Aristotle and Dante Dive into the Waters of the World (Aristotle and Dante #2)(24)

I thought about the list I’d made—of the things I wanted to do. I thought of the two things I had crossed out: Learn to play the guitar and Make love to Dante. If I wasn’t any good at music, maybe I could be good at making love to Dante. But how could I be good at it if I’d never done it before? And there wasn’t anything on my list that was long-term. I had no plans for my life.

“Well, I’m keeping a journal. I think that might help me in my quest to become a cartographer. And maybe I won’t ever find some great passion for something like you have. But when I’m old, I don’t want to be asking myself if my life mattered. Because if I was just a decent guy, if I had just been a good man, then my life would have been a good life. I guess that doesn’t sound very ambitious.”

“You have something I’ll never have. You have humility. And that word lives inside you. And you don’t even know it.”

I think his idea of me was a little generous. “I’m not humble. I like to fight.”

“Maybe that’s your way of protecting people.”

“Which doesn’t really make me very humble at all, now does it?”

“You want to know what I think? I think I have impeccable taste in men.”

“Well, I’m not exactly a man—but, hey, if you need me as an excuse to give yourself a compliment, well, what’s it gonna cost me to play along?”

He shook his head. “Ari, I think you know that I just gave you an indirect compliment. When someone says something nice about you, say thank you.”

“But—” He didn’t let me finish.

“Thank you. That’s all you have to say.”

“But—” And he stopped me again.

“Just because you don’t think that you’re anything special doesn’t mean I agree with you.”





Two


“TREES!” DANTE YELLED, LIKE A boy who’d never seen an apple tree or a pine tree. He hung his head out the window, the wind blowing through his hair. He closed his eyes and took in the fresh air, breathing in and out. It was a natural thing for him to make himself become a part of the landscape. Maybe that’s why he didn’t like shoes. I wondered if I would ever belong to the earth like Dante did.

“Even the shape of the earth,” he said. “It’s like it’s changing.”

Maybe the shape of the heart changed along with the shape of the earth. I didn’t know anything about physics or geometry or geography or the shape of things and why that somehow mattered so much.

“Gravity,” he said.

“Gravity?”

“You’re gravity,” he said.

I had no idea what he was talking about.

We fell silent again.

We had traveled away from a city built around a desert mountain, and moved to walking on white sand dunes in our bare feet—and now as I slowly drove my dad’s pickup and climbed up the curving road, I realized my truck would never have been able to take this trip. I was glad I’d listened to my dad. It occurred to me that Dante was always asking me what I was thinking and I hardly ever asked him that question, so I just asked, “What are you thinking?”

“I was thinking that people are very complicated. And people don’t have logical conversations. Well, because people aren’t logical. I mean, people aren’t all that consistent, if you think about it. They jump around from here to there to there because, well, like I said, people don’t think in straight lines, and that’s okay, it’s what makes people interesting, and maybe it’s what makes the world go ’round. And ’round and ’round and ’round—going nowhere, getting nowhere—and a lot of people don’t know how to think at all—they just know how to feel—”

“Like you.”

“That’s not where I was going. Yeah, but… so, yeah, I feel. Maybe I feel too much. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But I also know how to think.”

“Ever the intellectual.”

“You’re one too, Ari—so shut the fuck up.”

“I never claimed to be one,” I said.

“You read. And you think. And you don’t buy everybody’s bullshit.”

“Well, except for yours.”

“I’m going to ignore that.”

I had to grin.

“It’s not such a good thing to feel if you don’t know how to think. So, my question is why do so many White people hate Black people when they’re the ones that brought them here in chains?”

“Because, well, because they feel guilty, I guess.”

“Exactly. And that doesn’t have anything to do with thinking. See, they don’t let themselves feel guilty, but they do feel guilty because they should feel guilty. They just bury all that crap inside, but they bury it alive and it’s all running around in there—and it gets all screwed up in their emotions and it comes out as hate. And that’s fucking crazy.”

“You come up with that theory all by yourself?”

“Nope. Wish I could take the credit. That’s my mother’s theory.”

I smiled. “Ah, the therapist.”

“Yup. She’s brilliant.”

“I think so too.”