and I accepted the pain and I was pain. My musculature took the pain as its design.

Elvis took just as slowly getting in and was exhaling loudly in the water. We swam away and working the muscles pushed some warmth back into our bodies but we were sorer now from the rest we took. When we next stopped my teeth chattered and I thought that wasn’t good. A shiver had entered the balance of our bodies and I knew it would stay all the way to the Vineyard. We had passed slack tide on the boat. It was ebb now.

A half an hour later we came to a buoy in the Sound. My arms were too sore to reach for its cleats. I wanted to rest and Elvis reached too and couldn’t grasp them and fell back in frustration. We were becoming clumsy. I felt around the base of the buoy and there were sharp barnacles and nowhere to hold onto and rest. Elvis put both of his arms up on the edge of the buoy and hung there. I tried this on the other side from him and when the buoy listed toward you it was restful but when it bobbed away it lifted you too high in the water and put a strain on your arms and it was painful in the skin to dip like this in and out of the cold.

We dropped from it and treaded water looking up at it.

“If we could just boost up onto the edge we could sit there awhile and rest,” Elvis said. I could hear his teeth chatter. Mine chattered too when we rested.

“I just don’t think there’s a way.”

There was a channel marker not far and I sidestroked to it. It was smaller in the water and I wrapped my arms around it and floated for a moment. It was hard to find the right position because to truly float without taxing my body my legs would have to level out but that put a strain on my back so I just lay there hugging it, only straining when the water lifted it too high and I had to wrap it harder to hold on.

I called for Elvis and looked back at him straining to get up on the buoy. He had grabbed one of the cleats and had his legs climbing up the side of it. He climbed enough to grab with one arm for one of its central rungs and pulled his chest up so that his elbows were on top of the base. He rested there and I could see that his legs were heavy and he could not swing them up easily. I saw him use up too much of his strength in this. He could have used a place to lift and rest a knee but his body was too fatigued to position his hand hold properly to swing his leg up. Even fresh it would have been hard for a man to do. He reached for a higher rung and his knee caught about a half a foot below the lip of the buoy, and he pulled on the rungs trying to slide his knee over the edge but just a few inches from the edge the strength in his left leg braced against the platform of the buoy gave out and his chest hit against the buoy and he let go and pushed so that his chin would not clip the edge and splashed into the water.

I swam to him and his head came up exhausted, panting.

“Come here, El. This buoy is easier.”

I swam to it slowly with him. He tried to wrap his arms around it as I had.

“My arms are dead. I can’t.”

I felt for the mooring line with my hands.

“Here, grab the line.”

Elvis felt for it.

“I can’t close my hands around it.”

I felt the chain of the mooring line almost diagonal in my hands and my hands could not close around it either. They were like claws and couldn’t move properly. They were not my own hands. Only when I squeezed tight did I feel every inch in them again.

“Squeeze it tight,” I said.

He squeezed tight and then settled into a comfortable hand hold and floated there. The water was flowing past the buoy slowly. I knew it would pick up. I looked at the island and we were far West now of where we’d been. We’d been swimming slowly and resting more and so the ebb had taken away all the Eastward progress we’d made in the first half of the swim. But we were closer to the Vineyard now and I thought I could see some details of beach in it. I could almost distinguish beach from bluff and tree in the gradations of darkness.

We had to swim against the tide now and aim East almost perpendicular to the island to use the currents correctly. We left the buoys and Elvis urged us on with his bark, “Come on! Come on!” and we yelped a bit against the pain and the cold. We dug into our anger.

“You’re gonna kill Frank, El. You’re gonna fucking kill him.”

“I’m gonna blow his brains out. I’m gonna shoot him in the fucking face!”

We crawled forward and my hands were completely gone now. They were numb blocks. I was tiring into what felt like death and I was overalert on this edge but I still had strength in me. We were murderers earning our kill, I thought to myself. I knew what should really happen with the gun, but I thought also that we were earning the right to murder.

“We’re closer! We’re closer!”

“Come on!”

We yelled at each other to keep ourselves going. We whipped each other’s backs forward with our voices. We had to. It felt warm when we yelled. Another hour dragged and at the end of its sluggishness and its fatigue I felt for the first time in my life a little current inside myself. A little hatch had been opened to death and if I just gave up I knew deep in my body that I would die. It was in me to die. There was a natural gate. But it was like a whirlpool and if I swam far from the edges of its entrance I could get past it. But there was an event horizon to the feeling. I was not in it but I could glimpse the edge beyond from which there was no going back. It was not good enough to give up to die, but I felt then that you would have to make a move, a twist inside, to enter it. Then there would be only the unstoppable freefall, the perfect congruence to dying. Everytime I felt this inside I yelled at Elvis.

“Come on El! Come on!”

Our words were shrinking in the cold to one syllable, to grunts. Elvis barked in a way that sounded like, “Kill! Kill! Kill!” We had to have the kill up in us. We would kill. We had to have murderous hearts to catch good breaths.

We were drifting now toward Menemsha Bight and the beaches had a faint glow to them. My body had lost completely the outerwrapping of its warmth and the cold had only the bone to travel into. My warmth was in the glow of the beach, I thought. It was false dawn and the moon had slipped over the whole of the Vineyard and lay now low over the water at the end of the Sound. We’d been swimming for what must have been six hours. My eyes had begun to blur from the salt and it was only our wills now pushing us forward heavily. We were turned away from the moon in the way we swam but when I’d stop to look at it I knew it was our final leg. When it dropped we were on our own. We had to get across.

The ebb tide was picking up strength against us and we came across another boat resting at anchor with its lights on. It was a cabin cruiser and I couldn’t see anyone in it. We swam to its engine but when I felt for its ladder I was clumsy with it and it smacked into the water. I could hear the man aboard come out of the cabin. Elvis and I clung to the sides of the boat treading and shivering I could hear the man walk in the bow and then I heard the door close again. The engine was warm and I put my hands on it. Elvis got his leg on the rung but we were clumsy bodies and the boat was much smaller than the Viking before it and we rocked it as we held on. Elvis’s body was spasming in the cold and he made too much noise and dropped back as the hatch opened.

The man walked quickly to the side of the boat and looked over its edge. His head was above us and I feared he would hear our teeth chattering. But he looked further out at sea. He decided on something and pulled out one of his rods from the gunwale and cast it out over our heads. He cast and reeled in a couple times and I looked where he cast and could see the white braid of the rips. He reeled in for the last time and pushed the lure into the handle and went to the wheel and started the engine. We were at the back of the boat and I pushed from the boat now in fear of the propellor. Elvis did the same and the man put the boat forward gently and headed for the rips. We watched him a ways and he dropped an umbrella rig in the rip and trolled.

We were outside the Eastern edge of Lucas shoal and the ebb tide was drawing us into the rips. I panicked a little and turned my back to the rip and swam sideways from it with Elvis.

“Swim Elvis, swim. We have to get out.”

I could not feel my arms but I pushed myself as best I could without overtaxing. We were a mile now from the Vineyard but we’d have to swim more than that against the tide to reach the shore. I could see the reentrant curves of her shores, the coves of her conscience. I could see the silver of curvature just over the white caps.

In the confusion of the swim and the rips we soon found ourselves inside a calm, glassy current and the edge of the rip before us. The ridge below that formed the rips was miles long and there were many shapes and patterns to her currents and her waves. We were in a beautiful confused knot that only slack tide could untie. My heart dropped as I saw us getting sucked Southward and the waves of the rip getting taller. The waves faced us and the Vineyard was flying away. We’d have to swim South away from the island to get clear.

“Swim with it!” I yelled and angled in a diagonal position with the current. This put me facing the moon again. “Calm!” I kept my eye on the Vineyard just over the waves. The waves were loud here and babbling to each other. The moon had fallen low to the horizon like a wall that would keep us from draining out only one hour more before it set. It was small and faint now in the light and my blurred eyes.

I was too tired to front crawl and my neck no longer burned but knifed me with pain. I tried to pick smooth lanes between the waves and quarter into them in a sidestroke. If we didn’t get across, the rip would ferry us out beyond Aquinnah and the island and then we’d be done. I knew I’d wear myself out in a front stroke. I knew this would drown me. I stayed patient as I could in the panic, but these were the screams in the body of last pains. I knew I was on the edge of last feelings, tethers snapping in the will. This was the feeling before the will gave out and the soul in the water sprung its leak and was drawn into the inner waves of the Sound. My lungs burned and I wasn’t breathing well anymore but I found a stroke and was pushed sideways through the waves. They seemed never to get closer but just stay in place. But then finally you’d get to their white cap and you’d go sideways over them. They were so still it looked almost like you could grab the white caps as hand holds and drag yourself over them.

The Vineyard beyond the waves was rushing away and I was sucked under the back of the rips a few times but I would just tread and my head would get above water. I seemed to make progress out. Once I crossed a few of the waves I learned the pattern and my innertiming matched the currents and I tried to take it calmly and breathe slow. I was at the last looping edge and my face was turned in the sidestroke to look down the whole length of the rip and I saw it all the way South to the moon, like the last lane of the moon before it set, like some aspect of its reflection got into the sea itself. My eyes were blurry and so I saw mostly the dark, cracked glitter as the sky began to grow light and the faint haze of the moon sinking where the rips ended.

I made the last standing wave of the rip and it was tall and long. It had some light catching in it and I broke it. I ripped it. I tore it slowly and got across. Even here I could not stop and rest because the current would just push me right back in again and all my effort would be a waste. I switched sides now that the waves were lower and I sidestroked in my dead weight North. A little more you tell yourself, a little more. And then you go further and you lie to yourself again. A little more and then further. Further.

Aquinnah was still on my right and Menemsha before me, and I felt a glimmer of relief at that. I kept on swimming and my ears were deafened. The adrenalin now rushed over the cold in thin tendrils, throbbing against the cold of my body like the veins and last threads of the will were physical and I could feel them stretched and snapping at the faintest touch. My body glowed with the adrenalin and the glow became painful and I could feel the pain like blades against my body. My head ached and I was dazed and could not see but felt the direction of everything and kept pushing that way slowly. The tides were in me.

After quite a long time I turned to look for Elvis but he wasn’t with me.

I tried to yell for him but I was so cold and I could only get my mouth around one syllable at a time. I could not see him in the waves if he was there and my ears could not hear. My eyes were blurry and fogged almost to blindness. I was so close now to Menemsha and the moon was halfway down the horizon of the open ocean and the bluing sky. It was dawn on the other side of the island in Edgartown. With my eyes the way they were I could hardly tell it. I felt only the rush of every second plummeting out of the night and the last lift of the moon above the water. I looked over the backs of the waves at dark head-like shapes but they could have been buoy markers. I tried to rest but the Vineyard just rushed past me everytime I did and I had to keep crawling and I swam to the dark shapes but they were all buoy markers for lobster pots.

