by Micah Nathan
“Howie,” I said, almost desperate with curiosity, “you can’t just say something like that and not say anything else.”
“Relax,” he said, pulling faster. We were skimming along at a fairly good clip. The wind soughed in my ears. Cold air scraped at my cheeks. “Art likes you. You’re almost too young, but that might work to your advantage. It makes you less cynical…unlike me.” He laughed. In spite of his condition he was a good rower, pulling with his whole body, in clean, efficient strokes, the oar blade slicing into the water without a splash and skirting just above the surface on the backstroke. Moonlight skated by, glancing off the calm surface of the pond in a running beam.
“Howie,” I said, louder.
“Shush,” he said.
“Would you listen to me for a second? I need to know—”
I heard a surprised shout and turned my head to see Dan and Art in their canoe, not more than fifteen feet from us, both caught in mid-paddle, Dan wearing his ridiculous ski hat with the orange pom-pom on top. Art’s pipe trailed a stream of smoke, like the smokestack of a tiny train, lit by the moon. He jabbed his paddle into the water and yelled for Howie to stop, while Dan paddled furiously, splashing, turning the canoe away. I grabbed on to the sides of our dinghy and turned back to Howie, who looked oblivious to what was going on. The loon screamed again as I let go of the sides and lunged at Howie, trying to stop the oars, but I caught Howie’s right fist on the backstroke, and it slammed into my cheek, knocking me down. I fell into the bottom of the boat just as we rammed into the canoe; Howie rocketed forward, the toe of his shoe bumping my back, and he tumbled into the water. Everyone was shouting, including me, though I can’t remember what I was saying.
I lifted myself up and quickly surveyed the damage. The canoe had flipped over and was almost split in two. Art was holding on to its side, and Dan was treading water. There was something warm running down my cheek and I touched it there. Blood on my fingers. From Howie’s fist.
Art swam to the side of my boat, spitting water.
“What the fuck is going on?” he shouted. “Didn’t you guys see us?”
There were other shouts, far off, from shore. A woman’s voice. Nilus barking. “I tried to stop him,” I said. “He was so drunk, and I don’t—”
Something big flopped into the boat, tilting my end up and sending me tumbling again. I righted myself and turned around.
It was Howie. He was on his back, on the bottom of our boat, staring at the sky with one hand on his forehead.
“Holy shit,” he said, gasping. “I almost died down there.”
“You goddamn drunk,” Art said. He drew himself up over the side and glared at Howie. “Are you fucking blind?”
“They wanted me,” Howie said, looking at me. “They wanted me down there. They were clawing at my ankles.”
“Who was?” I said. I shivered violently.
Dan swam over and clutched at the side of the boat. Howie stared back up at the night sky. He had a gash on his forehead.
“The cats,” said Howie. “They’re all down there.”
An hour later I was sitting on the living room floor, knees drawn to my chest. Our clothes were in the dryer and Professor Cade had made us cups of Darjeeling and patched up Howie’s wound with some butterfly strips and gauze. Art and Ellen were in their usual spot: he, lying flat on the couch, and she at his feet, her legs pulled up and tucked under. Dan sat near me, a blanket draped over his shoulders, his cup of tea resting untouched on the coffee table. Howie was alone on the opposite couch.
“Are you certain you aren’t feeling any dizziness or nausea?” Dr. Cade had already performed some kind of diagnostic test on Howie with a pen light, inspecting his pupils, making him follow his finger. He walked into the living room now, still visibly worried, and bent over to inspect Howie’s forehead.
“I’m fine,” Howie said. “Really.”
Dr. Cade looked at me. “And how is your cheek, Eric?”
I touched the bandage on my cheek. I felt foolish from the attention. It had been a scratch, nothing more.
“I’m okay,” I said.
Dr. Cade narrowed his eyes back at Howie. “You were unconscious for how long, again?”
“Maybe one or two seconds at the most.”
“Watch for any nasal discharge. If you feel nauseated, or dizzy, please let me know immediately. No matter what time of night, understand?”
Howie nodded and sipped his tea.
Dr. Cade walked out. We hadn’t said much since coming back inside, just a few attempts at small talk that quickly fizzled. There was an air of narrowly averted disaster, and unlike most times when such an event sparks excited conversation after the fact, there was no excitement among us. We just sat there, basking in the quiet, interrupted only by the pop-crackle of the fire, engaged in our own thoughts.
What were you thinking? Art had asked Howie as we dragged him indoors. Ellen was on the shore with Professor Cade, flashlight in hand, trying to figure out what had happened and who was in danger. She ran to us when we ditched the boat a few feet from shoreline, the three of us carrying Howie, his arms wrapped around our shoulders and his feet dragging. He was confused and bleeding, and we had to shove Nilus out of the way because he was trying to lick Howie’s hands for whatever reason.
