by Hopen, David
* * *
SOPHIA WASN’T IN SCHOOL THAT next day. I moved about in a haze, conjuring awful images: Evan just behind her front door, laughing as I stood pathetically with flowers; Sophia, in tears, flinging herself from Evan’s car. Several times I drafted text messages, only to delete them. are you coming in late? feeling ok? need anything? I couldn’t bear seeing Evan, couldn’t stomach the thought of questioning the implied meaning of his every word, and so skipped lunch upstairs. I attempted instead to join Kayla, who was stationed at her tutorial post and picking irascibly at a salad, a book opened at her desk.
“Hi.” I took several cautious steps into the classroom. “Mind if I join?”
She looked up, glowered, returned to her reading. “Very much so.”
“What’re you reading?”
“Nothing you’ve read.”
“Clearly you’re still mad at me.”
“Nope.”
“Sure seems like it.”
“I just don’t have anything to say to you.”
I nodded politely and left.
After lunch, we congregated in Rabbi Bloom’s office, where we debated reasons for wearing tzitzit.
“They slap us in the face before we sin,” Oliver said. “Like the dude, in the Gemara, climbing the ladder to visit the prostitute. Pretty useful, really.”
“They equate with fulfilling all six hundred and thirteen mitzvoth,” Amir said. “The gematria is six hundred, and the threads and knots sum to thirteen.”
“They give us an extension of our body,” Noah said.
“They teach us that the Torah, like the ratio of white to blue strings, is seventy-five percent comprehensible and twenty-five percent shrouded in mystery,” Rabbi Bloom said. “And that there’s a perfect chemistry to achieve in balancing these two ideals, so that we lean largely on the rational, dipping into the mystical only as a supplementary force of faith.”
“It reminds us,” Evan said gloomily, “that we have nothing lasting in this world, no cars or houses or careers or parents or children, only tattered strings.”
“See?” Oliver said, leaning over to whisper in my ear.
When my turn came, I offered the first platitude that came to mind, neglecting to mention that it’d been several weeks since I last wore my tzitzit.
In English I was similarly silent, staring out the first-floor window at the model temple, failing to answer Mrs. Hartman’s challenge to liken Joyce’s vision of Parnell to Moses. “Are you sure you’re feeling well, Mr. Eden?” Mrs. Hartman asked. Bloom, are you the Messiah ben Joseph or ben David? “You’re uncharacteristically incoherent today.” Davis sniggered from the other side of the room. Evan glanced suspiciously in my direction.
I had a free last period, but instead of loitering around to ride home with Noah, as I usually did on Wednesdays, I left early and walked, despite the fact that it’d begun to rain. I was in no rush to be home and decided to detour, drifting about, walking along the lake. Before long the rain worsened. No one else was out. I was perfectly solitary, wandering the gray.
When I walked up to my house I found Sophia at my doorstep, head in hands. She sat unmoving, unaware of the rain. “I knocked.” She said so without looking up. Her hair was soaked, draped over her shoulders in long strands. Raindrops fell softly from her nose. “No one was home.”
The rain picked up, covering us in thick sheets. “What’re you doing here?”
“Waiting for you.”
The first time we were alone, at Oliver’s party, I was delivered infinitely far from reality. That sensation only deepened each time I’d been alone with her since. Looking at her now, I was frightened I’d never again have her transport me away from the confines of my internal life. “Why?”
“So I can talk to you,” she said.
“You should leave.”
“You’re angry with me.”
“Please,” I said. She didn’t move. “Please leave.”
Sometimes she had such cold eyes, I thought. Sometimes beauty dissembles exquisite sadness. “You really want that?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Hamlet.”
“Where were you today?” I asked.
“I didn’t feel like coming in.”
“Are you okay?”
She motioned for me to sit on the step beside her, but I was frozen where I stood. Her drenched black shirt, clinging tightly to her pale skin, made her glow a luminous white within the rain.
I glanced down the street: no sign of either of my parents, though I knew they’d be home soon. “I need to ask you a question.”