The cold was in the bone now, almost as deep as the marrow of the will, and this marrow was teetering on the impossible. I was at that last inner gate, like the innerwaves that move below the surface. You can see these inner waves sometimes from high above the water, their lighter shade of blue meandering through the water, and I was through this now, and the innerwaves of my body were flowing through this gate. I felt the tug of that whirlpool of death inside me loosen as my fogged eyes saw how close to shore I was. I saw rocks and by the shore I came across a submerged ledge a foot below the water. I held it and caught what little breath there was to catch and saw a cropping above the water ten yards ahead and swam to it. I held one and gasped across it. My hands were numb so I pinned them against the rock without feeling. I got to its side where the ebb pushed me against it and I held on for a long time. My neck ached and light was coming back to the earth and when I had rested my neck I lifted it and looked for Elvis and cried his name. But I had no strength in my lungs, not even to cry and I never saw his head. The whirlpool inched closer now to my heart the longer I waited to get to shore and I looked at the horizon and the moon was gone and I was alone and I knew now I had to push. I had to push and get to shore or I would die. The corridor of safety that had opened up to me days before was gone. It had pushed me up ahead as far as it could.

The water was dark, for sunrise was on the other side of the Vineyard. The Vineyard too looked dark, except there was sunlight bent around the tilt of its trees and its glowing ring was brimming over the top of the Vineyard now like a break of light coming round the edge of an eclipse. Stars were lost in the brightness of the ring. There was a band of brightness where the waves hit the beach too. In my blurred eyes it looked like an eclipse of the sun. It was the end of the totality of the night and I saw my soul in that inch of light. I was down to my last edge, my last silver inch of soul and I pawed forward in a kind of doggy paddle too destroyed to stretch my body into a stroke. I felt the draw now of the Vineyard. I felt it take me back in slowly. Still I could not make much distance in a doggy paddle and lay on my back looking up at the fogged sky and stroked my arms and legs as best I could. My head hit a rock and I did not feel the pain of it except dull waves radiated through my body from where I had hit it. I rolled over and the beach was before me and I looked down and I could see sand below me and I paddled in a mix of excitement and desperation and got to where I could get my hands and knees in the sand and I knew I would not die. I looked down at my hands in the sand and felt my back and my skin exploding in pain out in the air and I coughed and exhaled and spasmed so strongly I thought my lungs would give out and my back would break and maybe I would die afterall. My legs wobbled as I tried to wade and I crawled forward until I got past the tide line. I knelt on all fours for a long time dry heaving and coughing and gasping. Coughs were so deep and gnarled and painful that it kept me from my breath and I almost passed out. Then I tried to push up with my arms and stand on my knees but I fell back forward. I knew I would not be able to walk. I laid on my stomach out of the water a long time shivering until I could drag myself up behind a rock. The sunlight was on the beach now and I crawled up into it behind the rock. The warmth of a light was on a separate layer of my skin that did not work inside. My mind hurtled out of some secret place in me and as the sun broke over the top of the Vineyard I was gone into the darkness. It was the little hatch of death and I gave into it because it could not drain me out to the bottom of the ocean. I was safe on Earth.

I was shivering so hard that the pain of it woke me. I could not see well and my eyes stung and I kept them closed for a long time. Sunlight burst into my eyes now and blew its gold into the last silver inch of my soul. As I lay there coughing and shivering in the bright sand I opened my eyes every now and again to test my vision and take some light and saw a shape on the beach collapse. I squeezed my eyes to clear the fogbanks and I saw something on the ground coming to me very slowly. It took a long time. It was on its hands and knees and then its stomach. I could not see clearly through the fog and I could not move forward to get a better look. As the shape crawled toward me, I saw it was Elvis.

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• Prologue

• Chapter 1

• Chapter 2

• Chapter 3

• Chapter 4

• Chapter 5

• Chapter 6

• Chapter 7

A reminder that friend-of-the-Substack Anthony Marigold (of Magazine Non Grata) has released a Chrome extension for those who prefer to enjoy their Substacks offline.

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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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On the boat ride back Elvis and I did not say a word to each other. It was ebb tide and early evening and Elvis looked at the lighthouse that marked the entrance to Edgartown Harbor. It was lost in the fog except for its light and there was a weight and a resistance in returning to Mayflower. His shirt waved against his stomach and he didn’t turn his head to look at his home which seemed to push the same way, back where we came. Included in the mood was the impossibility of it all ending this way and the tension before deciding to scrabble up a high sheer wall with dangerous forces at your back.

Chris tied up to Elvis’s dock and yet Elvis walked away from them into Mayflower. I heard the suction sound of opening the balcony door to the hermetically sealed house and I followed Chris and Caleb as far as the boathouse and then as I watched them walk up the green sideyard of Mayflower to Northwater. I turned and went back to Chris’s boat and I laid there a long time on the floor of it. With the mist it was like the weather of early June and it was the first time I felt cold since the beginning of the summer. I thought of the nights getting drunk in bathwater when we had Mayflower to ourselves. It had become July without my knowing it and the Fourth would come soon and I would have to go home the next day. And then there’d be the final heats of the year and autumn would come clean across the harbor without Her in it, the leaves would change color not above Her head nor in Her eyes and then it would be winter and it would be one year and would She be in it somewhere, on that day.

The boat jostled and I looked up and it was Elvis. He unlooped the rope from the cleats of the dock and turned the engine of Chris’s boat and I stood up and gave us a push off and he reversed almost too far to hit the neighbor’s dock and then put the throttle forward.

He took us a little too fast in the fog and when we were in the lee of Sturgeon Flats and past McConnell’s yacht I yelled at him over the engine. “Where are we going?”

Elvis didn’t respond and over the bumps he took too fast he was trying to turn Chris’s GPS on. He couldn’t position his thumb over it in the chop so I turned it on for him and zoomed us out so we could see the whole island. We were outside of the Harbor now beyond the lighthouse and the seas were eerily calm in the fog. The entrance to the Harbor was often busy and I kept an uncomfortable eye as far as I could see while Elvis brought us to an idle in the mouth of the no wake zone and looked at the GPS. He had found what he was looking for when a boat came decelerating upon us and sounding its horn. I could feel the horn in my chest and I raised my hand in acknowledgement at the other boat and the men on board swore at us.

“Hey fucking dickheads, you’re gonna kill someone! I’m gonna call the Harbor Master on your ass!”

“El, we gotta move.”

He looked over at them and pressed something on the GPS and put the throttle forward and we were up to the boat’s top end speed with the currents pushing against us. We were too close to the Middle Flats and I kept my eye on land so far as I could make it out. I pointed with my thumb, “Go east a bit,” and he listened. We were upon the Eastern tidal rips and their white waves came up fast and Elvis slowed as they cupped us and we took some spray and once we were through them he put the throttle down again and we were in a stretch of sunlight. We passed into it through blindness from the sudden reflection the sun threw off the waves and we were warm and in at the Middle Ground rips in no time. It was a beautiful summer day on the northern shores of the island but as Elvis turned us West toward the Elizabeths we were in mist again.

I knew now where he was taking us and I looked back and forth between the GPS and the water in front of us to see if I could sight any landmarks in the mist. We crossed the ferry out of Wood’s Hole fast enough and far enough away that it didn’t blow its horn. The Holes off the Elizabeths are dangerous for their rocks and I was in tension waiting to see if Elvis would ever slow as we drew closer to them. Stray sunlight lay ahead of us cupped in the trough of waves and the waves broke over the height of the light and the light stayed where it shone with the wind blowing the water through it and the sun we could see now was before us throwing its light from the West behind Pasque and as we drew toward the waters where the Hinckley had gone down the night before the mist played with us and I yelled at Elvis to slow down. “Slow down!” I shouted. He didn’t listen and turned us into Robinson’s Hole in a long curve that bent me down toward the water and I yelled again, “Slow the fuck down!”

Then in the mist off starboard I could see a stretch of bright mirror laving over its mirror water. It faded as the water dissolved and then it brightened itself with another wave and I realized it must be the western shores of Naushon taking the early evening sun. I looked up and could see Pasque now. We were in Robinson’s Hole and Elvis was heading toward the tidal creek. “It’s too shallow,” I yelled, “we’re gonna hit!” Pasque was coming up fast now and as he drew down our speed I saw the errant wavebreak that plays over submerged rocks and ledges and threw the throttle down all the way with my hands and we slammed the stern into the rocks and it lurched forward over a ledge and I was thrown into the padding of the stern and lay jostled on the floor as the sound of rocks scraping the hull ended in the sound of great metal snapping and we now glided free in silence toward the mouth of the creek.

Elvis had smashed upward into the wheel and the center console and touched his head in the nylon of the teetop but was on his feet as I got to mine. My shoulder was not so hurt but I was in a state of adrenalin and knew that pain could come much later. I looked past the bow. The engine had been stripped and lay in the rocks.

“Jesus Christ,” I said.

“Shit.”

“You ok?”

“Yeah, I’m good. How are you?”

“I think I’m okay.”

The accident brought us back to even and I leapt out of the boat into the shallow water. I walked around it in the shallows and looked up through Robinson’s Hole between Pasque and Naushon toward Buzzard’s Bay. I felt a quick pang of fear, the kind from suddenly seeing too far before you were ready. Whatever we did there was a window where we had to be quick. I walked to the back of the boat to look at where the engine had been. The mounting bolts were snapped in half and the transom was cracked. I looked to the right of where the engine used to be and saw the hull identification number had been gouged out by the crack. It was gone. I stepped around and looked at the mouth of the tidal creek where the abutments and wing walls of a small stone bridge lay unconnected. I walked in the shallows toward the broken bridge and the water was up to my knees. I turned back around and the fog had thickened again and was covering us and Elvis was now in the water looking at the engine in the rocks.

“Fuck,” he said. I waded out toward the rocks and the current was fast so I held onto the ledges and put my hands on the engine which lay in a crooked balance on top of a ledge. I looked North again through the Hole and could not see through for the fog was so thick and climbed between the rocks and with my feet pushing on a ledge I shoved the engine into the water between the rocks and it sunk under out of sight. I walked back to the boat and Elvis was holding onto its sides as it had started drifting in the water and I climbed on board and found new rope and tied it to the front rail and jumped back into the soft sand.

“Here, give it a big push.” We pushed the boat off the sand and it freed into the water and when it had gone out enough I walked it with the rope past the opening of the creek and Elvis and I pulled on the boat slowly. As it drifted near the center of the creek I began to walk it up slowly through the mouth.

“Go on the left side and keep it in the center so it doesn’t beach. Push off if you need but gently.”

