Still Soft With Sleep (A Novel based on a true story) - Part One: Six Months, Ch. 2
by Vincenzo Barney
We continue the second week of the second round of PILCROW’s Serialized Novel Contest. Over the week and a half, we’ll serialize excerpts from of our remaining Finalist’s unpublished novels, and then subscribers (both free and paid) will vote on a Winner to be fully serialized here on the Substack. Finalists are awarded $500; the Winner $1,000.
Our Finalists are:
Vice Nimrod by Colin Dodds
Still Soft With Sleep by Vincenzo Barney
Don’t Disappoint by Martin Van Cooper
While the traditional organs of American letters continue to wither, we recognize the need to forge a new path. If you believe in what we’re doing, PLEASE share and subscribe and spread the word.
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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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The sun was banded suddenly with the dark of June clouds and as we left we ran into Astana, stoned and slanting towards us along the boards through the dunes. Her brothers and a few of their friends were there in their lifted Jeep getting wasted in the clouded dark. Their father was in their young faces, but not Astana’s. I wondered at her a little, so thin with her breasts pressed so tightly together, her hair blonded and poking imperceptibly from her bikini bottoms and I was glad Elvis had such a beautiful woman. The brothers knew about our college from Astana and were intrigued by Elvis and I and couldn’t believe we had swum from the boat to shore. After they left sliding joyfully through the sand we walked a ways down the beach to where it widened and deepened and the waves seemed finally to pick up with dignity and reprisal.
The breadth of the beach made it a natural stage, and Elvis put on a great performance for us, flirting with the waves and getting seduced into them, and Astana looked at me all excited and I knew what she was thinking and I said, “Go join this wonderful play that I’m watching,” and she ran like a child merging into the scenery and played with Elvis, splitting the beachstage into perfect thirds by swapping the midground of the shoreline and the highground of the sea with Elvis, sending the spectators of the orchestra pit into delight. A few elderly audience members passed through my sightline and asked, “Are they with you?”
“Yes.”
“Wow. How are they doing that?”
I didn’t quite know what “that” was, though I was enjoying it, and I answered, “They have a lot of energy.”
They looked back. “Pshewwww,” and shook their smiling heads and walked on.
I sat and smiled and knew I could never join them in the water because my view was holding up the bonds of the performance, and it would all be destroyed if I moved and I could not let the curtain come down on them together. It felt so comfortable to sit there, to be so young and tan and thin with my stomach flat and slipping past my waistband. It felt to be at the peak of something. A peak with thousands of feet below to fall through.
Astana sat with her feet disappearing into the sand and Elvis traced out an elongation of her leg and sloped it down perfectly so that her legs truly faded and vanished into the sand. Then he laid back and spoke in non-sequiturs. “So monkey’s then us, huh?” “We’re just born in the middle of all this and don’t need to know any of it.” “We could forget everything we ever knew, tomorrow. Right now. And never learn it again. Forget the arch all over again. Nothing’s keep us from it.” “Everyone is our age. The rookies, the artists, the porn stars.”
“Yeah L?” Astana smiled.
After an hour or so of half-sleeping and sunbathing Astana’s brothers came up through the sand in their Jeep. I wanted to join them ripping through the dunes and leant us bikes. I wanted to go ripping with them through the dunes but Elvis had been talking about taking me to the Japanese Garden on Chappaquidick the entire flight from New York City. There was also talk of a J in store when we got there, though the sun had made one hardly necessary, the sun floating us up off the beach.
In the garden three women were speaking somewhere behind the trees in the gentlest hill and their voices rang out to us through the silence of the stream and the floating turtleheads as if they were up in the trees. Elvis kept trying to roll a joint from Astana’s weed but we had to keep walking from the voices deeper into the garden to find a place to smoke in privacy. The voices crowded in from all sides.
Astana looked so beautiful and halfcrazy in the sun I had to look away. The beach had opened up another layer of her beauty and she had settled down comfortably into it. Staring at the sand between my dirty toes I got sick thinking of how little I had done so far that summer and wanted to bike back to Elvis’s house immediately so I could really do nothing.
Elvis used the back of Astana’s phone to roll the joint. When he was done, he scrolled through her Instagram feed and showed us a video of a basketball player shooting from beyond the arc, then landing and his ankle snapping in half and his bone dangling out.
“Jesus Christ. I’m never jumping again,” I said.
