Still Soft With Sleep - Part 1, Chapter 7
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:
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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 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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