Still Soft With Sleep - Part 1, Chapter 4
by Vincenzo Barney
Welcome back, readers, as we resume serializing our second quarterly Contest winner’s novel, Vincenzo Barney’s Still Soft With Sleep. Catch up with the opening 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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World was in the face of the beloved,
but suddenly it poured out and was gone:
world is outside, world cannot be grasped.
Why didn’t I, from the full, beloved face
as I raised it to my lips, why didn’t I drink
world, so near that I could almost taste it?
—Rainer Maria Rilke
Keep those tears hid out of sight.
—Mick Jagger
⚬─────────✧─────────⚬
The last crossing of my shift we picked up a statie from Chappy and he rode alone on the ferry. I let him and Jill talk alone at his window and kept my eyes on the glitter of the harbor and the impatient center consoles trying to cross my path. I had driven my strength up the high vertical wall of my fatigue and the whole shift at the helm of the ferry passed as one vivid hour. But now as my body neared the end of its mission the bottom began falling out and I felt the possibility of collapse. After the statie drove off and our replacements boarded the ferry I stood Jill a drink at the Atlantic.
She told me how Rosie was in her tent past midnight nudged into Cape Poge and how a light rain had come and I remembered that rain as a soft mist on my face the night before and she told how the bullet struck her softly in the rain. She had been found by a beachcomber this morning with her hands around the rim of the entry wound in her forehead. It had gone straight through whatever dream she’d been having, whatever fantasy or memory she’d been playing with and coloring, and she’d had enough time after being shot to put her little hands around it, feel the dream draw away through her fingertips. I thought about that under the surface of Jill’s conversation, how there was enough awareness and curiosity in that second to probe one’s fatal wound.
It was here Jill cried and I stood from my stool and hugged her. If for the last few months I’d been unable to cry while awake I knew as I choked my own tears back now I’d forfeited my ability to cry for at least as long. For I was not tamping down the pain of the moment but was drawing back several zones and gulfs before it.
“Have you seen Brock?”
“I can’t go there, Adam,” she said. She was done crying in front of me and waved this question away weakly. Her wet eyes looked such like a little girl’s when I sat back across from her and I ordered us another drink. I was now easing my leftover drunkenness from the night before just as it tilted into its delayed hangover.
Brock loomed large in my mind. The death of Rosie magnified him, like a mountain with the sun setting behind it. The contours of all that pain and all that was possible to him now glowed. There was the realization that nothing now could be denied him. If he knew who did it then destiny would come in on the wave to Chris’s feet. The law would come in later but they’d be punishing the wave, they’d be tampering with something outside of the law. Even the statie knew this. The mood he gave off was not of sadness but of a man’s tension in knowing there was someone new on his island who had every right to be killed, and yet he’d have to arrest the man who did it. He’d have to arrest Brock.
It would be so simple to tell Jill, but Elvis’s prints being on the gun were a complication that opened a door I didn’t think I’d ever have to decide about walking through. It was not a choice. Jill rose to go drive to Brock and I paid for the drinks and walked back to Mayflower with the odd sensation of a corridor opening up to me. For a moment, in that first step over the sill, anything felt possible, like I might arrive at the house and be told by startled faces that there’d never been an Elvis Gavin, that they didn’t know who I was. That I was wanted for the murder of Rosie Hallet. But this was the limbo before you get your second foot through the doorway. I put that wiggle room, that brief moment when you can refuse the corridor, back down from your courage to face the invisible rim and see reality to its new boundary, but once you chose it there was no turning around and finding the door again. Crossing it was an act of erasure. Each step now was an ante taking me away from Jill, and I knew now I’d be in it for each hand until I couldn’t measure the size of the bet.
I couldn’t say that I wasn’t afraid but the fear and the anxiety came now from a purer place not far from the bottom of the sea, not the familiar boundaries but from the endless steps below it like harp strings stretched all the way to the seafloor and the faint currents of an early storm were plucking them as the seas picked up. I felt fear but the danger of the fear withdrew, as I was now in a situation where something larger than danger was at hazard. I had a storm to sail through, and there was clarity and purpose in knowing there was no going back, there was only facing it down and this calmed me. Deepening into concentration, I knew a moment would come. Elvis’s prints were on the gun.
“Boy George, Adam, you’re back just in time!” This was Laura, at the head of a mass exodus of Gavins headed for Lighthouse Beach. “Get your speedo on and come down to the beach.”
I saw in their faces no indication they’d heard of the killing. It was too early for the radio or the local paper. I gave Laura some of our repartee. “Ah, I wish but I’m tired from work. I’m gonna go have a delicious little nap.”
She laughed and I saw I’d coined a new one. I tip-toed inside Mayflower where house workers had begun doing something arbitrary and breathtakingly loud to the walls and Chelsea stood barking at their feet. Elvis’s little brother Jamie and his girlfriend Serena were shifting in each other’s arms on the large couch, just waking up now from the party last night. From each other’s arms they asked if I’d drive them to the Boathouse, their country club which Elvis had never brought me to. I thought then of Elvis. If there had been times that summer where the boundary between our own minds had been blurred I tried to reach to him now. Already a sliver had opened up between us on my walk back from the ferry and I thought only of keeping him in Eden as long as possible.