We had only a small window with the tide in the middle of its ebb but the boat had a shallow enough draft that we could work it for about a hundred feet. Elvis went to the side and we worked together bringing the boat between the wing walls of the broken bridge and we brought it as far as we could get it beyond them. Then I turned it so it beached sideways, perpendicular to the broken bridge, and pulled on the rope until it stopped and I felt the weight come back into the boat without the buoyancy. I climbed on board and threw the anchor forward onto the beach. Pasque was a private island and no one used its creek except for the family that owned it, and it was too shallow for motorboats. I remembered Chris saying the family was gone until August and I figured this way we could make the now engineless boat look quaint and private and inconspicuous, not crashed. Less likely for people to ask questions or report it if they even saw it, for it was well hidden behind the wing walls. It looked like private property.

I dug around for tools in the hatches of the boat and came up with screwdrivers and tossed one down to Elvis. “Scrape off the registration number there in the front.” I rooted around until I found the second hull identification number in the hatch below the center console and I laid on my sore shoulder and worked for about five minutes with the screwdriver. Halfway through I jumped to the beach and found a rock the size of my palm and I climbed and laid back down again and whacked it against the bottom of the screwdriver wedged under the metal until the identification number came loose and I could pry it off. I took it and the GPS and the registration papers and waded back out to the rocks where the engine was hidden. I smashed the GPS with a rock and I tossed the identification number into the current and I ripped the registration documentation and scattered it in Robinson’s Hole.

Elvis had made the registration number unreadable with the screwdriver and I put my hand on his shoulder. “It’s this way,” I said and we took the first curve of the tidal creek. The creek wound in a slalom pattern the water and the tide had given it who knows how many mysterious centuries ago. We walked as high up on the sand as we could and it wasn’t until the second curve that stretches of the creek became deep. Where it grew deep up above our waste the bottom was marshy and our feet sunk into the floorsand and we took our arms out of our sleeves and let our shirts hang around our necks to keep them from soaking. The bottom of my shirt was wet because it had touched the water and it was cold in the fog against my stomach but the water we walked through was warm because it was so shallow and had stood for hours warmed by the sun.

Banked on our sides was soft seagrass and seagulls eyed us curiously from between the grass for they’d never seen men walk through this creek and the sandpipers fluttered in nervous excitement and disappeared in the fog and then we had to swim. It felt good to dip my chest into the water and we balled our shirts and held them above our heads and sidestroked to the next sandbar. We took the last turn and had to sidestroke again in the water warm as bathwater and came upon a stretch of the creek where it narrowed and then opened up again into a final visible pool. We walked out of the narrow trickle to where a beach opened to our left and we took it walked the beach around the pool to the treeline.

“It’s in there,” I said to Elvis. “Somewhere not too deep.” And Elvis walked to the treeline with his back wet and beading with warm water and here I followed him. It was a strange treeline with scrub and saltwater florations and trees that I imagined all Cape beaches must have looked like in their natural state. The beach was shallow enough that in high storms I could imagine the water flooded into the pool of the creek and ran into the scrub of the trees. So this was vegetation and flower that could take the ocean, and grew from flood.

We whacked through the scrub and it was not long before we found in the saltgreen grass silver poking out of the sand. Elvis’s back was scratched with the sharp branches and I saw lines that would soon bleed and as he bent down the cuts reddened on his back. He took the gun in his hands and looked at it. I couldn’t believe how little Chris had done to hide it against the elements. The gun had sand in its crevices and Elvis nervously brushed them and tilted the gun to let the sand run off it.

“Make sure it’s not loaded,” I said.

“How?”

“There, on the left.”

He touched the knurled thumbpiece behind the cylinder with his right thumb.

“Forward?”

“Forward. Now push the cylinder open from the right, with your other hand.”

He felt for the cylinder awkwardly at first and then it gave easily to his fingers and the cylinder swung out smoothly and sand trickled from the gun. The sun was beginning to poke out over our shoulders through the fog and the brass rims of the two remaining bullets took its light gently. One of those empty chambers had been for Rosie.

“What a fucking loser,” I said.

“What should we do.”

I looked at the bullets and his wet pockets. Elvis did not want to hold the gun and with its cylinder open it looked like he was holding a horseshoe crab from the shell with its legs reaching out awkwardly for land.

“I have to think. Just don’t cock the hammer and it won’t fire. Swing the cylinder back in for now.”

We walked down to the shoreline where the tide was still going out and sat a long while looking through the fog toward the Vineyard, the sand sticking to our wet pants and the small of our backs. The fog was wavering and my shoulder glowed only slightly with pain and we looked across the Vineyard Sound until the light of sunset over the island came out in the fading mist. The orange of it was clear in the disappearing fog and then the fog was gone and it was just the island with a wan pink sky above it and the first Atlantic stars. My toes and elbows were bleeding from pushing the engine in the rocks and I had a cut I couldn’t place bleeding down my leg.

“Shit,” said Elvis. “What are we gonna do?”

I didn’t answer. I was thinking about the gun and how close Naushon looked at the tidal creek where we wrecked the boat. The sunset was behind us and I thought too of all the ocean at our backs with the sunset in it. The Elizabeths were like the edge of a world to me and I looked Southwest at Nashawena and Cuttyhunk islands and the lights of the boats far out in the Sound. All we could see of the sunset now was the jet trail of an plane pinking the sky and the waves had grown quiet.

“Jesus man, what is that?”

I turned to look where Elvis pointed. There was a bright orange glow unwinding slowly in the late blue of the sky. It was low to the horizon between Wood’s Hole and West Chop in the mouth of the Sound. The glow was almost wet looking though its shape was clean and did not run. It looked so close yet I couldn’t tell if it was in our sky or was the low orbit of a rocket-trail skimming the outer currents of orbit. Some test out of Otis Air Force base.

We stood up and walked towards it along the beach, and as we walked its glow began to fill in and curve and my eyes could push through some depth in its light. Its shape took a more final curve and I saw a bright darkness come into it then. “Wait.” I walked backwards in the sand looking at it and the glow closed up along the same contours and the bright darkness faded from it and it looked how it did when Elvis first pointed to it.

“I think it’s the moon,” I said.

“It looks broken.”

Anything seemed possible and it was not too distant a thought that in the last hours man had stolen something from the moon. That we had denuded its webbing and it began to fall apart in the grip of our orbit. We had wantonly pulled it closer. Some war had taken place there on the far side and we had bombarded the moon and now Elvis and I gazed into nature’s wound before it closed up forever.

“Look, it opens as you walk,” said Elvis.

We walked together and entered the tidal creek. It had dried of water and the sand was harder than before but was still wet enough to take our feet up to our ankles and leave dry footprints. The continuum of water had been broken where we entered as if the creek itself had snapped and here we entered and here the great floodplains of the moon darkened. The creekbank looked tall now that there was no water and you could see the striations of its wet sides that had never taken moonlight. The seagrass was lush and dark green on the banks and we walked deep where the sea grass was above our heads. The moon was bigger than I’d ever seen it and it was a shock to see it so big and so close to Earth and coming closer all the time. It was coming closer and yet still it seemed half in glow and half in clarity as if some part of it were caught in our atmosphere and some part out in space.

As we took the curves of the creek and passed through its bright puddles we gave the moon back to itself and it stretched now to its far side from the Ocean of Storms through its Sea of Islands to the far Sea of Crises where it ended on its edge. Its harbors and channels and shorelines were so bright Elvis and I could have sat down to map them and name all their darker lights and see oceans in the light. There is a place on the moon called the terminator. It is the boundary of darkness that moves leftward across the moon’s face each night and in our walking Elvis and I were like the arbiters of this line, moving the moon between day and night at will. It was like to have some share in the revelation of a secret, that day was a great secret revealed out of night, and we took the darkness that lay through a lunar floodplain and the rim rings of a crater and drew it back and brought light into the lunar face, and abolished a nighttime on the moon.

By the time we reached Chris’s boat at the mouth of the creek the moon’s Southern Hemisphere was still missing and it was shrinking in size as it rose Westward in the sky. Her basins and riverways were as clear as they would ever be and presented to the eye as some far and final wall where the breadth of the iris ends.

The sky was black now and the tide had ebbed dramatically and it looked almost as if you could walk from Pasque to Naushon. In the tide’s contraction was another depth as if there was a secret magnitude the tide could travel beyond the tug of the moon and here then was a new ocean. Or perhaps the moon could tug harder in certain hours, but I could not now tell such an hour apart from the route and power of death that lived within such hours.

“It’s a spring tide.”

“What’s that?”

“Extreme low tide.”

“I thought full moons brought high tides.”

“They do. But they can also make extreme low tides like this.”

We could see the tops of many rocks in the Hole that had not been above the surface probably for several years. There were no waves and in my mind I thought that like the reverse of the moon maybe as we walked closer to the Hole it would shrink to a stream and we could step over it softly to Naushon. The rocks where we wrecked were down to sand. We walked to them and looked at their bases disappearing in the sand.

Elvis looked into the center of the rocks at the engine. “On the rock, huh?”

I laughed thinking of that day long ago on Falmouth with Astana’s father and his whiskey.

The Hole was dangerously shallow now and the ebb was on the edge of slack tide. If we swam across to Naushon at slack with the water this low it would take only the work of ten easy minutes. I thought of a time when I was a child and a spring tide like this had come under a full moon and my father and I walked far out beyond the buoys from our beach in the evening. The water never got past our knees but I was a child and I grew scared being so far from shore. The water was eerily still and my father kept walking and I watched him go until the water was at his waist and he seemed from my vantage to touch the horizon for me.

A deep lowing sound came across from Naushon. My hackles raised and I turned to look where it was coming from. Another lowing came and Elvis squinted out across at Naushon.

“The fuck?” Elvis put his hands over his brows. “Jesus, there’s horns.”

“What?”

I looked across at the far shore and saw the darkness move. There was a white glint in the throw of living bone.

“They’re fucking cows,” said Elvis.

I plucked my irises from the banks of the moon and focused them on the beach and saw now the shape of Belted Galloway and Scottish Highland cattle with long horns curving from their heads. They had come out in the moonlight in the seagrass to walk the lowtide. They stood at its edge in childish curiosity and lowed at it and at us across the way.

“My God, cows.”

“I have heard there’s a big farm there,” said Elvis.

We walked now to the water’s edge where the new beach dropped into a steep channel to look at the cows. The Scottish Highland with the horns had thick long coats and Elvis made kissing sounds to them across the Hole and they came closer to the water and some waded in it. The water hardly moved. I looked across the moonlight in the Sound at the Vineyard. The still water lay like its own terminator line between the near and the dark sides of the moon. But I had once seen beyond the edge of this edge. Yes, I had followed Her round every bend and I knew the far-away chord beyond the next bend and in this moment I knew I had finally stolen forward and the inner reflex of my ear was faster for a split second than the hidden note and I stole it back. I had once named it and the notes of the name were humming again in my skin and I knew now what to do.

I showed Elvis what I wanted to do on Chris’s map. The tides were in me and I felt we could cross to Naushon in slack and I explained the rest of my thinking and he understood my plan and agreed it was the only option.