“That’s what I’m saying bruv.”
“Two feet on the ground, all times.”
The voices of the women kept following us and crowding us in and with the weed now their voices took on an altogether different pitch and harmony. So in panic, taking the shallowest hits I could, I started to herd us toward our bikes and out of the crooked turns of the garden. I looked back at the trees and heard the women’s voices threading and coming through the leaves in the wind. I thought I could see them in the trees, their voices breathing through it.
Astana decided to walk back to the beach to be with her brothers. I stood there waiting for her and Elvis to say goodbye, their noses rubbing. All three of us went to Londonberry College, which Astana was always threatening to leave, even now in the summer before our final year. She left her bike with ours, warning us with a smile that she wasn’t coming back to Londonberry next term, and when we called to her not to forget her bike in the garden she turned around in a sliver of sunlight, beaming like a slightly mad and tanned halfangel.
“I’d rather walk,” she said, and some part of me knew that this time she was serious about leaving, and that Elvis and I would not see her again in the Fall.
“The A, then the C, then the... the G?”
Elvis passed me mouthing our little song to himself, counting on his fingers the absurd route just to show how easily he was passing me. I had led him out in the strong headwind and my legs were so out of shape that he passed me leisurely on the straightaway toward the Chappy ferry. I laughed hoarsely and barely breathing and caught my breath waiting for the ferry to land on the front ramp.
“Hey there Jill.”
“Adam, you’re back. Brock, look who it is.”
“You’re still on the boat, kid?”
“Yup. That’s hangin on.”
“About the only thing, huh?” He nodded at me in my shorts.
“Yeah, just about.”
Jill and Brock were my bosses. Jill, a widow, inherited the Chappy Ferry from her late husband, and Brock was the head captain. There were two boats, but Brock was senior in the chain of command. I spent June piloting back and forth in the open sun over the hundred yard stretch of harbor that separates Edgartown from Chappaquiddick, driving every now and then under Brock’s tutelage. The smell of gasoline, the seatop. It was meditative.
I sat back down and set my eyes on Mayflower, Elvis’s house on the other side of the harbor in Edgartown. In a cul-de-sac of mansions and docks it was distinguished from the rest by a fifth level that I had only ever been on the midstairs of. Though we lived with a mutual freedom in Mayflower that June, it was implied by Elvis that that floor was the one place in the house that only he could go and I understood, content with the rest of the sprawl. Something to do with his father, I gathered.
We had had all of June to ourselves. In the morning we would jump from Elvis’s dock, or from the second story porch into the pool, and spend the day half-asleep, reading, drinking, taking baths at night with bottles of rosé. In the beginning, I would let myself get lost in the house, and Elvis and I would go hours without talking or being together, always finding each other when we both wanted, as if our thoughts touched the other’s across the house. But as the Fourth of July approached, Elvis’s family began their slow trickle into our days. Our dinners moved from the couch to the table, and the table filled first with Elvis’s mother, and then his grandparents. A blind Maltese named Chelsea now engulfed Mayflower’s intimate silences with unending barks, penetrating the privacy of every room and proving how deceptively shallow the walls and floors were of that large house. At the dinner table Elvis and I had fantasies of punting Chelsea across the harbor to Chappaquiddick, now suddenly packed with boats, which caused our forays off the dock to slow with the water weighed down in gasoline. We could feel the difference in our hair.
Soon aunts and uncles and friends referred to as “cousins” showed up too, and Mayflower took on strange new habits. If you put a glass on the counter, full or not, it would be gone within five minutes to the dishwasher. Cleaning ladies would show up when we least expected them, that is daily, and reorganize everything we owned into places that we couldn’t find or that didn’t make any sense, leaving Elvis and I with certain crucial pairs of underwear and t-shirts missing in action for days on end. If you left your change of clothes on the wrung outside the outdoor shower as opposed to the inside wrung, you would find they’d been taken and thrown into the washing machine while you showered. One even feared the inside wrung was not safe, and that they’d come bursting in for your shirt which they’d just washed and dried and you had only worn for an hour in the central air of the house. Elvis put a sign up on his bedroom door, “No Cleaning Please,” and on the envelope where he kept his cash he wrote, “I know exactly how much is in here: $453.” I died laughing when he first showed it to me.