“I know you do.” She spoke now with such unnatural calm, as if nothing that ever happened—to her, to us, to anyone—actually mattered.
“Are you together again?”
She didn’t blink. “Absolutely not.”
“He was at your house. He was there when it was supposed to be me. And then, in the car the other night, after the game, I—I saw you two.” Voicing this reinforced several fundamental truths. I was foolish for living in negative capability. I was foolish for retreating into the blurred world she built for me, for ignoring that some force bound her to Evan. Keats describes two rooms in the “large Mansion” of human life: the antechamber, where we suppress consciousness, and the Chamber of Maiden-Thought, where we become intoxicated by beauty, only to discover heartbreak. I was now, at last, experiencing whatever darkness follows fleeting light.
Sophia looked up at me with iron eyes. “I don’t love him, Ari. We’re not together. We’ve—I’ve had to see him about something, that’s true, but whatever . . . sinister thing you’re imagining is wrong.”
I loved her in a way I didn’t think I was capable of loving another person, and still I wasn’t what she desired, she who had given me everything, she who had given me nothing. “What do you need to see him about?”
“That’s not a simple question,” she said.
I wanted to hold her, kiss her, warm her. I wanted to kick down the door, carry her into my room, submit myself to her. Instead, I remained where I was, a safe distance away.
“When I tried warning you,” she said, “from the very start, it was because I knew things were going to become complicated.”
“Warn me about what? That you’d use me? That I’d serve as a project or as some easy distraction until you two found each other again?”
She stood, stepped toward me. It appeared I was shivering from the rain. “You need to understand—”
“Are you still going to see him?”
She closed her eyes, let loose quiet tears.
“I’ll never be able to do that to you,” I said, “will I?”
“Do what?”
“Make you cry.”
For the first time in my life, I wondered whether happiness might somehow be beside the point. “You wish you could, don’t you?” she asked.
I was so cold from the rain that I was beginning to feel light-headed. The enormity of what I wanted, of what I always wanted, frightened me. “I do.”
She kissed me, taking everything from me so abruptly and violently that I nearly buckled. “I’m sorry, Hamlet.” The last of light sinking into night: I could feel the ground shifting beneath my feet. Her lips broke away. She gave a faint smile, tore at my heart. She removed her hand from mine and wandered from my driveway, dematerializing into fog.
* * *
WE WERE IN NOAH’S BACKYARD, drinking, sending golf balls into the dark. It had been a solitary Shabbat, a solitary week. The weather had turned unseasonably cold: rain for hours on end, granite-colored skies, splinters of lightning, wet and treacherous roads. It’d been several days now since I’d found Sophia at my doorstep and we hadn’t spoken since. I ignored her in class, even in biology, and she missed two more days of school, allegedly suffering from the flu. Evan, too, was absent one of those days, deepening my paranoia. I tried reminding myself of Sophia’s initial warnings, so as to forgive her, and then tried convincing myself I’d be
en mistreated. Neither approach worked. The discoloration of Brooklyn, for the first time since I’d arrived in Florida, was seeping back into my life.
“What’s with the silence?” Noah asked, whacking a ball into the black distance. “Everyone seems so pissed lately.”
I sliced my ball, moving it four yards to my left, narrowly avoiding contact with Amir’s temple. Amir wisely removed himself from my circumference. “Midterms?” he asked. “The weather?”
“Nah,” Oliver said. “I vote girl trouble.”
“Drew?”
I finished my beer, shrugged.
“Check out that attitude,” Oliver said. “I think Eden’s had too much to drink.”
“What about you, Ev?” Noah asked.
Evan didn’t look up. “What about me?”
“I don’t know,” Noah said. “You’ve been MIA every night this week. You skipped school on Tuesday. You don’t answer texts. You’ve been as weird as Drew.”
Oliver shrugged. “Like I said. Girl problems.” Nausea surged briefly through my upper body.
Evan tossed aside his club. “Don’t compare us.”
“Who?”
“Me and Eden.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I said, mostly to my own surprise.