We opened Chris’s large cooler and took stock of its contents. There was water and iced teas and beef jerky and peanuts and a bottle of white wine. I tossed in towels from the hatch and our t-shirts and I walked Elvis through stripping the gun in the moonlight.

“Why are we stripping it?”

“I think it’ll be easier to clean later. No trapped water. More likely to fire when we put it back together.”

“Ok.”

I handed him the screw driver and he swung the cylinder out with ease this time. Before he emptied the two bullets I asked him to put a mark with the screwdriver above the chamber of the bullet on the right. This took him about a minute to dig through the paint to the silver below but I could see it. He unscrewed the bottom and lifted the grips off and I held out a plastic bag from the cooler and he put it in with the bullets. I directed him to the crane lock on the left side of the frame and he unscrewed it and pulled the cylinder and crane forward off the gun and put it in the bag. Then he turned the gun over and the screws of the side plate glinted in the light and he removed them from the brightness of the light and lifted the side plates off. They were all in the bag and I tied the plastic handles and pushed all the air out so that it was tight to the components and then tied it again. I then wound tape tightly around the bag and put this in a second bag and taped this too.

We put the gun in the cooler and undressed and put our clothes in it and walked down to the water naked holding the cooler between us. The cooler was heavy and we set it in the water and it floated. I worried about it overturning and made sure to bolt the top down. The water was warm on my feet but that was because my feet were used to the water from walking in it for the last several minutes. When we entered Robinson’s the coolness traveled up my legs and groin and it was not as warm as I’d have liked it but it felt nice on my body. There was hardly a current in the water and we waded as far as we could and were quickly in the depth above our heads. We sidestroked with one hand on the handles of the cooler.

“Aim for the cows,” I said and Elvis laughed.

I tried breastroking with my right hand on the cooler. Even with slack tide we were heading a little off course from Naushon Point and I could feel the cold of the water below and lifted my feet up and went back into a sidestroke. The cows watched us the whole way and were standing in the water bunched together waiting for us. Their horns looked strange in the moonlight and they mooed loudly with real purpose of communication when our feet touched the bottom. Their eyes were pretty and they had the sweet long-lashed look of something that knows that you may kill them but does not know what death is and thinks it could be a sweetness. Their eyes were large and dopey and the moon was in them. One began to lope nervously and spooked the whole group but Elvis and I reached our hands gently and made plaintive sounds to them. One let Elvis and I pet him and the others scattered loudly into the seagrass and then turned to watch us. I ran my hands along the living bone of his horns and the cow threw its head and ran heavily away with his hooves thumping in the packed sand and watched us from the grass and his horns shown against the night sky and open water of Buzzard’s Bay.

We took the towels out of the cooler and dried ourselves and put our clothes back on, careful to put our sandy feet through our pants without touching. I sat on a rock and dried my feet with the towel and rubbed the sand off and let them dry in the air. I rubbed and smacked my body to circulate the blood. The beach was smooth but every hundred yards a cluster of large rocks stood and then there were the small round rocks just big enough to hurt when you walked over them barefoot. We drank some water and ate the jerky and peanuts. I was afraid of cramps later on so I suggested we eat the food now. We put the empty bags in the cooler and I took the roll of tape from the cooler and we put our shoes on. We walked the empty cooler to the scrubline for the land here was hilly and that of a sea meadow and there were no trees for quite a ways. We stowed it in a bush at the visible roots of a cluster of low trees. The cows followed us with their eyes and some followed us up the hill and I could hear them thumping the knoll and feel their hooves in the ground. Elvis took the bagged gun from the cooler and we turned and a cow had come up close to us when our backs were turned and he stared, heavy and silent. There was a far-off moo at the bottom of the hill on the beach, perhaps calling her back.

The seagrass was soft in the meadow, and we stood in a footpath figuring what was our best route East. The nautical map only charted the water and Naushon was private so there were no maps of its interior nor names we could know for its roads. Pasque may have had no one on it but Naushon was seven miles long with old farm houses hidden in the hillfolds. The sand was soft and I looked at the moon and it was moving ever so slightly over the top of Martha’s Vineyard. We had to move fast and cover as much of Naushon as we could while we still had the flood tide. It would start soon and would run the water East for six hours and we could only spare to lose one of those hours.

We walked down through the sea meadow to the beach and the cows and I looked around the bend of the beach one more time at the large boulders and the sand bright white in the moonlight. It was walkable but even with the low tide it was a thin beach and I remembered there were bluffs along Naushon and large boulders and ledges. I turned and one of the cows was standing next to me looking around the bend of beach.

“Where would you walk?” I asked him.

He looked up at me with his large lashes and blinked at me as a friend.

“Let’s float this guy across,” said Elvis, his arm resting on the cow’s back.

“Dock him at Mayflower.”

“We’ll keep him in the boathouse.”

We could have played in the moonlight with the cows all night and there was a final shape in that mood that waited for us across a daybreak, far away.

“I think we have to chance it,” I told Elvis.

“What, and float him across?”

“No,” I laughed. “We’re gonna have to cut through the island.”

We walked back up the knoll into the green meadow. The light was white. There was a footpath through the seagrass that led through the trees. A light wind poured through the grass and the grass drew a softness out of the sound. The path took us East through a cropping of dwarf beech and every now and then I looked back and watched the cows follow us, bright in the light. It was not a wood so much as a garden of trees and the moonlight drew a whiteness out of the clearing between the trees like bright ejecta drifting from a crater rimmed in seaflowers. I spied across the hummock of the clearing the opening of another trail. The footpath we were on wanted us to loop and follow the long curve of the island itself which would make us walk more distance than we could afford so I began to cut across.

We walked tall in the bright grass and the thorns of the scrub scratched our legs but the entrance to the heavens is riddled with pretty thorns and the blood looked beautiful on my legs. We walked through the scrubthorns until we couldn’t feel their hidden knives on our legs any longer. My legs glowed with numbness and I thought I would need this numbness later.

Big beautiful rocks stood in white light between the trees. I turned and the cows had followed us past the thin treeline. We were at the open door to the moon you could only cross in the ducts of certain dreams. Dreams you had that were secret from you. We mounted the sill of this door and stepped into the next trailhead and the next meadow we walked took a steeper tilt and the shade of taller trees. We kept the moonlight on our right. It poked through the branches and shaped lunar shadows in the sandy grass. We walked the trial until it opened to a rough road with deep car grooves in it. It looked like a dry riverbed and had sharp white rocks shining in the grooves and the crown. The road was not flat but canted down toward the bluffs and I thought how beautiful it would be for a stream or a river to run at this angle without the water falling out.

But we did not take the road. We crossed over it and followed instead where the light shirred through the trees. There was a ripple in the grass and we took the route of another secret meadow to stay off the road. The southern hemisphere of the moon was rounding out now and it was smaller in the sky than it had been. There was a wake in its light in the grass from when it had drawn so close to the world and we walked so that this light fell down upon us on our right. I turned and could no longer see the cows, but there were fireflies where we’d been, bright and then dark like stars half-falling. In the distance beyond the trees there was a clearing and a barn with a light on. We crouched our heads and tried to move quietly but like ghosts there was something in how brazenly visible we were that we could not be seen. We walked over an old stone wall and we were in small farmland and dark shapes moved. We heard the pounding of hooves before we saw what moved. It was a herd of horses and they came up to us in curiosity and wheeled around us and snorted. Horses answer to the mood of man and they let us walk and were not afraid, for the horses of heaven do not spook I thought to myself.

Across another wall the trees thickened and we were in tall oak. We had stolen a mile into heaven and had a few more to go through its woods and found ourselves upon the rough road again. The holly and black cherry and American beech were too thick to make good time through and we walked the road close to its outer edge. The trees came steeply down to the road and on the other side was a bluff down to the beach. I wondered if a car might come down and one did, heading in the direction of where we’d landed with its lights off. The light was bright enough to see by. I could not imagine what would bring a car down the road at this hour except to wrap your arms around a woman and kiss her deeply in the sea meadow, or to make a private tour of the moon from the bluff. It was a jeep bouncing softly and running naked and there was indeed a man and woman sitting in the front with their clothes off, their skin bright white. We were close enough that we could have touched them as they passed and the woman’s breasts and her hair falling around them did something to my heart. Elvis and I stood back behind the beech like Indian spirits watching as they passed, for if something could stir the attention of the old dead it would be nights like these when blood is drawn by the bright thorn the soul makes its journey back to on the light of the moon. What a deep breath the soul must hold to return once a month on the full moon. Some proximity of this hour to midnight awoke the lost vertigoes of the old heights of man before he is born. It felt to be just the soul answering to the currents in the light and pouring back into the light along its secret routes and all we had to do now was follow this eddy for there was no wrong step to take. What a deep breath is in the soul.

We went another two miles in a half jog sipping from our waters and tea, sweating gently.

“Imagine living here man,” said Elvis, but it was not a place one could stay past daylight.

The road was now arcing North away from the bluffs and the beach. I knew we were getting close to Tarpaulin Cove and we found a small foot-trail leading down to the beach that branched from the road like an invisible fork. Here we were full in the moonlight and could see across to the Vineyard as we walked. The moon was now full and almost over the center of the Vineyard. The tide was coming in but from up on the bluff you could not hear any waves and the Sound lay like a wet silver plain between us and the Vineyard. The trail took us down to the white beach and past a small pond close to the beach which the map had called French Watering Place. The beach thinned for long stretches so that we could just barely walk abreast. The rocks picked up and the sand was in my shoes and we soon came to huge boulders that we had to climb and crouch through carefully. “On the rock,” we said to each other. The waves were silent but the flood would be coming in strong after the spring tide and I looked around the bending beach, through the silver of curvature, and up above the bluff at a sweeping light. We had reached Naushon Lighthouse and the bend where the Lunet had wrecked hundreds of years ago. Around the bend was Tarpaulin Cove and bunched against its crescent were the whites of yachts and sailboats at anchor. But we would not walk that far.

I took the laces out of my sneakers and tied them tight around my knees. Then I took the role of tape and taped the laces in tight bands. I put a water and iced tea down my pant legs where the shoelaces had closed them and shoved my sneakers in the back of my pants and cinched my belt tight. I handed Elvis the tape and he did the same with the gun and his water and tea and sneakers.

The shoreline was still low. The flood would be pushing us East toward the mouth of the Sound as we swam toward West Chop. I couldn’t predict how long the swim would be but my fear was of us being carried West and missing the island completely. The flood must be at least an hour or more old and I figured it was sometime around midnight. If we timed it right and were East enough in the Sound when the ebb came again we could land somewhere up island.