Mayflower, which to my eyes was pristine, perhaps too pristine, was also apparently in disrepair and needed to be banged on with hammers and painted from morning to night. I was convinced for a few days that a team of painters had moved into the bottom floor until I realized all of Edgartown had become a construction zone of pathological upkeep. Entire rooms in the house would randomly be off limits for days so that the floors could be revarnished, or the couches washed. It was the day that Elvis’s boathouse, the crown jewel of the house, had been taped off from us that we had decided to fly to New York City and get away from our vacation. Fearing the packed house I made good on a long ignored promise I’d made to my parents when my father was laid-off at the start of summer, and got the job on the ferry.
Mayflower itself was about halfway down North Water Street in Edgartown, a street besieged by tourists of the middle-class who treated the road and the colonial captains’ houses with an almost historical reverence, gawking and taking pictures in an endless stream. You could see Elvis’s house in Jaws. The lawn was small, but that’s how it had to be with so many huge houses on the water, and so much expanse of ocean at the end of a great length of dock. The homes on the left side of the street without access to the water were much older, which you could tell by their architecture, and there was a beautiful old captain’s house that had been renovated the summer before to look like every other house on the street. I remembered seeing it when I was a little kid visiting the island with my parents, but now I had trouble spotting it.
As we neared land I watched Elvis’s house grow closer and closer until it disappeared behind the trees and I could see only his dock, stretching long and boatless into the water. Then that too disappeared.
Those weeks of being alone but together were gone. June was about to end.
Elvis turned to me. “Bruv, I am not jumping once this summer.”
“Bruv, not once.”
I found Elvis’s voice in the mirror.
“Can I borrow a shirt?” he asked, coming into the bathroom and trying to squeeze the two halves of a small dress shirt over his torso. “All I’ve got is stuff from High School.”
That night we were to dress in suit jackets and join the Gavins at the Charlotte Inn for dinner. Elvis didn’t own any dress shirts that fit him anymore, and his father’s shirts that his mother still left hanging in her closet were too big for him.
“Yeah, take one of mine,” I said, positioning my wet hair in the mirror.
Scoring a week before at the Second Hand Store I owned probably half of the street’s donated clothes. Not that the town had great taste, but I got the old stuff with style that, as the town’s conformity deepened, no longer fit Edgartown’s salmon pink and yellow palette.
“I haven’t been to this stupid place in ages,” Elvis said.
“Where? The Charlatan?”
“What?”
“The Charlatan.”
“Are you saying the ‘Charlatan?’” He clasped his hands together and bowed over them, laughing. “Oh my days. It’s the ‘Charlotte’ Inn.”
“Ah, putain, the Charlotte,” I said, affecting the accent of our French friend from Londonberry, hoisting up my second-hand French slacks to the height I wanted my belt to cinch them to, perfectly creased down the legs. “Excusez moi.”
Elvis pulled my waistband in the back to see the brand. “Wow, check the French Press,” he said. “Let’s get you in that accent all dinner long.”
“Oo la la. But of course.”
“On second thought, maybe not.”
The “Inn,” as the family referred to it, looked like a huge, gilded luxury lounge from the Titanic. But there were no Jack’s, nor Roses. We arrived a few minutes later than everyone else and Elvis’s grandfather Monty, a formerly working-class Brooklynite, ordered us Keyo Manhattans. We sat around chewing the whiskey-soaked cherries and making conversation. After hearing that I was going to Italy for the fall semester, one of Elvis’s aunts spoke of how impossible it was to kill yourself in Switzerland, how they put nets at the bottoms of bridges and how everyday the widows of Italy walked a mile and a half downhill thirty years after the deaths that grieved them still in black mourning and wheeled fish back up to their villages. Someone mentioned how an uncle of Elvis’s went to Italy once and had to call in fat to work when he returned because he couldn’t fit back into his suit pants. When the waiter came the same aunt cautioned him that he should pull up a chair to take her order, that’s how complex her substitutions and alterations were going to be. Everyone found that pretty funny.
In the middle of all this, the Serbian hostess came out to the top of the stairs leading to the dining room and stood smiling and blinking at me with one of the most angelic faces I have ever seen. The kind that takes you unawares, like the part of a blind dream that shocks you suddenly into memory, into the pocket of pure floating, the unclinging glimpse. With that look in my pocket I felt blissfully drunk sitting in the Hermes jacket that I had bought for only 2 dollars. Faking it so, I seemed to fit in more than Elvis who did his best not to fit in. He caught my eye and indicated the hostess to me with his eyebrows.
