Real Life(62)

“I don’t know,” he says, and then, “I just want to be alone in my apartment. I just want to sleep.”

“Fine,” Miller says. “Okay.”

Miller digs in the pockets of his cardigan. He extracts a pack of cigarettes and lights one, takes a long drag and exhales. He runs a hand through his hair.

“Fuck,” he says. “Fuck.”

“I’m not mad,” Wallace says.

“I know. It’s fine. I’m just fucked up over this.”

“Over what?”

“I don’t know, Wallace. Over you, over me, over the shit with Cole and Vincent. I don’t even want to go sailing. I just said that because of the drama.”

“I know. I figured. I mean, I’m sorry.”

“But I’ll go sailing,” he said, taking another drag. “I’ll go fucking sailing with Yngve and the others.”

“I can’t go, Miller.”

“I know you can’t. Will I see you later?” His voice is soft, low.

Wallace touches the edge of Miller’s cardigan, slides his hand inside its coarse knit, to the place where his skin is bare. “I don’t know, Miller. Maybe.”

“I need more than a maybe, Wallace,” he says, blowing smoke from the corner of his mouth. “I need something. A yes. A no. But more than a maybe.”

“Why do you want to see me anyway?”

“The weekend’s not over,” he says, smiling, but it’s that shy smile from before, the one that started all the trouble in the first place. Wallace looks away.

“Call me,” he says. “We’ll see.”

“I’ll take it,” Miller says, and he draws Wallace in for a hug. He smells like smoke and ashes, and also like oranges. Wallace wraps his arms around Miller’s waist, and he doesn’t make to leave. For all his talk of wanting to be alone, having been brought close to another person, he realizes that what he would like more than anything else is to be held. But he can’t bring himself to ask for that now, and knowing himself, he’d only change his mind later, would regret it the moment he got what he wanted.

“Well, I better go,” he says.

“So you say,” Miller says. Wallace laughs, and then steps backward out of Miller’s arms.

“See you,” he says.

“See you around.”

Wallace goes down the street, and every so often he looks back. Miller is there smoking each time, watching him. There are more people now. The sun is out. It’s bright. It’s hot. Eventually, it is impossible to discern Miller from all the other people crossing the street or walking toward and away from the capitol. Eventually, they are all just people going about their lives, shopping and eating, laughing and arguing, doing what people in the world do. This too is real life, he thinks. Not merely the accumulation of tasks, things to be done and sorted, but also the bumping up against other lives, everyone in the world insignificant when taken and observed together.

He stops on the corner and supports himself against the building there, closing his eyes. The world spins, shifts underfoot. The week is ahead of him, waiting, with all its demands, its structure, and soon enough another academic year will begin. If he advances toward it, marching ever closer, will it swallow him, till the sound of his weight traversing is absorbed into its bulk, his life no more discernible from the outside than the lives of others on the street are to him?

He would like to sleep for a long time, but there is lab, the nematodes, and so while he might go home, he knows that he must leave again. He pushes off from the building, gathers his strength, and points himself toward home—a little rest, he thinks, he’s earned that much.





7





A bird has flown into a window and lies dying on its back, Wallace discovers when he arrives at the biosciences building. The day is still cloudless, and the sky is an almost iridescent blue, the way it can be in late summer. The sight of the bird startles him. He has retained a fear of birds since childhood. This is one of those vague Midwestern birds, gray with a white belly. Its head is nearly crushed down inside its body, and its long dark legs are like twigs from certain bushes. Occasionally, its wings spasm open. A thread of dark ants already stretches from a nearby bench to the bird, and Wallace knows, without thinking too hard, what will happen next.

This reemergence of death in this immaculate city of the North—the suddenness of it jolts him almost as much as the bird itself. He cannot remember the last time he actually saw something die, not counting the worms he burns at the end of the titanium wire. How long has it been since he came across such a clear and present illustration of the order of things, of life ending, moving on? Long enough to have grown comfortable with death happening elsewhere, off in the margins. Or perhaps he’s making too much of it, imbuing the moment with more significance than it warrants, in the wake of all he told Miller about Alabama.

How did his father look at the hour of his death? Or later, at the funeral? Was he buried on a day like this? No, it must have been warmer, surely, in Alabama, at the height of the heat, the crying cicadas. Wallace breathes, turns. He hops up the steps and enters the building. Enough, he thinks.

The familiar rattle of the machines greets him, and he relaxes. It’s dry and cool indoors; he feels the humid tent of his sweater begin to dry. He takes the elevator to the third floor, lets his fingers glide along the wooden railing as he walks past the balcony. Down below, a field of purple tiles depicting the molecular structures of various sugars and biomolecules. There is an error down there somewhere, a carbon with five bonds—a Texas carbon, they call it, after the points on the star on the flag of Texas. Someone pointed it out to him during orientation, and he strained to see it, squinting while the others merely laughed and shrugged. They didn’t need to see to get the joke. Someone had to explain it to him later: because five bonds on a carbon is impossible. He smiled, nodded. Of course: A carbon can make four bonds, not more. He knew this. He had learned it in chemistry.