Still Soft With Sleep - Part 1, Chapter 5
by Vincenzo Barney
We resume serializing our second quarterly Contest winner’s novel, Vincenzo Barney’s Still Soft With Sleep. Catch up with the previous chapters here:
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.
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.”
 | A guest post by
|