He leaned over. “See the look she just gave me?”
“Bru, are you out of your mind? She was looking at me.”
“Pff, you’re out to lunch pal.”
“We’re out to dinner, pal.”
Then Elvis pretended he we was being called by the hostess, looking off in her direction where she now stood turned away from us, mouthing to her back, “What’s that? This guy?” He pointed his thumb at me quizzically. Then he squinted his eyes, shook his head and turned the same thumb away from the table, gesturing with it toward the door. “Don’t worry, I’ll get him outta he’e.” I started laughing, feeling properly KO’d already by the Keyo. This caused the table to return their attention to us.
“But Adam, tell me, why are you going to Italy for the Fall semester of your Senior year? Isn’t that unusual?” someone asked whose name I didn’t know.
“Adam wants a little breather from Londonberry,” Elvis said for me, putting it lightly.
“But why not just go after graduation?”
Because I’m broke. “Because I got a good offer to go and study Italian in Sorrento. Cheaper than a semester at Londonberry, actually.”
“Oh, Sorrento. So beautiful.” The table fell back into tales of Italy.
Then Monty grabbed my arm and said quietly, “Look, Adam, let me just tell you somethin’ so you understand.” This was how he began most of his stories.
He and his wife proceeded to speak to me of their many six degrees of separation from the Bose of Bose speakers, of how the Charlotte Inn with all the twinkling crystal lights used to not be much until they got the new head chef who was a good friend of Mont’s, how I should save the cherries of the Keyo until the end and then drink the dirty ice of the martini last after dinner when it had melted. But when he grabbed my arm again after the appetizers I lowered myself to him and he spoke pridefully of the characters in Brooklyn he used to call Joey Two Shoes and Herbie the Bullet and his days as a firefighter. While holding my arm he told the table how he met Elvis’s grandmother. He had come to collect his date at her apartment in Bay Ridge, the grandmother’s roommate, but when he arrived the roommate was in the shower and Elvis’s grandmother was there instead. He found he liked her much better than the roommate and they snuck out for drinks before the roommate was the wiser, and the rest as they was history.
“When I first went to your grandmother’s house, I thought she was rich because her family had a picture window,” he said to Elvis. “Now I’m serious, that’s a true story.”
After dinner, in his Brooklyn accent, Hugh offered to pay the check, but Elvis’s mother Linda batted her hand and paid instead. The fortune had been Elvis’s father’s, not Linda’s or Monty’s.
Walking out of the restaurant, finding Elvis already at the front desk flirting with the hostess and slipping her his number, Mont asked me to feel the paint of the Charlotte Inn’s porch and see how it was so smooth and glowed in the moonlight. There were moments of sidewalk on the way back that popped up out of the flat brick and he pointed them out to me in the dark as we walked behind the others in a long train, Elvis up at the front with his mother Linda, the man of the family. Monty looked proud of himself and his family and where he was. But there seemed to be something sad sunken below his features, like he didn’t earn it the way he had wanted to, with his own hands. He was one of those men whom you feared most when they fell suddenly silent or sad-looking.
“Elvis told me they retired your badge in Brooklyn,” I said.
“Oh sure. Anyhow.”
Elvis’s sisters and their friends arrived while we were gone and we met up with them in the living room and smoked the “latest innovation in Californian technology.” Caleb provided it, one of the friends who was a producer in LA whom the sisters kept whispering to me about, and whom Elvis had already prepped me on. He was tall as me, muscular and handsome in a crushed velvet suit jacket. Everything he said was phrased in PR-speak, and he kept pushing on us these weed pens like he was taking a cut, the “latest innovation in Californian technology.”
Then like some bourgeois nightmare Elvis and I watched as the boathouse where we had spent so many nights smoking and playing darts became infested with suited, late-20s frat heirs. With all of our disdain summoned, Elvis and I won at games of cups even though we didn’t get drunk that way at our school and around 2 am, watching Elvis kayak one of his sister’s friends across the harbor toward Chappy, I nearly cried seeing him disappear into the blackness of the night I was so drunk and the dark wrapping him so whole.
Caleb asked, “You think he’ll make it back?” and I said, “If he’s worth his salt he will,” and I said it knowing he would make it back appearing in the strands of light coming from the ferry and the tall lights from the masts of the sailboats and the water running across the lights, and that was the beauty in saying it, knowing the outcome to a promise you begin with “if.”