“Look at you,” Evan said. “So alarmed to hear we’re different?”
I kicked dirt in his direction. “On the contrary. I hope nobody compares me to you.”
“All righty, then,” Noah said, trying to defuse things. “Let’s say we do something else now, huh?”
Amir leaned on his club. “Like?”
“I have an idea,” Evan said. “Let’s get Eden to smoke.”
“Funny,” Noah said. “Clearly you are pissed off.”
I put down my club, walked over to Evan, a dull ache starting in my temple. “Okay.”
“Okay what?”
I blinked in pain. “Let’s do it.”
Evan smiled, studied my face. “You kind of look like you want to fight me, you know that? You can punch me if you want to. I won’t mind.”
Amir cracked his knuckles. “I’ve been there, Ari,” he muttered. “Might be worth it.”
I considered the prospect. The notion of striking him, of making him bleed, was, for a moment, disturbingly appealing. I massaged my forehead. “We doing it or not?”
“I like the boldness,” Evan said, “but we know you’re full of shit, Eden.”
I found myself inside, seated on the couch. Noah got the fan going and opened the patio door for a cross-breeze. Oliver disappeared into his car and returned with an obtrusive, yellowed sock from which he removed a plastic bag. He did his grinding and gave Evan the joint. Evan applied his lighter, took a long breath, cocked his head, blew out. Smoke billowed, fogging the windows.
Evan waved the joint in my direction. “Your move, Eden.”
Things crashed over me: alcohol, Columbia’s rejection, the way my chest seared at the sight of Evan, the thought that Sophia could be texting him at that very moment. I snatched the joint. Curious silence, everyone watching. I held it to my face.
I had no desire to smoke. The act itself bore no appeal, nor did the way Evan and Oliver typically functioned in the aftermath. I didn’t know why accepting a joint from his hand would do anything to shift the balance of power between us. I knew only, in my semi-drunken state, that I refused to suffer another loss to Evan.
“Whoa, hold up a second,” Noah cautioned, realizing that I wasn’t joking. “Don’t do something you’ll regret.”
“He won’t,” Evan said. “Like I said, he’s too much of a coward.”
“Ari,” Amir said, looking as if he wanted to grab me and shake sense into me, “don’t be a huge idiot. Do not take the bait.”
Drunkenly, I inhaled.
“Holy hell,” Oliver said. “Ev, you gave birth to a monster.”
“That’s it, hold a few seconds,” Evan instructed. This reminded me of the way Evan first taught me how to drink, which just so happened to be the night he gave me that Xanax. I wanted to point this out, but my lungs were filled with smoke.
I held until my breath broke. I coughed violently, throat burning. I paced the room, trying to steady my breathing.
Oliver crossed himself. “Never thought I’d see the day. I’m a believer.”
Noah grinned, shook his head. “Nobody tell Rocky.” He took the joint from me and put it to his lips. “Because, for the record, this is definitely a mistake.” I was still preoccupied coughing up a lung.
We looked at Amir now. Finally, cursing us, he accepted the joint from Noah. “I hate you people,” he said, scrunching his face. The joint underwent several more revolutions until it burned close to our fingertips and Oliver flicked it to the coffee table, though Noah made him retrieve it and dispose of it properly. Oliver leaned against the couch and put his hands behind his head, eyes circular and bleary. “Now, we wait, boys,” he announced dreamily. “Now we wait.”
We sat quietly, sipping warm Yuengling. My throat was on fire, the smoke had worsened my headache, my vision was now strained, slipping out of focus, occasionally darkening around the periphery. A floating sensation snaked through my intestines. I thought I heard something, muttered incoherently to myself, drawing laughs. Amir—watery eyes, lopsided grin—was playing with a pillow, hurling it at the ceiling. Noah had the TV going. The Magnificent Seven was on. We watched without blinking.
Until: a small, whirling noise.
“Hear that?” I stiffened. “You guys hear anything?”
Noah’s eyes fluttered. “Hear what?”