Elvis had the white wine in his hands. It was only two-thirds full and he opened it. “Here. For the road.” He belted back the wine and wiped his mouth and I took two warm chugs and handed it back. He drank half of what remained and I put away the rest and we left it in a glint only the glass could catch and show was waiting there between a cluster of rocks, wanting to shine. We rubbed and slapped ourselves for circulation and I looked at the sky once more and saw the lost white of Her eyes in the harbor of the moon. The moonlight lay soft in the direction we’d have to have to swim. I had seen the lost white of Her eyes and I was come at last upon the shores of Her voice and it said, here is the Sound Adam, swim it.

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• Prologue

• Part 1, Chapter 1

• Part 1, Chapter 2

• Part 1, Chapter 3

• Part 1, Chapter 4

• Part 1, Chapter 5

• Part 1, Chapter 6

A reminder that friend-of-the-Substack Anthony Marigold (of Magazine Non Grata) has released a Chrome extension for those who prefer to enjoy their Substacks offline.

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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.

⚬─────────✧─────────⚬

I had the early shift on the ferry and woke with no alarm clock in the early light while Elvis still slept. My sleep had been just a few hours but it pulled a fold in the fabric of twilight and gave me the sleep of twelve hours. Perhaps I dreamed that I slept for so long and that was sufficient for my energies but I did wake with the sound of Her voice. She was not speaking to me but She was giving me some hint of a way and I made Her same my name in my memory. I made Her laugh and then I let go and waited to see if She would speak on Her own in my mind.

I had not yet gambled all my energies but like the waxing moon I was going into the days with more strength than I took to bed. My feet hurt with pain too fresh and new to ache. I had cut them on the rocks and the roots of the uncleared woods on Naushon. Their pain was new and open to growing so I walked in a limping way on the parts of my feet that had not been cut. I wore long pants to cover my legs which bled from those cuts you get in the water that you cannot feel.

As I walked down Northwater Street to the ferry I was in fear only of running into Brock. Things had opened so fast and so bright I could not follow the turn of my feelings. But if Rosie’s soul had been hanging in transit over the island she made the last miles of separation last night and the glow would be off Brock now, the glow to match the glow of the dead, the fire the soul makes to touch the dead’s invisibility, and feeling her out of reach and his fire put out, a rage would now come over him. There’d been rage present at the creation of his grief but now it would have its season and I feared it might be powerful enough to alter the channel we were sailing. It would be wanting to know who killed his daughter and why they couldn’t find out.

So we were in blameless weather, bad seas with harbors on the moon. I was putting silver in my hold but the silver only lasted the night and had to be gathered again at the close of each day.

He was not there and an early light played on the calm dapple where the harbor was its greenest and there were no cars in line yet. I hugged Jill when I saw her and she took the hug for the several seconds she needed.

“How’s Brock?” I asked.

Jill’s look grew distant to Chilmark, where Brock’s grief had been so far staged, and there was a certain sadness within her sadness about revealing to me too much of Brock’s privacy – that to tell me he cried or he raged was to make him cry and rage – though there are wings to the stage we cannot always see and I felt some part of me was approaching him from there whether she gave me news or not. “He’s rocky,” she finally said.

I sighed and looked down into my arms. “And nothing at all about who did it?”

A defeat came into her face, a defeat that had not yet happened but had been preordained, and she put her sunglasses on to hide her eyes from me. “Well, it was someone on Chappy. That’s all we know.”

“Just, what, shooting a gun into the air randomly?”

She nodded sadly. “Yup.”

Jill unhooked the gate to the ferry and I stood behind the wheel in the hatch and she soon bade three cars on board. She put the wooden blocks behind their wheels and relatched the gate and I pushed us forward. My muscles were good now on the wheel and the throttle as if my body had gained coordination while I slept. It was like that with all physical activities you learned for the first time: the next day you woke up better and your muscle worked with less mental effort.

There was another mood driving through Jill, in the adjacency of Rosie and Brock. “Did you hear what happened last night?”

“No, tell me.”

“A boat caught fire off Naushon and a family had to swim all the way to shore.”

“Jesus,” I said.

“I know it.”

“Are they ok?”

“MVY said the mother was mediflighted to Boston. She’s in critical condition apparently with burns.”

“That’s crazy. What is happening?”

“I don’t know.” She looked at me now with an increased intimacy. “Something’s going on.”

The mystery of Rosie’s death had collided with another mystery, and this was fresh clean air blowing across Jill’s wound. There was reassurance in the fact that the cruelty of her death was not total but it existed in some container where other mysteries moved in an eerie congruence.

We fell into a rhythm which the quiet of the harbor in the morning helped open me to and there was a glimpse of Heaven in many of my turnings that day and how could there not be? Rosie’s death had opened it up overhead and the fire of the night before had vivified it. By now everyone on the island could feel the tug of its absorption, its expectancy, the possibility of transit, especially out in the open in the daylight, uncovered in the sun and bright and observable on the sea. I thought I could see everyone in a warp, like upside down flames darting and living but tied ultimately to a wick that bound them all to a single source overhead and the candle wax coming off them in their sweat. They could all go out in an instant, up in the common draw of all men, up into erasure.

I felt it put me close to Her ground. I had reentered the missing feeling but I was not yet over the iris of Her death. But I was drawing through, I had pierced the webbing, and the membrane of events was now like those beaches on the bayside of the Cape where the tide goes out for a mile and you watch while sandbars pop up and the shorelines scatter and there are shorelines beyond shorelines and you can swim between them to the further wavebreaks. The sandbars never rippled into the light the same way twice and the lowtide created a new beach twice a day. The destiny of these tides were now at work and they were drawing back on that absented origin, that missing piece of the whole and the first splitsecond of creation was now at hazard. The tide was out and it wanted to be seen and walked into and I was walking from sandbar to sandbar, glitter to gloss, and it was going out for miles and I was walking toward new islands beyond the Vineyard, secret isles past Chappaquiddick and the Elizabeths. I was wading out toward submerged mountains and secret beaches which She had given me the eyes to see. There were basins below and mountainheads above and some creative attention was present over the whole island.

I thought I could see Her just around every corner, every bend of beach, the back of Her hair in every boat. The waves of Her hair were those of the summer sea. Like the sea on a bright and beautifully stormy summer day and I looked for their shape. I looked in every car window superstitiously on the chance Her face may be below the tint, like the high incidence of coincidence was drawing upon a reversal of Her death, and this secret eddy took me into the deeper intentions of creation.

At noon I landed us with a slight jostle on the Chappy side and we took two cars on. The first was Chris and I waved him on and I wanted to wave him all the way forward into the water. I nodded and he lowered his window and I gave him a look like I’d talk to him in just a moment. Behind him was Caleb and I joked with Caleb, waving him on with my left hand and waving him back at the same time with my right, the motion of each wave saying, “Just another inch, just another inch” in each direction.

Caleb rolled his window down. “Hey bru.”

“Where you guys headed?”

“Chris is talking to the police. About the rescue.”

“Oh yeah?”

I walked up to Chris while Jill waved one last car on. Its windows were tinted so dark I could not see through them.

“Hey bru.”

“Hey Chris,” I said, staring at the last car as it pulled slowly forward facing me.

“Crazy night huh?”

“Yeah crazy. Who’s this behind you?”

“Huh? No clue bru. Hey that could be a new shi foo me. No clue bru.”

“Good stuff.”

“Caleb and I are getting a commendation from the Coast Guard. My dad’s got a friend in the state police who’s driving down.” Then he lowered his voice. “It’s all taken care of now. Crazy how life gives you a chance to make things right. So tell Elvis not to worry anymore, we’re all set.”

I walked the long way past the third car up to the wheel but the side windows were black too. Jill latched the gates and collected the fares. A tan arm came out the driver’s side window and handed Jill her money and I pretended to crane my neck in a navigational posture to see more of the arm.

Then Jill spoke to Caleb as I piloted us and I couldn’t hear what they said but when she approached Chris’ window there was a note of awe in her voice. I left off the forward throttle and hit the reverse rutters and we coasted at a slight angle into the ramp. I drove us forward and we fitted flush against the ramp.

“God bless you,” Jill said to Chris. “You’re a hero.”

“Thank you. Thank you,” said Chris, and Jill unlatched the gate. I leapt to the third car and removed the wooden blocks and smiled and waved into the glass but I could only see my reflection in it, and then I stood and watched as Chris drove off the ferry without paying his fare.

“Where were you last night man?” Elvis put his left hand on the steering wheel and dropped his right on the center console between us, turning his chest toward me. The tattoo of the harp on his forearm looked deep purple.

“On the yacht.”

“And then with Chris and Caleb on the boat?”

“Yes.”

He stared out ahead unblinking. We were halfway down West Tisbury Road. Linda had sent us out to Morning Glory farm for blueberry pies. To take the turn Elvis took the wheel now with his right and turned his body from me. When we came to a stop he kept his seatbelt on and left the car running. He rubbed the corners of his eyes with his index fingers along his fine nose. The radio was on and we could hear it now while we idled.

“…this rescue comes just two days after twelve year-old Rosie Hallet was killed in Chappaquiddick by a stray bullet. Hallet was the young daughter of Brock Hallet, captain of the Chappaquiddick ferry and late husband of Rose Ellen Hallet. The investigation into this death is still ongoing. You’re listening to MVY.”

Elvis’s fingers paused in the corners of his eyes as he listened, as he understood. He drew his hands away and looked at me.

“Rosie is the daughter of Brock?”

“Yes,” I said.

“The daughter of your boss.”

“Yes.”

Elvis’s edge made me nervous because he didn’t wear it quite right, it came over the wrong side of him and lit him from the opposite direction. But I respected it because I was under its hierarchy. It was affronted and injudicious and it came out of nowhere though I learned to feel it coming like rough weather. Perhaps I drew close to it because I wanted to test if I could founder. Perhaps Elvis was the only thing that could do me in and his waves started coming at me sideways. If it’s true I was like a child innocent of the knives people hide then the circlets of my fingers were puffy like a child who has been in the water a long time and yet I still had ground to cover. I was approaching Brock somehow and I wondered whether the puffiness of the wet creases altered the destinies fortune tellers could read in them.

I wanted to speak for Elvis because I could see some of his anger was in not being able to get it out right. He stared out the window with his eyes wide and violent and then he raised his hands and opened his fingers wide and thrust them at the wheel and looked at me. I could tell those hands wanted to hit me.

“What are you doing?” he yelled. “What are you doing! You’re partying with a murderer. You’re fucking hanging out with a guy who killed the daughter of your boss and is gonna get away with it. You met her.”

“I know. But I’m not…” I looked up into the green of the trees over us for the words. I thought he had understood. I didn’t want to say any of it out loud because She was so close and I didn’t want to break it before She came back and I thought he was in it with me.

“Your girlfriend kills herself and you’re hanging out half a year later with a guy who shot a girl through the head and you work with her father. And you met her.”

“Elvis. It’s still happening and you’re talking to me like it’s all over.”

“Like it’s all over? Listen to yourself. What are you talking about?”