I kept my brow furrowed at the darkness. And then, almost as if I had conjured him out of the darkness, Elvis came back into the light. I helped him haul the kayak onto the beach and everyone applauded him and went back inside the boathouse and I found myself properly wasted and peeing into his garden standing on the concrete corner of his pool. He was skinny dipping and told me to come in but I was warm in my dinner jacket and had gotten so many looks from the women in town and in Elvis’s boathouse that I had no desire to ever get out of it, even now that we were alone. I enjoyed the acting role I had affected for the night in front of these people. I had them enthralled wondering who I was the son of, what my father’s enterprise was. Someone had even said I was stunning, but it was maybe just Chris or Caleb halfjoking, I couldn’t remember.
But eventually I stripped down and went in. I felt so free and clean breastroking in the saltwater pool. We started swimming across the length of the pool at the same time and then slowly sped into an all out race where I outswam him to show that I was the faster and stronger swimmer. We playargued about who was faster all week and I think Elvis had started to believe it was actually him. He refused to remember the time I beat him across the lake at Londonberry and I felt I still had to draw even for him drafting me and beating me in the sprint earlier on the bikes.
Afterwards, in the outdoor shower, he cupped his palms below the water and his hands were white with it.
Upstairs Caleb was sitting elegantly wasted on the couch with Elvis’s brother Jamie asleep on the other side, sobering up before driving back to his farm in Vineyard Haven that ran all the way out to a private strip of South Beach. Elvis and I sat in our towels next to him, sharing several rounds of his vape pen. The latest in Californian design.
“Caleb man, how many girls do you bag a week?” Elvis asked.
“Oh man, anywhere from 5-8.”
I was gone for sure, but even that seemed a quirky range.
“Wow man,” Elvis said innocently. “Tell us. What are the girls like in LA?”
“Oh man, incredible. On my sets I get the most beautiful girls. If we’re shooting something that needs women, I call up all the models I know and I’m just like, ‘Come through,’ and then I’m just surrounded all day by these beautiful women. All day. Instagram models man.”
“Wow. How do you get all these girls man?”
“The key is just staying fit and confident, and then they love you. They love you. And smile a lot. Get a good smile. You guys have good smiles. A good smile means I’m successful and I’m approachable, and I want to share that with you.”
Caleb did have a good smile, and he shared it with us, pushing his mouth up against his cheekbones and putting his eyes into crescents.
“Wow. So, do you think I should be working out more?” Elvis asked, jokingly puffing out his chest, sucking in his stomach, gasping for breath.
“Yeah, your pecs are ok. This guy over here has the perfect frame.” He gestured toward me and smiled. His blue eyes could hardly open from the smoking.
“You think so?”
“Yeah man, you’d be killing it in LA. You have the perfect body, you just need more muscle. You could be dating a Sport’s Illustrated model.”
“No.”
“Yeah man. Both of you. I remember your girlfriend from last summer Elvis. Ashanti, right? Very nice.”
“Astana.”
“Right man, Astana, very nice.”
“Aren’t you dating a Sports Illustrated model Caleb?” Elvis asked.
“Yeah. I just broke up with her though. All she was interested in was my money. She came up to me one week and was just like,” he pitched his voice up, “‘So my mom and I looked over your Instagram, and you seem really successful and ready for a commitment. Let’s do this.’”
“Woah. Like, marriage?” Elvis clarified.
“Yeah.” He took a hit. “I guess Victoria’s Secret’s my next goal,” he said, his vape pen greening in his mouth. “I wanna be in love.”
Elvis had taken the queen bed off its frame in his room and put it on the floor because he preferred sleeping down there. All the other beds in the five story house were taken by family and friends, so his mother and aunt put a big king-sized blow-up mattress on Elvis’s frame, three-feet tall, complete with sheets and blankets and pillows thinking I’d sleep on it. I didn’t know they made blow-up mattresses that big. Elvis and I laughed at it and never touched it, instead sleeping together as we’d always done like proper bosom buddies in his bed, staying close for warmth with the central air set to 62 degrees by his sister and brother’s girlfriend across the hall, waking up and exchanging little dreamwords. As we drifted closer to sleep, sometimes it even felt like we were talking to each other in our heads and then answering out loud.
