Real Life(80)

Weightless, Wallace feels unmoored, out of control, but he wills himself to float. Miller takes his wrists, wet and hard. He pulls Wallace close to him. He wraps his arms around Wallace and tells him to breathe, to feel himself getting lighter and lighter until he is nothing at all.

Wallace floats on his back. Occasionally, waves cover his mouth and nose and he panics, feels as though he’ll drown, but Miller holds him steady, his smile easy.

The water feels slimy, like they’re in the mouth of some enormous organism, its waves like a thousand teeth eating the shore.

“I used to pretend that I was in the whale that ate Jonah,” Miller says, floating next to Wallace. “I’d swim and pretend I was in the belly of a whale.”

“That’s kind of how it sounds,” Wallace says, the water echoing in his ears.

“It does,” Miller says. “When you’re in the belly of a whale, nothing else matters. The whole universe could explode, and you wouldn’t know. You’re already in a different universe, I guess.”

“I used to get scared when I thought about the Red Sea parting,” Wallace says. “I don’t know why, but when they told that story in church at Easter, I always got scared and sad. Something awful about so much water just hanging over your head.”

“I imagine so,” Miller says.

“And then it all comes down. Those soldiers who were chasing the Jews, they got drowned in the water.”

“They did.”

“When they tried to baptize me when I was little, I was so afraid of that—being drowned, like in Exodus—that I cried and cried and fought and eventually they just gave up.”

“You weren’t baptized?”

“No,” Wallace says. “Everyone but me.”

“Do you believe in God?”

“Me? No. Well. No, I guess not. Not anymore.”

“Science is kind of like God,” Miller says.

Wallace is silent on that score. Instead, he asks, “Why did you want to bring me out here?”

“Because I wanted to be inside something else, I think.”

“Other than my apartment, you mean?”

“Yes. It was getting suffocating in there. I guess I just needed to be in something bigger.”

“I go to the roof.”

“What do you mean?”

Wallace turns to him in the water, but loses his balance, plunges down beneath the surface. Below, the world is green and black. There are algae blooming all along the arms of the pier, and just under the water there is a rust-colored film. Miller pulls him up and Wallace breathes, his lungs filling with air.

“Oh,” he says.

“Be careful,” Miller says sternly. “Don’t die.”

“I’ll try not to,” Wallace says, wiping water from his eyes.

“What did you mean, before, about the roof?”

Wallace coughs up lake water and shakes his head to clear his ears.

“I meant, when I feel like everything is closing in, I go to the roof of my building.”

Miller nods thoughtfully, then asks quietly, “Will you take me there?”

“Okay,” Wallace says. “All right.”



* * *



? ? ?

IN SOGGY SHOES and dripping clothes, they make their way back across the street and into the building. They get into the elevator smelling strongly like the lake water and algae. The elevator smells like beer and grease. Miller’s eyes are red, from fatigue or the lake or both. They’re holding hands, dripping onto the dark carpet. Up they go, against gravity. They emerge into a world that is more silver than gray. Morning is brightening. The roof is metallic and gravelly, spiked with antennae. Wallace immediately feels the sense of inverted scope, so high above the world, where everything flattens and becomes smaller. So high up—birdlike—that Wallace feels as if he’s floating. He is, at all times, acutely aware of his distance from the ground. At this height he is a little dizzy, but he disguises his discomfort with a wan smile. Miller lets out a low whistle of appreciation.

“Holy fuck,” he says.

“Yep,” Wallace says, watching as the gravel on the top of the roof darkens beneath their dripping clothes. White pebbles, crushed stones, turn to powder under their feet. Someone has left deck chairs and a little table up here. There is a grill; this is the only place in the building where fire is permitted, which seems counterintuitive. Why would you want to start a fire at the highest point, the place most difficult to reach and extinguish? But there it is, black metal in the corner, near the side of the building that faces the city rather than the lake.

Behind them, the lake is full of luminous water. Miller bends over the edge of the building, its railing waist-high, and he peers down into the world.

Wallace sits on the ground next to him, knees against his chest. He usually comes here alone, to think and be by himself. He comes to feel the sense of the world around him, its forever shifting currents of air, their coldness on him like a comforting hand. He comes to get away. But here he is with Miller.

Miller crouches down next to Wallace, sits next to him. They sit that way for a long time, the stones sticking to their legs, at first painfully, and then numbly, like anything else. They watch the sun come up, its yellow light saturating everything and eventually burning away the mist of morning. They’re still sitting that way when the first sounds of cars fill the streets below, and the world turns over itself, to begin again.