I could only try to take his waves at the right angles now. I was rounding a point and now the waves were coming sideways to me so I had to angle into them before I could continue in my turn. I was heading somewhere and that moment I had felt coming yesterday was close. I was startled by how close it was. “I think you do understand,” I said.

He spent several seconds ignoring this. “Why was Chris all the way out in the Elizabeths last night?”

I cleared my throat. “Hiding the gun.”

“Why not throw it in the middle of the water?”

“Well, he probably wants to use it again when it all blows over. If he throws it in the water he can never get it back.”

Elvis stared off in disbelief. I could feel the violence in him. He was speaking to me now from the other side of his heart and he wanted to hit me.

“Your prints are on it, El.”

“Which island did he take it to?”

“Pasque,” I said. “Next to Naushon.”

“And now he’s a fucking hero.”

“And now that he’s protected he’ll probably go back for it soon.”

“Jesus Christ!” Elvis punched the steering wheel three times with the bottom of his fist.

“If your prints weren’t on it it would be a different story, but it’s put this whole thing in a different direction.”

He opened his hands and shook them. “I don’t give a fuck that my prints are on it! Your prints are on it too!”

“No, they’re not. I never touched it.”

He built somewhere in his head. This was something of a counterblow, the cause of a new differentiation between us.

“We have to tell the police, or Brock. Tell Brock to go to Pasque to find the gun.”

“Yes, Brock should know about Chris. But it’s too late for the police. Chris is getting awarded. He’s got protection. Your prints are on it – he’d use that to scare you, say you did it. It’s gotta happen in a way where you don’t get tied up in it. And telling Brock brings you into it, and raises questions about why I didn’t tell him as soon as I found out.”

“Well, that’s not my problem.”

“Well, that’s what protected you.”

“So you’re fine with letting him skate by?”

“I think something will happen.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. It’ll break somewhere and there will be an opening.”

“I just can’t believe you Adam. Friends with Chris. You met her. You know her father.”

“I’m not friends with the guy. I thought you understood.”

“Well, I don’t.” And he got out of the car and slammed the door.

When we got back to Mayflower Chris and his father were standing in the kitchen surrounded by all the Gavins.

“Tip O’Neil Award, then a midnight rescue mission. What a family!” one of the aunts said.

“We’re real proud of Chris,” said Mr. McConnell.

“You looked so handsome on the news.”

“What were you doing out there so late?”

“Oh, just taking in a midnight cruise,” Chris said, smirking at me.

“You’re crazy!” said Laura.

He had a drink of Whistle Pig in his hands and Linda took the pies from us and began cutting them for Chris. Elvis hadn’t spoken to me the whole way back and I could tell he wanted immediately to cut through the crowd of his family and go to the fifth floor by himself but there were too many people to get through, and by the time we moved through the crowd – I going for the boathouse – we were close to Chris who turned to us.

“Hey gay boys. Wanted to take you to the yacht for a couple minutes. You haven’t seen it yet Elvis, have you?”

Elvis couldn’t look Chris in the eyes and made his way for a verbal exit, but Chris’s father was standing near and he stepped before us.

“I’m taking my dad back on the ferry and then taking the boat back over to meet people in town. Let’s stop off in the yacht.”

“That’s a good idea, Chris. We’ll have a drink there,” said Mr. McConnell.

“Elvis,” said Laura, “you still haven’t seen the yacht?”

“No,” Chris said. “You have to go.”

“Can I come?” asked Jamie.

“It’s only a four-seater,” said Chris. “Sorry Jamie.”

“Oh my God, go, go!” said Laura. And we started to make our goodbyes.

I lowered my head sitting in the backseat on the ferry but Jill was already gone and the workers were none who would be likely to recognize me if I kept my profile to them. I tried to do this in a way that didn’t show my shame to Elvis but his eyes were lost staring out the window in anticipation anyways. The sky was not clear yet no rain came. A mist was settling in gently in between the light and we piloted from fog to brightness as if the light were in tatters.

With a slight jostle we landed on the ramp and soon were on the road and heading for the treeline. There was that eerie silence to Chappaquiddick I hadn’t felt since Chris’s birthday. That lack of electronic chatter. We took the left onto North Neck Road and drove with Chris and his father talking all the way about the father’s upcoming travel. He’d be leaving before the fourth for Ireland but the yacht would stay for another week.

With the mist the road was dark even though it was only late afternoon and we took their private sandy road, the second to last before the Golf Club and bore left the whole road to their driveway.

Caleb’s red jeep was there and he was waiting for us on the porch, having a drink with Chris’s mother. There was a sweetness to her face that didn’t belong to the family, like she’d merely followed the waves of her life into this home and this husband and this child.

“Bru’s!” Caleb called to us. He got up and shook our hands as we got to the deck. Chris’s mother stood up also and smiled at us. “Hello Elvis,” she said.

“Hi Charlotte.”

And then she looked at me, “I don’t know if we’ve met.”

“I’m Adam.”

“Nice to meet you,” she said. “And where do you live?”

“Oh I’m from the Cape, but I’ve been staying the summer with across the harbor with Elvis.”

“Well, welcome to the island.”

“Thank you,” I said. And it was here I realized she must have no idea about anything that had happened.

“What are you drinking?” asked Mr. McConnell.

“Oh, I’m good,” said Elvis wanly, waving it away, “thank you.”

“So a beer,” was his joke. He looked at me.

I had an instinct to stay away from whiskey. I wanted something bright. “A glass of rose would be very nice, thank you.” Mr. McConnell walked away and Chris stood hovering over us silently, chewing something in the corner of his mouth.

“How you bru’s doing?” asked Caleb.

“Good, good,” said Elvis, his eyes wide and looking down at his feet in the sand.

“How’s your mother?” asked Charlotte.

“She’s good. She’s good.”

“That was so hard,” she said, smiling sadly.

“Yeah, it was.”

“And how are you?”

“Umm…” Elvis was overwhelmed and all the anger and resolution he had against Chris was clashing against the spontaneity of these social constraints. He looked off over our heads at the trees and realized he had to stow away all his wrath and judgement or risk unraveling, risk embarrassment. The weight of Charlotte’s innocence and the confrontation with the powerful guilty parties above Elvis called upon his role in the hierarchy of wealth. Called upon the atoms in him he despised. He now in an instant played his stammering off as the painful introspection of death. “It’s been really hard but I’m doing really well. I’m loving school and my studies, and life has been good.”

“Oh that’s good. Where do you go to school again?”

“Londonberry College.”

“Oh yes, I had a cousin go there a long time ago.”

“Oh,” he said brightly. And then Mr. McConnell came back with our drinks and we said goodbye to Charlotte and walked out to the dock to Chris’s boat and pushed off toward the Gidal. We went silently through a warm wet mist and when we got close I could see Elvis see himself in its reflection of the glass.

They could not know but all of this pageantry worked on the root of Elvis’s turmoil. The grand living room, the glass elevator passing floors of vast rooms and bedrooms, the golden lights of the top floor and the low couch was everything Elvis didn’t want and yet some part of it tugged on a root in him. It lured him into his raw depths, a child helpless to what happened to him. It sharpened his edge but it also brought out that part of himself that could be scared. It might as well have thrown him back ten years to pubescence and the awkwardness in his body not wanting to be here.

When we got to the top floor we met a man in a black suit. He had too much bearing to be a servant and he shook our hands with an air of genial conspiracy.

Mr. McConnell sat us on the sofas and gave Elvis a new beer and refilled my glass and sat across from us with a smile that sat oddly in his face. The muscles of the smile were those of self-satisfaction, of warmth that can be shared with others only in moments of collective self-satisfaction, like closing some hundred million dollar deal after months of negotiations. The smile was not of warmth but a signifier that you’d just won a very big haul for yourself. Chris sat next to him on the couch and Caleb sat on the arm of a chair, smiling handsomely at us.

Outside the windows the sun was breaking back through the clouds and the mist and the treeline of Chappaquiddick was bright in the darkness like it had been daubed with wet light. The scattered sunlight took waves and patches of the harbor at random and boats moved silently through the patches of brightness and some patches were so bright you could almost see straight through them to the bottom. The AC was on full blast and I was very cold suddenly and looked into the lights of my wine.

“Well it’s been one of those weeks with many twists and turns,” Mr. McConnell said. He drank bourbon which in the gold of the lights looked orange. “The only constant in this world is change. Obstacles and unexpected roadblocks. But roadblocks are not our enemies – our responses to them are. If we tell ourselves that we are helpless to harsh conditions and bad circumstances we fall victim to a story of defeat. Success is buried on the other side of adversity. And I want to make a toast to our ability this week to stare an obstacle square in the eye and devote our powers to its solution.”

He raised his glass and we followed, Elvis and I hesitating.

“Cheers,” said Mr. McConnell.

“Cheers,” said Chris and Caleb.

“Cheers,” said Elvis and I flatly.

“I want to thank you two personally for your friendship to my son, Christopher.”

Chris smiled chubbily.

“What gets rewarded gets repeated. Elvis, your father told me that.” Elvis looked back at him with a scorn only I could interpret in the contours of his face. “We had debates about the balance between praise and economic reward. Will a man do more for money or for public recognition? I take the radical approach in my organizations. I pay handsomely to be sure, but I prioritize personal recognition. It’s been my observation that a man will do more when he feels seen than if you merely reward him with a bonus. It’s recognition he wants, and when you give it to him, he gives you back his loyalty. Your father thought that the approach should be balanced. Yes, recognize the man, celebrate his wins publicly, but reward him in private too. Give him, say, 30K on top of it. That way he goes home to his wife happy with his boss, with his chest proudly outthrust, and says, honey, let’s go away this weekend. He thought this was a more human approach, and I must say your father was a very human kind of a guy.”

This last summation, so lamely phrased, was a lashing against Elvis’s heart. McConnell was trying to run himself in the same blood.

“So in honor of your father, I am embodying his balanced approach. Howard,” he said to the man in the suit. The man stepped forward, pulling from his inner breast pocket two checks and presenting them to us each. “To celebrate our success and your friendship with my son, in your hands is a direct reflection of what you two delivered. But on top of that, and here comes your father’s balanced approach Elvis, is the promise of my friendship. You’ll be graduating soon and I have many opportunities in my organizations for strong, loyal, dependable young men. What we lack in this world is men of courage. Tenacity. Never say quit. And loyalty. No organization can thrive without these traits. So boys, you have a personal line to me.”

In the tension Elvis has sucked his cheeks in slightly and his cheekbones were sticking out.

“Elvis,” said Caleb, “studies filmmaking, Frank.”

“Well, consider me a more than happy financier then too,” said Mr. McConnell. “But if you’ve got your father’s blood in you and ever want to bring it to my endeavors, just say the word.”