That night, I don’t know how it happened because I thought I was drunk enough not to dream, but I dreamt I was holding Her body against mine in bed and saying to Her, “You’re so cold,” and She with Her eyes shut in their orange lids saying to me, “I know. I’m tired Adam,” Her words little vocables precipitating out of whatever it was that was happening in Her head lying on the cot, as if there were a longer process to dying than just the heart stopping; as if the last precipitation of the dying came those days after, out of the deepest sleep, out of It; as if she could somehow share the knowledge even after. Or maybe it was what She would have said to me if She was even half there on the cot, “I know, I know.” It might have helped.
I woke up for a moment and touched the wet of my eyes and went back into nothing.
I woke up again not long after in a panic. I could not remember how Her lips felt against mine. I laid in the darkness panicking to remember. I tried to clear my mind and wait for it to come to me, for the feeling to come to my lips. But it doesn’t come straight to your lips and it is hard to remember Her warm lips, the lips that kissed you back, the warm cheek that yielded to your mouth when you have kissed the cold, the stiff lips, held Her cheeks that are not the same soft, not the same warm. You see the undertakers have shaved the little blondish hairs She had on Her upper lip but left Her eyebrows how they were, the little hairs trailing off the sides, plucked in the middle, exactly how you remember Her. Not a body and not a statue but something in between. You put your forehead to Hers and rub your nose against Her nose as gently as you did when She slept or when you were helping to bring Her into sleep with your lips. The eyelids are still soft and Her eyes feel alive somehow. This makes you happy, but you forget to touch Her ears before you leave the funeral home, or you have, maybe you have, yes you have, but you forget already how the earlobes felt when you rubbed them gently between your thumb and index finger so you stand around waiting and avoid looking at any reflection of your face in mirrors or glass for an hour while the others sit with Her except you look once once, and not in the eyes, you can’t look into your own eyes but you look just to know what your face looks like at a moment like this because the reflection of Her eyes cannot give yours back and you cannot show Her what She looks like, when She stared deep into your eyes to look, and when you go in again you feel Her earlobes once more with your fingers. Once you have kissed Her again your lips feel dead, and cold, and this feeling travels through your mouth. It closes your throat and makes it feel more numb than you were aware you could feel. It travels down to your chest and you cannot feel your heart. You do not realize that all this time you’ve been living that you’ve felt your heart inside your chest and felt each of your breaths trailed by another. But now it feels empty and cold and you feel nothing, and since you cannot actually feel nothing you are just aware of this nothing inside of you. This little nothing traveling and dispersing inside. The absence surrounded. You do not know where it ends up but this is when you know She is not in Her body anymore, you know She is gone somewhere else and yet you cannot stop looking at Her face, kissing Her lips. You have no control where your hand goes, from your forehead to your eyes, from your cheek to your mouth, all wet with the tears’ traces. She is not in Her body. You are brought along by something which is utterly you that you have not felt before, a kind of hand emerging from within, as if waiting, formally and eternally recused since the blurred unreal of childhood but now commenced again, a hand which leads the mind that is more entangled with it than you knew, the hand of clarity, and it helps you remember those times lying with Her in your bed, when you tried to slip out because you had had to pee for hours and hours and She grabs you in Her sleep, tightens Her hold on you. You slip Her hand off and She hugs you harder. You wait and you slip Her hand off again and you are almost out and Her sleeping body senses It is not as close to you as It wants to be and Her warm thigh comes over you now. Before the thigh was over your leg, then between your legs, now it is over your waist, and you stop and you think ‘If we could just lie this way forever’ and you believe you can, you’re already doing it, and you kiss Her forehead, Her sweet forehead and Her lips come up to you in sleep and you kiss them and then you remember how Her lips feel. Then you lie there in the dark and you remember how Her lips feel.
Associated Press, Thursday December 22nd 2016
LONDONBERRY, Vt. – Vermont State Police say investigators have confirmed that a body found in the waters of a Dorset quarry is that of a missing Londonberry College student.
Police say the cause of death of 21-year-old Ajjul Wafa was drowning and the manner of death is pending. Divers found the body Wednesday.
On Saturday Wafa left a residence where she was staying and did not return. She was reported missing on Sunday and her car was later found at the quarry.
Divers had nearly finished their three-day sweep of the quarry when a detective spotted an irregularity in the ice consistent with the size of Wafa’s waist and what appeared to be a body “in the fetal position” some feet below.
