Real Life(51)

6





When Wallace wakes alone in Miller’s bed a little before midnight, all he can say is, “Fair enough.”

Miller’s room is dark except for the indistinct blue haze coming from a tangled cluster of string lights on the floor. There’s a dense clump of hurt below his belly, pressing against his back. His bladder. The sleep has been partial and rough. His face is swollen from pressing into the pillow. He can smell Miller’s sweat. The room is cool from the fan in the window. The voices on the lawn are gone. There are no voices in the hall. A fine crack rings the upper edge of the wall, near the close, white, angled ceiling. There is a skylight there, a trapezoid of deeper black, a few caught leaves flattened to its corners. These old houses—the words spring to mind like a bit of old music, a line dredged up from the holiday party at Simone’s house the previous year, Henrik’s last year.

He and Henrik had been sent down into the basement to retrieve chairs. Simone stood at the top of the stairs, watching the two of them move into and out of the pool of light at the base, stacking the chairs. Henrik had been drinking gin already, and his lips were red. His eyes were a little pink. Wallace could smell the piney scent on him. At one point they both stepped out of the light into the shadow at the same moment and reached for the same chair, and their hands brushed low over its base. Henrik grunted, and Wallace drew back stiffly. Henrik lifted the chair in one smooth move and he motioned with his chin to the far wall, deeper into the shadow under the stairs, where there was a faint, barely discernible crack running through the concrete. These old houses, he said. They’ve got shitty foundations. Which at the time had not made sense to Wallace, because how did a thing with a shitty foundation get to be old? He thought about it as they climbed the stairs together over and over, carrying two chairs at a time, and each time the stairs creaked or threatened to give way under their weight; he thought about it until it became a kind of song. These old houses. Henrik’s last party. Henrik’s last year. These old houses.

Wallace gets up to piss. He draws Miller’s flannel around his shoulders. They get cold, these old houses, Wallace thinks. On the landing, he presses close to the railing and waits. The front hall is dark. The kitchen is dark. But the silence is not perfect. He can make out the soft scratch of the edge of whispers. Not the words, but the impression of sound pressing against the air. He is not alone. It makes sense, after all, that Miller would still be in the house. And Yngve. People live here. Their lives go on. He has not been left entirely alone. The incompleteness of his abandonment makes him want to laugh a little, but he also feels the curious, inverted sweep of vertigo. The shame of having given away too much of himself, and to Miller of all people. The reflexive desire to seek cover, to hide, flashes through him. There was a time—running up to Friday, even—when giving so much of himself away would have been a fatal mistake. He would have had to live the rest of his time in graduate school fearing reprisal, fearing having it sprung on him at odd turns, strange moments, always having to peer around the corner just to make sure. There was a time when Wallace would have trusted this suspicious streak in his nature, would have trusted it to keep him safe, but he had done a stupid thing, has done a stupid thing, in telling Miller all of this about himself, and so all he has is hope, and he has never been a person who can depend on hope.

The bathroom is clean, full of wicker and white, like a bathroom in some beach town. He pisses with the blanket wrapped around his shoulders, smelling like Miller, and he watches the water in the bowl turn yellow. The stink of urine, too much coffee, the smell of ammonia. He rinses his hands, pulls the blanket back around him, and then he descends the stairs.

In the air: musk and burning pine. Thin blue vapor. At the edge of the doorway, he sees them sitting on the kitchen floor. The piercing red glow of an electronic cigarette. The back door cracked. Miller’s and Yngve’s long legs stretched out past each other. Miller with his back against the low cabinets. Yngve with his back against the wall. They pass the vape pen back and forth, each taking his time, the one not smoking looking out the door into the night, where the blankets are still strewn across the grass, getting damp. Yngve and Miller, they look like brothers this way, except that Yngve’s face is angular, sharp, and his body’s got a boxy quality, like he was cut from a piece of thick leather. Miller is softer, that stupid curl in his hair, the baby fat of his cheeks and his jaw. They’re talking about the boats, but what about them Wallace cannot tell, either because he lacks the knowledge or because they are quiet, or maybe it’s both. But he’s desperate to know, gripping the edge of the door so tight his nails ache. He needs to know what they are talking about because he is afraid—the rising chill at the nape of his neck, the heat of blood in his nose—that they are talking about him. His senses sharpen. The smell of grease from dinner. The tinny drip of water into the basin sink. The hiss of the resin as it burns, as the plant matter in the vape pen congeals. He can smell the heat. He can taste it on the tip of his tongue. And he watches the slow, dark motion of their mouths, their eyes turning toward each other, glinting, and Wallace takes that fatal step forward, the floor underneath him groans, and there, just before Yngve turns to him, Wallace watches a ripple of muscle up his neck, a sign that surely his head will turn, and on Miller’s face, a momentary beat at the hollow of his throat. In that moment, Wallace sees it all, the whole world, deepened and shaded, can feel them, can hear them, knows even before they do what action, what motion will come next, and he steadies himself. Prepares himself for it.