Elvis and I didn’t say anything but Mr. McConnell did not let the silence go too long. He had seen straight through into an aspect of Elvis’s turmoil and now addressed it. “The past is a point of reference, not residence. If we brood on the past, we give it a meaning that controls our present and limits our future. In this way the past can be another a roadblock. A roadblock we place in front of ourselves. The only constant is change and the past cannot be changed. It is therefore not a constant, but an illusion and must be let go of. When we realize this and let the past go we open new sources of energy and reinvention. When a man is free of the past the only decision becomes that of deciding to choose success. Caleb, have you ever told them the story of your accident?”

“No, but I’d be happy to Frank. I’m very lucky to be here you know,” he said, wrapping his sport coat over his stomach. “Very lucky. Not only am I lucky to be alive, but I’m lucky to even just be here. I was born to a single, drug-addicted mother in Kentucky. I could be there right now. God knows. But I was incredibly lucky. I was adopted by an incredibly wealthy man. We’re all lucky for that,” he took us all in with the sweep of his hand. “You’re lucky you had the dad you had Elvis, he raised you right. My fortunes switched so drastically, to just completely opposite ends of the spectrum. Left to right, 0 to 100 before I was even conscious of what side of the spectrum I was on.

“The only time my biological mother wanted to meet me was after the accident. I was in this frat in college, and it’s about a month in so I’ve already pledged and done all the crazy drinking shit and I’m finally in. And we’re just chilling. Fucking hard. It was a Friday night and every Friday we usually just got absolutely hammered and threw massive parties. Biggest on campus. Girls came from miles away to our house to get fucked.” He took out his vape and drew hard on it. “And man, we had the biggest fucking parties man. I brought Chris to one one time and he came out of the room where we’re all just railing lines of coke and taking blunts to the face, and he looks out at the party downstairs and it was just too much for him. Just imagine a house filled with Penelope Cruz’s and Emily Ratajkowski’s. He was like, ‘man these girls are so beautiful, I just, I just can’t.’”

Chris giggled. “It’s true.”

“It was insane. That was better shit than I’ve been to in LA and I’m a producer. I live in Santa Monica, ok? These girls were wild. Anyways, it was a Friday, and I’m trying to get with this girl, this beautiful girl.” He said beautiful in a different, softer way than before. “Except she’s Christian, like strict Christian or whatever so I’m not drinking at all, trying not seem like a wild guy, you know? And finally it’s late and she wants to go home so I decide to walk her home. I’d been friends with her all term and I actually don’t really even think I was trying to get with her at this point. I really liked her. We were getting to be good friends. And yeah, honestly, I wasn’t trying to hook up, she was… yeah…” He was walking that road in his mind. “Anyways, I decide to walk her home because her other friends are trashed and banging or something and it’s a long walk and it goes through some sketchy parts of town. So, we get to this huge intersection right by the school, the intersection I and every other student crosses every day to get to class, and we’re walking through and I don’t see a single car because it’s late and I’m really just listening to her talking, and we’re going past the last lane and I see these lights and this car just comes careening through us. Never saw us. Never stopped. The girl goes flying fifty feet, and she’s killed instantly. I go through the windshield. Somehow my head never hits anything. Doesn’t hit the glass or the dashboard or the seats. I broke everything with my arm somehow. And it’s a couple, and they’re going home from a party, just trashed with their newborn asleep in the back, right? And they don’t know what to do, so they just keep flying down the road with me halfway through the windshield, about 150 yards before they decide to pull over, with my unconscious body bleeding between them. And so, before this I’m all cut up and my legs are broken and I’m bleeding very badly, but I’m kinda ok. But when they pull me out, the shards of the windshield which are only meant to break inwards, in the direction that I broke them, they rip my entire stomach open and the couple leaves me there, on the side of the road, bleeding to death with my stomach hanging out.

“Under huge amounts of traumatic pain, the brain automatically goes into a state of shock, or unconsciousness, where you’re still technically conscious but it doesn’t take in that immediate memory or sensation. To protect itself basically, because you’d just die out of the shock, or the shock would just make it way worse.” He looked out the window now. “So I remember the lights and the beginning of it, and then I come to and I’m lying in the road a lot further down the road than I was before, the car’s gone, and my bones are sticking out of my legs and the muscles on my arms and stomach are turned inside out and I can see them on the outside of my skin. I wiggled my toes so I could see if I was paralyzed, which I wasn’t, so that was a plus and then, as I was drifting off, I said to myself, ‘Bruh,’” he paused and pointed his finger out at the harbor, “‘you will be the biggest beast in history if you get through this.’

“I swear to God that was the first thing I thought. And that’s how I survived it basically. I just doubled down on myself. It wasn’t even a choice really, it was an instinct. Someone had been on the other side of the intersection or a store or something, I can’t remember, and they had heard it and called immediately. The impact was so forceful a lot of people heard it pretty far away. It was so forceful it tossed all my clothes off. The only things I had on were my underwear and these sick Nikes I had just custom ordered with my name on it. They were sick dude. They were these ill sneakers. I had just gotten them too so they were still completely white. Of course, they were filling up with blood when I came to.

“So then when the ambulance shows up, I’m just cracking jokes. My instinct is just to make everyone laugh. I was just going, ‘I’m in pretty bad shape, huh?’ Or like, ‘I look like a Picasso don’t I? You never thought you’d find a Picasso on the side of the road tonight, that’s a pretty good steal.’And then in the hospital my frat chair comes in, who’s just blasted on coke and crying, and he brings these three banging girls with him, straight from the party, and I’m all hooked up to these machines and my bones are still outside of my legs. I haven’t been operated on yet, and I’m just spitting mad game. Like, maddest game I’ve ever spit, and I got one of the girl’s numbers. And my teeth were all broken too by the way. They got crushed in the impact. I bit down so hard. These babies are faked.” He tapped his teeth with his vape.

“But that was just my instinct. Just keep it all light, you know? Because you can’t dwell on that shit, it’ll just bring you right down.”

I looked around at the room and watched Caleb holding the vape, smoke coming out of his mouth and had a huge rush of deja-vu watching all of this, but I was suspicious of it, like I’d dreamt it all but it didn’t go exactly in this way.

“So I’m in the hospital for a month. Just going absolutely out of my mind. Like, if you’re in the hospital for a night, it’s like, whatever. Two nights, it sucks but it’s ok. Three days, you start to feel it. I was in there for a month straight, in a full body cast, can’t move shit, just lying there going out of my fucking head. And I’m watching all the shit on the news, the mother of that beautiful girl just pouring her fucking heart out on live TV, on CNN and shit, because there was a huge manhunt to find these guys who did it. I spent all day just seeing that girl’s face, that beautiful, beautiful girl, and then my own face. And I just have to watch this shit, every night. See my name on the TV, and remember her face right before it happened and what she was saying, and where she was in the sentence. I kept running her voice back in my head just so I wouldn’t forget. And I remember it perfectly because I was sober, for once, and someone told me that that had actually probably saved my life being sober. It let me react quicker to break the windshield with my arm. But I don’t know. If I was drunk, we could have ended up in my room, even though that would have been a mistake, or like a bonehead I could have ended up with someone else and she would have left at a different time. I don’t know. I ran all the scenarios through my head, because I sure as hell had time.

“The pain was horrible. They gave me one of those little buttons to press for the pain that just shoots you up with basically the most potent morphine, but really this drug that is like a hundred times more strong. I was just shooting myself up all day. All day. Because hospital ratings are based on the treatment of pain, so they just dope you up beyond belief, every hospital, even the best. They kind of have to or their ratings fall and they lose their funding and whatever. So not only do I get out and I’ve lost like 90 pounds, because I went in 240, pure muscle, and I came out 150, but I’m completely addicted to pain killers. Completely. And I was in a wheelchair too. Before that I was the biggest motherfucker in the gym, just the coolest guy there. I was a fucking beast. Sorry, but I was. Everyone wanted to be me. Sorry, but it’s true. And I had to earn it all back. Very humbling. The best experience I could have gone through. It wasn’t vengeance for finding the family who hit me – it was building myself back better than ever.

“Anyways, the guy who called the ambulance comes, and he gives me this bizarre letter, like, no punctuation, no commas or periods just one straight sentence with these random capitalized words, about how connected he was to me through the accident, and then this like boombox that he’s disassembled and then taped all back together for me in like blue painter’s tape. And I read this thing and I’m just like what the absolute fuck? Am I going crazy or this guy a nutjob or both, you know? So I realized I had to change my name, I had to break from the past to get away from it, and I’m like, what is the coolest name?”

Elvis’s hands were rubbing his beard meditatively and he waited for Caleb to give the name and when he didn’t he asked, “What?”

“Caleb Stone, baby. Caleb Stone.”

McConnell let a silence pass while Elvis and I sat back into the sofa and Caleb caught my eye and winked.

“That’s the best you’ve ever told it, Caleb. To Caleb Stone.”

Elvis and I had to lean forward again and grab our drinks to raise them. McConnell was throwing a long shadow across Elvis’s depths trying to find that hole in his heart his father had left, dying in the air halfway across another ocean. He searched for the Pacific in Elvis and though Elvis and I had taken our thoughts from the same wishing well all summer I could not touch the wet of his mind now. Elvis was struggling with a decision that may throw the switch of cancer in his soul and I saw him acquiesce to something and I couldn’t tell what it was, I could only follow him around its bend. There was a quick wind of change in him and I took its momentum.

“So you see,” said McConnell, “now we’re putting back on our muscle. This is a lot of money, men. Howard is at your beck and call, day and night, to advise you on how best to maximize it. And I mean it from the bottom of my heart when I say I look forward to the opportunity of working with you two in the future. I learned a lot from your father, Elvis. His more human approach to things. And I look forward to one day, perhaps, learning from you.

“To Ed Gavin,” McConnell said.

“To Ed Gavin,” they all said, opposite us.

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• Prologue

• Part 1, Chapter 1

• Part 1, Chapter 2

• Part 1, Chapter 3

• Part 1, Chapter 4

• Part 1, Chapter 5

A reminder that friend-of-the-Substack Anthony Marigold (of Magazine Non Grata) has released a Chrome extension for those who prefer to enjoy their Substacks offline.

As ever, if you believe in what we’re doing at PILCROW, please subscribe, please share, 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 night had an odd brightness to it and the garden was bathed white when the moon came out. The flowers glowed like moonroses and the tide of the night washed over the rose. There was a complicity between the moon and the color of the petal that suggested concessions larger than I could measure. There seemed parts of the garden brighter now than in day, and the light took the underhang of what the sun had laid in shadow. The night was no reprieve from the heaven that had opened overhead and the brightness of the moon laid on every living thing as if to say, “I am still touching you. I am still wrapped around you and shall tug you away at any moment.”

The moonlight answered to the winter that was in my mood, as if walking to the boathouse I walked warmly through a snowbank. Though no one in the boathouse knew Chris was Rosie’s killer a mania edged into the gathered energy that can only come from getting drunk on the rim of someone’s newly opened psychic wound. A wound whose lips had opened and was seeking to be pushed through to the kill. He knew it in his heart even if he’d closed his soul against it that some part of him was slipping out, and this leakage put a warp in the room everyone took a curve through.