Investigators said that the warm temperatures of the last few days had helped melt the snow on the ice’s surface and reveal irregularities in the ice to the topographical view.
The consistency of the hole to Wafa’s waist indicates that she may have entered the water feet first.
The next day Elvis and I woke up God knows how for the sunrise and drove to Gayhead, even though it was really the sunset you wanted to see in Gayhead and the sunrise over here in Edgartown. Standing on the nude beach in the blue unpaling of sky the sun rose behind our backs like a big billowing mess and parts of the cliff looked like a womb you could climb back through, and the whole world felt like it was reversing by rising at all. It didn’t feel right, it was that kind of uncomfortable beauty that you can’t look away from.
We ran out of gas on the way back and sat at the gas station for an hour waiting for it to open and talked about the night before.
“Your sister’s friend Hampton is dead,” I said.
“Fully is. He’s the deadest guy I know. All of them are. Especially Chris. He’s the deadest one.”
“I liked that guy John though.”
“John is dead bru.”
I consented. “100 p bru.”
Once the station opened Elvis gave me his card for the gas, officially establishing a line of credit between us as my funds which had recently improved from the negatives to the status of permanent depletion. There was a pulse to my bank account, but just barely. Afterwards, we stopped at the 7A Sandwhich Shop and he bought me one called the Liz Lemon. Everyone on the island put lemon on everything. And sesame. And ate very small portions. But the sandwiches at 7A were huge and greasy and felt more like home and my stomach welcomed it.
“Who the fuck names their kid Hampton? Or Bantam? I mean, I played Bantam hockey, but…”
“On the C team right?”
“Oh sure,” I said.
“And Chad Windchill. What kinda name is that?” Elvis scoffed.
“Windchill… I don’t think I met him last night.”
“Ah. A shame.”
“But I felt him. I felt Windchill,” I said, getting it was a joke. “You meet Hilton Clause? He was pretty sick. I liked that guy.”
“Yeah, I think so. Friends with Tommy Chalant right?” Elvis was quick.
“Riiight. I think his dad produced the first Dusty Saunders LP or something.”
“Dusty Saunders, right. He played with Dicky Reed, Live at the Greek, right?”
“Yeah. Killer album. You have a signed copy of that back at school don’t you?”
“Course. Given to me by Glenn Verr Klempt. Old family friend from Belgium.”
We had nothing else to do so we went back to the beach. A whole load of fog had settled in out of nowhere and the waves had grown taller than our heads. We walked down through the fog and sat as naked as the rocks themselves and painted our bodies in the pigment of the cliffs thick as oil paint and read a sign later that said we weren’t allowed to. We saw faces in the cliffs, real Native American faces with their eyes closed to the sea that, by slowly eating them off their beach, was eroding their features into a last and final relief.
There was a giant rock out in the water that looked like it was moving, sailing through the waves. It must have been twenty feet tall, but a part of it was carved as if to make a seat for a giant and we swam out to it and raced each other to try to hoist up on it and sit as long as we could before the waves threw us off. We didn’t speak, we just did it like it was a game we’d played our whole lives, and we stopped only when we were breathless.
I couldn’t help but think of Chappaquidick and Gay Head as the sight of a great seaside Western. During World War II there were forts out on Aquinnah, and bombers would practice strikes with live bombs off Noman’s Island and Chappaquidick. To this day Noman’s, which lies right off Gay Head, cannot be beached upon or sailed too close for fear of unexploded ordnance in the water, or dredging up in the sand like fossils. Bombs being immortal wombs of destruction outliving their maker.
Elvis and I didn’t speak for about an hour and a half, but when we did again I thought I heard my voice in his.
We drove back sharing some sunwarmed rosé. Elvis parked at the Chappy ferry and I went into the hut to get my check. I was hoping not to run into anyone reeking of alcohol but there was Brock and a young girl.
“Adam, this is Rosie.”
“Hi there Rosie.” Rosie looked about thirteen years old.
“My daughter.”
“Pleasure to meet you Rosie,” I said, shaking her hand. She was wearing a huge backpack of gear, her hands proudly holding the straps. “You’re moving Brock out or what?”
“Not yet,” Rosie joked. I was impressed by this response. She was very plain looking in a very sweet, touching way. You couldn’t quite tell which way her face would go in the coming years.