I parked the Porsche in the sea shells and Jamie led me through the portico and the hydrangeas down to the changing room. Chris’s father came out of a racquetball court in all white and Jamie smiled and greeted him.
“Hey Mr. McConnel. Congratulations, I heard you’re getting the Tip O’Neill Award.”
“Yeah. Thanks.”
“Good stuff.”
“Yeah, good stuff.”
“Congratulations,” I said.
“We’re done with this court if you want it.”
“Oh thanks. But I’m not great at racquetball.”
“I’m here everyday at noon to play. Come down some time and I’ll give you lessons.”
“Thanks Mr. McConnel.”
I knew from Jill that no one had calculated a bullet trajectory yet. I wondered just how precise they could be with it. Would they walk the path through the woods straight to Frank’s and ask to search a billionaire’s house? I doubted it. I hated his face. It had more character than his son’s. The nose sharper, the face narrower, while Chris’ was chubby, undefined. His narrow face had married a woman soft enough to fall into and Chris’ son came out with the mother’s heft from which he tried to rescue his father’s ego. Frank’s was a sneaky face. It was a face that used silence to mask emptiness, and this silence then to project power. He could have been a coward as a child. Or a dickhead, a born tool. But for the coward, even if they are an evil coward, there are seams you can see them fall apart at, you can see them pinch and wedge and pull against themselves and I couldn’t read this in him. If his face had any gravity at all it was because it was simply old. If Chris wanted any shot at being handsome he had better get old quick. He had better get off this island and hide somewhere and get old.
McConnel’s partner came out of the court sweating, throwing around much more personality than him. I’d learned you could measure personality by drop in net worth. The less personality you had the more you could profit, as if cold character and lack of personality opened a vacuum into others’ pockets.
“Ned, this is Jamie Gavin.”
“Ed’s boy! And so you must be Elvis.” He shook our hands.
“No, I’m Elvis’s friend, Adam.”
“Ah I see.” He wiped his face hurriedly with his towel. Here was a much better face, a face that moved. It was overweight but it was friendly. You could look at it across a drink without getting spooked. “How’re you doing?” he asked Jamie. “How’s your mother. I don’t think I’ve seen her since the funeral.”
“She’s good. She’s good.”
“Strong woman. Tell her Ned Flannery says hi. I’d love to have her over sometime when Susanne’s back. You two playing racquetball? Court’s all yours.”
“No no, just hitting the gym. We don’t play.”
“Come by tomorrow around noon, we’ll teach you.”
We nudged past each other and said goodbye and Jamie brought me to the changing room. “About to get swoll iz, bru,” he smiled. Jamie changed into his gym clothes and went upstairs and I undressed and went outside into the hot tub. I was alone under a large awning and there were children playing around a large fountain on the other side of the fence. I laid on my back with my eyes closed and felt like I was going to throw up. The heat answered to some resonance of nausea within me and it came to the surface of my stomach and my lungs and my throat and burned off.
Underneath the nausea the colors of the past were deepening. The colors of the present were now of the same hue and they were blending into each other. Death is a creation and you have to take some gift from it or it will put a very dark hole in your heart, and day by day this hole will start stealing from you. Involuntary as a dream it comes upon you, all its events and feelings too incisive to form in the brightness of the day, but then it spills into your day, into your week, your month. Your winter and spring. Just as in a dream the moment you start trying to grasp it, hold onto it, remember it, record it, make it last a little longer, it fades. The second you become aware of the dream the dream ends. It will not be made to be voluntary. And so first I mourned Her and then I began to mourn the mourning.
For the mourning state is sacred. It makes this known through its own laws. Its strange waves and eerie tides. You cannot ask a wave to be any different than it is, you can only take it at the right angle. One lives in a state set apart from the world with a deadly clarity about reality, about the soul. One finally knows who they are and the world permits this, it permits you to walk around naked without your mask. It is like people are watching someone continually be born: there is no judgement when the newborn cries, when their faces are smeared in blood. There is no judgement at their nakedness. People deny nothing to creation when it comes. But eventually the world expects you to come back, even though you’ve touched Heaven. Your pain has searched the last routes into the nerves of Her last feeling. You have felt a little string attached from your soul to Hers and occasionally you feel it nudge and tug and you don’t know if it is Her or the wind, you cannot tell if the weight in it is from its growing length of the string or from Her at the other end, and new muscles form around the tugs, quick-twitch muscles to sense the slightest movement. But then you and the mourning state work together to destroy it. You begin to covet it and destroy it and mourning itself must follow its mysterious tides. It had been your only way to touch Her and you panic because you realize you will not be able to stop drifting from Her. It had put you and Her in the same nimbus. Wherever She was you were breathing some of Her air, Heaven’s or nothingness, you couldn’t be sure. But one day the pain may not be so great and maybe you could think about loving again. This is what everyone tells you, that in concert with time you will betray Her. You cannot stop flowing away from each other and that is worse than your own death. But She had followed Her death into a darkness and I did not want that darkness for myself. I reached a point of the dark corridor in which I could not be shaped to fit. I followed Her darkness as long as there was ground to cover but what I could not see was whether She was in light on the other side of the darkness. I could not follow Her route just as I could not have arrived with her through the same womb. It was Her own death just as it was Her own birth.