The actors in the movie uncoiled grotesque mouths. Were they inspecting me? A cold sweat came on. I forced away my eyes.
“You okay, Ari?” Amir snapped in my direction, whistled at me. “You’re pale.”
“Yeah, you kind of look like shit, dude,” Oliver piped up. Noah was asleep beside him, his head on Oliver’s left shoulder.
Evan glanced at me and then refocused his attention on the film. “He’s going to boot.”
I was standing, it seemed. “The bathroom.”
Nobody answered.
“Where’s the bathroom?” I repeated, nausea washing over me. The muted, faraway voice from my childhood migraines was back.
“Dude. You know where the bathroom is.” Amir waved in no particular direction, shoveling popcorn into his mouth. “You’ve been here a million times.”
After a terror-filled minute, I found the bathroom and, head spinning, vomited without closing the door. After some dry heaving I rinsed my mouth, washed my face. In the mirror I had the eyes of some other boy.
When I came back out Oliver suggested we go for drinks. Three Amigos, that hole in the wall they were always talking about. There I flashed my fake ID, clenched my beer, braving distorted colors and pulsating lights. Our waitress hovered over Oliver. I was desperate to sleep, my vision swimming, lights rearranging around me. Oliver left, waitress in hand, and I was home now, it was past three now, I was climbing into bed now, attempting to will away nausea, liquid words dancing around me. The eyes are not here / There are no eyes here. Images of Brooklyn: the three creaky steps leading into my house, the sound my bike made when I’d skid. The arch of Sophia’s back, one leg beneath cold sheets, the taste of her neck. Kayla, storming from every room I was in. Noah in his pool, the water rising. Evan wandering through fields. An Aston Martin suspended in air. Draperies of grief. My parents fighting, silently, through their eyes. My rejection letter: the steps of Low Library, dwindling into whiteness. I am alone, I am alone, I am alone.
January
Evil and brief hath been my pilgrimage
—Browning, “The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed’s Church”
Oliver proposed spending a week in Key West during winter break. I was hesitant, given that I could neither independently finance this trip nor ask my parents for the money, but Oliver decided to book a swanky hotel on his own. “I don’t do accommodations significantl
y worse than my house,” he insisted, matter-of-factly. “So you don’t need to pay me back.”
I was excited for the trip, desperate as I was to distract myself from the fact that, in all likelihood, I’d soon be sitting in a cramped classroom of a local college, listening to someone drone on about how and why to read, my blood boiling at the thought of Evan loafing around Stanford. First, however, I had to suffer through midterms, none of which, save for English, went remotely well. (I didn’t even complete biology; Dr. Flowers gave me a sympathetic look when she snatched my exam, as if observing a wounded dog.) That sense of purpose Sophia made me feel was gone. Having failed to wriggle my way into Columbia, I’d received my dreaded answer: the gap between everyone else and me could not be bridged, the future toward which I was hurtling could not be made less bleak. I’d begun smoking not infrequently, slipping out late, tiptoeing with sneakers in hand, locking the front door with my breath held. When especially high, I’d sit still and wait patiently for sadness or guilt or regret to come for me. Increasingly, however, I felt no particular emotion, only an absence of thought verging pleasantly on numbness. Ah! When the ghost begins to quicken.
My father, as expected, responded with a blank look when I announced I’d be leaving to Key West for a week. “What’s in Key West?”
“It’s a tourist spot, Abba.”
“So there are shuls?” he asked. “There’s kosher food? A kehillah?”
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” my mother said, clearly making an effort to convince herself. “Probably not a full-fledged community, but there must be—something.”
“Yeah,” I lied. “Of course.”
My father remained skeptical. “And this is with Noah and the others, you said? The minyan guy and—”
“Yes, Abba. The usual bunch.”
He played with his glass of water. “Even Bellow?”
I feigned defensiveness. “What’s wrong with him?” I asked, only to immediately imagine how I’d feel if I had a child traveling with someone like Oliver.
My father shrugged, put his palms up. “Nothing’s wrong. He’s just—”
“Just what?”