Elvis had disappeared up to the fifth floor and I didn’t ask him to come with me. The tide was high in the full moon and the shoreline landed high almost to the sea grass. It was a glass brim, the brim a mirror, and the moon in the mirror, Jamie laying drunk with his arms stretched around it like a snow angel. The sea was nearly flush with the dock and we left Jamie there with Serena and the Gavins, and Chris boated the rest of us over to his father’s yacht anchored at the mouth of the harbor.

I had been watching him all night and it was on his father’s yacht against the rail that I saw the edge of his spirit slip from him. I saw it tug out and stand next to him in a state of limbo. I could see the stress of the day in him – the stress perhaps not yet of policemen but of his father and his lawyers and his conscience – and I could see a sleepless night before him. No matter how much he drank tonight he would not be sleeping. Somewhere in the day he had smelled the breath of the beast on the back of his neck and turned to face himself in the mirror of his soul and saw his own death. A voice had whispered to him, even if briefly, even if from a cavern whose depth he’d never plumbed, that the cleanest route to justice was to be killed by Rosie’s father. The knowledge was like water finding its lowest point and though the physics of the psyche answers to higher constants there was no skirting this truth. The brain is ancient, and if pain is as old as the body then somewhere there had woken inside him the knowledge that he had called for his own blood.

For a moment I saw him in a state of heightened quality, as a condemned man briefly glows as they approach their executioner and there is a brief urge no matter how evil to stave the man from death. Here was a man who had come to see that his own face, the face he’d watched change over twenty-seven years so slowly that its aging was imperceptible, that it was like a flowing stream the difference between his face as a child and now, that buried in the contours of this face, in the squint and angle of the eyes, was the destiny of a face that is to be killed. That this stream however slow and pure in its origin deserved to be destroyed. That if his mother, the source of Chris’s appearance on this Earth, could be in possession of his fate at the moment of birth – if some oracle could have revealed it to her in her wildest pregnant dream – she would have to look at her child’s face and know that in twenty-seven years he will be killed, and his death will be deserved and it will be good. And that was it: he had the look of a man who has come to know that his imminent death would be just.

He would slide, and his sense of justice struck against the calm assurance of his father, but in gathering the strength to be a coward for the rest of his life was the knowledge that what was written in his fate was deliverance unto murder, and in rejecting destiny he would live forever in imbalance.

He teetered toward me now with a beers in his hands, one for me, and I recognized that bringing half the party to his father’s yacht was a way of better cornering me in private. None of the Gavins were aboard and without thinking about it I had not yet gone into the yacht but had isolated myself on the deck for him, inviting him to talk to me when the groups drew apart and everyone lost focus on each other. He put his finger to his lips and brought me down a gangplank away from the deck in the starboard of the ship where the moon was shining most strongly.

“I assume you’ve heard,” he whispered.

Something about him finally glowed, became rounded.

“Yeah,” I said. “I heard.”

He tried to edge some calm command of the situation into his voice but it wouldn’t hold together when he spoke.

“Where’s Elvis?”

“At Mayflower.”

“Has he heard?”

“Yeah.” I paused to read his face, seeing what he needed. He was nervous and of course this conversation was the first of making sure we would all stick together on the plan. “We’re sorry this happened to you,” I said, and he broke and took this condolence ravenously into him, for what he needed now was to be consoled as victim and feel we were with him. For a few seconds he broke into the posture of the child within him, and I was embarrassed for him, the way he shivered into himself and put his hands on the rail and bent his head.

“Yeah, thank you, thank you,” he said rapidly. “It’s fucking nuts.” He let this settle. I could see him straining toward another will, breathing strangely as if he’d just discovered dangerous depths inside where his breath could now touch. Straining in his torture for some divinity or pattern through which to ascend out of his fear but he was too afraid to look, or he didn’t know where. The moon did not even exist for him and he looked down at the bright slow waves and I watched his eyes search and probe. I saw him regret how little he’d ever thought of these things and I enjoyed the Milky Way smeared above him, that lost white of the sky. I could even feel the yacht’s slow bob in the water.

Failing to have proper vision he closed up. His failure was being punished by fear and I saw his calculus collapse into a safety net of lawyers and money and local connections and the confidence in his wealth and then there it was, swallowed up, all the fear and guilt. Now it became an arrogance, a new facet of his bad masculinity. How far apart were fate and justice I could not say, but the glow that had been there went out of his face as he pulled out of the moonlight and I saw again he’d already been born outside of whatever the balance was. He was born where man had gathered enough gold to tilt the balance in his favor.

“But this shit happens, you know? More than we think.” He looked at me. “Our fathers all had crazy shit like this happen when they were young, and the test of a man is to live it down and get through it, you know?”

I had been drinking and taking so many drugs to set an edge against myself, to give myself a wall to come up against, but I kept overwashing all possibility of boundary and I could not undercut myself. I was held in culpable innocence. Alienated from failure. But I knew when to quit a party and I made my way to the tender where Chris’s boat was tied. I laid on the floor of Chris’s boat looking up at the moon and it kept splitting into two moons. I was blinking to bring it back together when Chris and Caleb rocked my cradle with their footsteps. I lay looking up at Caleb and he said not a word and it might have been that he hadn’t seen me at all.

They didn’t say a word and Chris pushed the boat forward slowly. It was very late and I thought maybe they didn’t want to draw attention to their departure.

Driving through the dark and the lamplit moorings and invisible winking buoys was like tunneling through the lightbeds of space and the oceandark fabric rippling into brief crests of light, the wind humming into the rippled edges, curling them and spraying them into wet broken beads. There was a rim to what could be seen of the waves, and the whitecaps were blue in the blackness beyond this horizon. But close to the boat the spray was so white that it was as if we were shattering the liquid light of the moon itself. They were so drunk and I was so soundless that I don’t think they knew I was on the boat until we slowed by Robinson’s Hole off Naushon Island and I stood up and put my arms around the teetop.

“This is too close,” said Caleb. “People beach it here every day.”

“What is this is?” asked Chris.

“Naushon.”

“Yeah,” said Chris. “You’re right.”

“It’s a bad idea.”

Chris cut the wheel and spun us from Naushon Point toward the dark bulge of Pasque island. The whole thing was a bad idea and it was a good thing Chris was given to bad ideas because they might bring him to failure, or at the least up to the edge of his wealth. Chris was smart enough not to use his GPS and scanned the dark rim of the Elizabeth Islands with his drunken eyes. Drunkeness did not vivify him, and all his eyes showed now was the curdled fear of a child. I didn’t want him to see the inlet off Pasque but he did and he put in and I sat on the edge of the boat with my arm on the teetop, my shirt filled with warm wind. I could not even grow a belly with so much beer, and it felt flat and comforting slipping under my waistband.

I looked down and saw it, wrapped in a towel on Chris’s lap.

“Careful Chris,” said Caleb.

Not wanting to go too deep he beached in the mouth and hopped the side of the boat with Caleb. Caleb looked hesitant about going onto the sand, and I forbade myself putting my footsteps in it and they did not ask it of me. They left the engine running and hadn’t bothered to throw an anchor up the shore, a lapse which gave me a moment’s fantasy about reversing and driving off.

But I stayed, and I sat looking up at the sky. There were fast whisps of cloud moving across the moon, brightening seams pulling apart. Around the moon in the clouds a rim of light, rainbow wool.

I saw the tips of their dark shapes pause in the black treeline and soon they were back.

Heading back there were deep flames laid in the ultraviolet coastline, a black just visible beyond black, and a glitter as of distant deep red starlight, which Chris and Caleb did not see.

On our starboard and passing it by I pointed at it, “What’s that?”

“What?”

“That.”

Chris swung his spotlight out with no clue where to place it, lighting foam and froth in the small telescoped narrowness of the light.

“No,” I said, “there.”

And they saw the crimson hull and the rocking flames against the blackness. The spotlight overlit the burning reflection in the water as we approached, erased the clarity of the fire in the sea and I drew the spotlight away and the flames bobbed in the waves like lit water. We drew toward Naushon a nimbus from the burning boat. It was a wooden Hinckley. The light of its cradled flame haloed it in the water, a perfect circle if the waves held still. But they did not. They put a chop into the vividness and we lay outside its rim. Only man could have put a fire on the sea, this was something we had added to nature and the fire took over its flame and burned with an intensity to the levitate the flame, and put a fire on the moon.

“Hey!” I yelled in the boat. “Hey!”

For a moment we pulled close enough for me to put a leg onto the boat and with my arm holding our teetop leer upwards in the chop and try to see down the companionway. I let go of the teetop and stepped into the Hinckley. The flames were burning straight through the hatch high enough to melt the wax of the furled sails. There were small explosions inside and I could hear beyond the fire Caleb and Chris calling to me. I walked forward a step to look down the companionway into the cabin but everything was being burned into the same shape and the same light and I called but there was no answering. I choked on the smoke and crouched and tried to look through the liquid curl of shape, some layer to it as of memory, an amber in it like the iris of the lost white of Her eyes but the black smoke caught in my eyes and I could not see and turned back to Chris’s boat which was circling and now drew close enough for me to leap to it.

“Look at the shore, maybe the shore,” I said coming back onto the boat.

And there like knifing shadows as we sped away with the spotlight on Naushon, like ghosts that had never belonged to a single soul, three or four bodies threw their arms up in the air at us from a stretch of private beach.

“Call the coast guard,” I said, and by the time Chris landed I had bound over the rail and landed up to my waist in the water carelessly between rocks. I was too fast to slip on them. There was a small family on the beach, wet and breathless. They were down on the beach watching their boat burn and making their way toward Tarpaulin Cove where there’d be many overnight boats moored to get radio help for their mother. I followed them in the confusion up a hillock to an abandoned barn where their mother was. The boat had caught fire past midnight and they had swum to Naushon and had no radio to call for help or flairs to shoot. Her burns were magmal in the darkness of the barn. Her eyes too white and I was afraid to touch her and we decided the only thing now was to wait for the coast guard. I held her hand on and off while she repeated restfully that she was alright and I looked into the new purple of her wounds in a darkness that I hoped hid the angle of eyes from her. But as my eyes adjusted to the dark the color of her’s became hazel and she must have felt my eyes hurtling into her wound for when we looked at each other she closed her eyes in pain.

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• Prologue

• Part 1, Chapter 1

• Part 1, Chapter 2

• Part 1, Chapter 3

• Part 1, Chapter 4

A reminder that friend-of-the-Substack Anthony Marigold (of Magazine Non Grata) has released a Chrome extension for those who prefer to enjoy their Substacks offline.¹

As ever, if you believe in what we’re doing at PILCROW, please subscribe, please share, and spread the word.

Share

Subscribe now

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.

⚬─────────✧─────────⚬

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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