“I ain’t that old yet,” smiled Brock. “She’s camping the night on Chappy.”
“Wow, look at you.”
“Not that crazy, I do it all the time.”
“It’s true,” said Brock.
“Well I wish you luck Rosie. Not cuz it’s scary over there but cuz you gotta deal with your dad ferry you over.”
“Yeah, I’ll be white knuckling the whole way over.”
“Aren’t you funny,” I smiled. “Hope to see you soon, Rosie. Brock,” I said, saluting him with my check as I left.
After jumping from Elvis’s dock into the harbor water mixed slightly with gasoline and showering, we got into another bottle and met his sisters Laura and Michelle and brother Jamie and their other friends at the Kelly House. They all had a boyfriend or girlfriend with them except for the oldest sister Laura, who was single. They all loved Elvis with a sweet affection, and besides his name which stood out so strongly amongst the Anglo sea, including my own, it was clear he was different, he was the family and friend’s favorite, he was rare and unlike anyone. But many times they did not understand Elvis, purposefully it seemed.
I spent the whole night answering questions by saying “Oh sure” in the most nonchalant way possible, like Elvis’s grandfather had done to me, and joined Laura in saying “Boy George” instead of “by George,” and “the sheer size of it” in reference to anything at all, a plate of food, or Jamie’s new Yeezy’s, anything, and they became great running jokes that week and the only personality or pose I felt confident striking at the parties to endear myself. My character was taking shape. No one doubted I was anything but one of those “different” wealthy kids who congregate at far out colleges like Londonberry.
Walking out of the Kelly House, one of us must have stepped on a pop-rock or something of the sort because there was a bang at the ground and a blue ball passed muddily over our vision.
“By George, what was that!” Laura yelled. But we had too much drunk momentum to stop and give it much of an acknowledgement, and treated the blue ball as a little blip we collectively decided to zoom past or not register. It felt like I had simply scraped the heel of the 600 dollar Bally shoes I got for five dollars against the pavement and elicited the spark.
Then, for a moment, I thought I smelled Her perfume. But the street was so packed with people in dresses and Vineyard Vines regalia and tourists trying to match the wealthy color palette that I could not locate it and I let it go.
Later that night there was a surprise birthday party across the harbor in Chappy for Chris. Elvis and I smoked a bit in the boathouse before leaving, our last stronghold on his property, listening to Cat Steven’s Trouble on repeat until we couldn’t listen to it anymore. Then we played the Supreme’s Run Run Run three or four times, and I kept dropping the needle back at the beginning because I loved how the song falls into the first chorus, and how fast the piano sounds in the background, “You better run-run run-run run run.” The whole harbor looked like it was twinkling along to the music, all the distant lights of the yachts glittering in the darkening sky.
Afterwards we kayaked over, sobering a bit going across the harbor, lucky for me as I had begun feeling my voice start to untether in the boathouse, slipping a few levels into the brass while I stood staring into the reflection of Mayflower and its chimney rising above the fifth floor through a pane of glass in the boathouse door, mistaking it for the head and shoulders of a person. But the ocean has a way of sobering you, of prolonging you, evening you to itself and we passed along to the gentle sounds of our paddles.
We stopped at a massive yacht anchored a little ways off Chris’s beach and touched the side of it with our hands.
“Imagine, some alarm starts going off.” Elvis rubbed his hand on the boat and made a face, biting his lower lip and scrunching up his nose like he was deep into a flirt with it, trying it on with it.
When we got to Chris’s private shore we hauled the kayak in the dark, judging the tide to be going out, and walked through the private dunes and the cold sand toward the house which was the only focal point of light we could see in the night. Sand, sea and sky all bound in one color.
We sat for awhile with Elvis’ siblings on the deck of the three-story “cottage,” as they called it. Everyone was in suits or button-up shirts and dresses except Elvis and I, who were barefoot. I didn’t want to drink too much more but Elvis’s little brother Jamie and his girlfriend Serena kept making me dark and stormy’s and talking about how funny Caleb was being, quoting some new meme or slang in an Australian accent that I hadn’t heard before, but was desperate to work into my actor’s epertoire:
“Caleb over there, he’s beached as,” Jamie said. “As” was pronounced, “iz.”
“He’s funny iz,” said Serena
“Jamie bru, you’re stoned iz aren’t you bru?” I said.
“Oh sure,” he smiled.
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