I felt now, however, that I was reapproaching Her ground from another field of play. That clarity that death gives to the resonance of tides left over in the body, the great floodtide of growing in the wet belly, when we breathed in the sea. That deadly clarity of knowing when to be born. I felt the promise of the missing feeling. A promise of the old feeling. I felt everything that had waned, everything that had drifted away was now caught in an orbit that brought it back to circle the momentum of the path I was on. I had been staring across a great gulf which had drifted so slowly from me that I could not feel it going until it was out of reach and now fate had brought it to back to my feet and something worse than fear was waiting for me if I didn’t take the step across. But I had. I had taken it and I was across now and what I had to accept was that it would be involuntary from here on.
I met Jamie and Serena at the restaurant behind the gym and ordered a Dark and Stormy. Serena was more beautiful than I had realized and her face was putting me into a beautiful mood.
“How did you two meet?”
“Well,” said Jamie, “Serena used to get with one of my best friends, and then she started hooking up with one of my other best friends, so I guess that’s when I first heard of her.”
“Yeah, I guess he wanted to get in on it,” Serena said.
I choked on my drink, my second, and a little stream dribbled down my chin.
“So then I texted her -”
“No, you Snapchatted me. You said, ‘Hey, you’ve hooked up with two of my friends, we should be tight.’”
“I thought it was an Instagram DM,” Jamie said thoughtfully.
“Did you actually say that?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“21st Century love,” she smiled.
Chris had left his boat unattended on Elvis’s dock and I sat on a chair on the deck of the boathouse brooding on it, spinning an ice cube in my drink. The deck was the size of my living room at home, and from here the depth of the harbor flowing between the twin white columns of the deck made a natural sea stage, and Chappy in the background a kind of mythic backdrop, slowing being obstructed by the distant, competing heights of new yachts, bunching together for July 4th. I thought of the books I’d read on Near Death Experience, when the souls rise out of the bodies and look down on their loved ones in the room, trying to tell them how happy they were. Sometimes they follow the doctors out of the room to their offices, or travel to loved ones. I imagined Rosie now high above Chappaquiddick looking down at me. Had some particle of her mind followed me and Jill? I don’t know why I had thought of Brock as being so sad – he must be very angry. I felt his anger all the way from Chilmark.
“Are you Elvis?”
I turned around over the railing to the seagrass and dunes of Elvis’s shore. The workers had come down to the boathouse.
“No, I’m Adam. Elvis’s friend.”
“Oh, hi Mr. Adam. Do you mind if we take a look at the deck here?”
“No, not at all. Please.”
They stepped from around the side and between the white columns. But they dared not enter the actual deck, giving me an unnatural berth of about ten or fifteen feet. The leader pointed out two apparent blemishes in the wood and the paint tens of feet away. The two others listened, bending their heads down to the wood, angled away from my sight, trying hard to be ghosts to me.
“It must be getting late. Would you guys care for a drink or something?” I asked.
The leader smiled and waved his hand, bowing his head. “No, no. It’s ok.”
Then, instead of violating the bubble they made around me by stepping onto the deck and entering the already opened twin doors of the boathouse at my side, they went around the side and entered through the front door behind me. I thought it was Elvis for a moment because surely if it was them they would have entered through the open doors right in front of them. I turned around and they stared at me through the window, looking guilty and panicked. I smiled to let them know it was ok and turned back to Chris’s boat.
“I’ve come to rescue you,” a voice said behind me.
I turned around again, not expecting to be surprised in such quick tandem. It was Elvis with two sandwiches in his hand. He nodded to Chris’s boat and smiled. I smiled and we walked quickly towards it and I untied us from the cleats and pushed us from the dock.
“I thought you didn’t get back till like 7,” I said over the engine, the wind.
“I was supposed to, but the owner asked me to work till close, so he gave me a few hours break between.”
The harbor opened up to us and we found a natural path through the boats towards the distant line of Cape Cod and the smooth palm of the ocean. The rips, the standing waves, ringed the mouth of the horizon. I was curious just where Elvis was taking us, though not caring where at all.
When we were free of the harbor Elvis turned us towards Cape Poge, tucked inside of Chappy and well within the boundary of the rips. We beached ourselves inside the yellows and greens of the shore and the seagrass. I found a bottle of white wine and pesto in Chris’s cooler and presented them to Elvis.
“Just one drink for me. I’ve got to work.”
We were alone together again. When I turned the engine off the radio could be heard. “—passed away just past midnight. Hallet was only 12 years old.”
“Hallet. Wow, that’s a sick name. Hallet,” Elvis said.
And I felt my soul open into brilliant possibility.
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