I swear I didn’t see you guys, Howie said, as Dr. Cade pressed a gauze pad to his cut. We were all in the kitchen, Howie seated in the breakfast nook, the rest of us crowded around, standing in puddles of water. The table had been transformed into a medicine cabinet—hydrogen peroxide, iodine, sutures, gauze pads. Eric was talking to me, Howie said, and he winced. I wasn’t paying attention.
Art pressed the issue. Didn’t you hear me yell?
Dr. Cade shushed them. Talk about it later, he said. Let’s first make sure Howie’s okay.
I couldn’t imagine, though, how Howie hadn’t seen them, or heard Art’s frantic shouts when he realized we were on course to ram them. I remembered Howie’s eyes, the moment before impact, before I dove to try to stop him. They were blank. Or had that stoic stare been resolve? Drunken resolve, at that. Maybe some sort of deep-seated hostility unleashed by copious amounts of alcohol. I looked over my shoulder at Art, who was still on his back, staring straight up at the ceiling. Ellen was reading a magazine, and had pulled a blanket over her legs. There was nothing there, I thought, no sexual tension at all between Howie and Ellen. If anything he antagonized her along with everyone else, and it wasn’t even flirtatious teasing, but outright bullying. Cracks about feminism. Jokes about the clothes she wore. Asking her in front of Art if they had started planning for the wedding. She handled Howie gently, however, recognizing, I think, the childish fears inherent in all bullies. And their earlier exchange in the kitchen—he seemed to be enjoying it, but there had been something else behind his smile. Was it vindication?
I shifted my gaze toward Dan, who was transfixed by the fire, his face tinted orange, eyes reflecting miniature flames. His brown hair was still wet at the nape. Nothing from him either, nothing awkward between him and Howie. If anything, they interacted the least. Dan seemed to exist under Howie’s radar. What then? I thought. Perhaps Howie hadn’t seen them in the canoe. Drunken drivers are capable of going down a one-way street for miles, driving into lakes, plowing into snowbanks in broad daylight. Maybe it was just bad luck. And I had been distracting him with my questions.
“How are your ankles?” I said, turning to Howie. He looked up at me.
“Fine. Why?”
“You said something about them being clawed.”
Ellen put her magazine down.
“When did I say that?” Howie slurped his tea. He had a large square of gauze taped to his forehead.
“After you got back in the boat. You were lying on your back and you said ‘they’ were clawing your ankles.”
“That’s nuts.” Howie put his cup down and settled back. He looked genuinely surprised. “I must have been out of it. A lot of water plants in that
pond, always twisting around your feet.”
“They are a problem,” Dan added, nodding. “The hornworts exploded this past summer.”
“We dredged some in July. Remember that?” Art stretched his arms back and shifted his legs. “Filled half the boat with them, and went back four more times. I got burned so bad on the back of my neck…”
“You peeled for weeks,” Howie said, laughing. “Like a leper.”
And there it was. The closing off I had detected before, the drawing in of the ranks. I looked to Ellen, wondering what she knew, if anything. She was staring at me, and we locked eyes for a moment.
“Have a good night, all,” I said, standing up. I looked forward to an evening of masturbation, indifferent to the sinister plots the others were hatching in my absence. I was too tired to think anymore. Maybe it was easier that I remain oblivious. Maybe ignorance really is bliss and all that.
“Oh, about your pants,” Ellen said, holding her magazine open again. She wouldn’t look at me. “You had your wallet in the front pocket. Thank God it didn’t fall out into the pond. I left it for you on top of the dryer.”
“Thanks,” I said, and then it struck me.
I headed straight for the basement door.
She had read it. The paper was soaked through but the ink had held; the note I had written to her and stuffed in my pants now lay in a folded square atop the drying machine. The cement floor was cool beneath my bare feet, the air smelled of dry wood and old mildew. Someone had left the bicycle with the missing front wheel and limp racing streamers lying on its side, a collection of nuts and bolts scattered nearby.
I opened the note and reread it, and then spent another minute trying to convince myself that maybe she hadn’t seen it. Maybe she started to read it and then stopped, thinking it was for some other girl. There was no greeting line, so it was possible that she could’ve mistaken it for a love letter to someone else.
I read it again, ripped it up, climbed atop an empty crate against the wall, and pushed a basement window open. Cold air rushed in, carrying old, brittle leaves over the sash. A long-neglected spiderweb traversed the opening, cocooned remains of insects twirling in the wind. I threw out the pieces of the letter, watched them land in the cups of fallen leaves. Another gust of wind carried some away into the darkness, and there I imagined a piece floating high up, riding air currents, skimming and scraping along the roof of the house, glancing off the rainspouts, skirting down a windowpane and swooping into Art’s room, where it would land, the one damning piece that would survive, unmistakably in my handwriting, gliding to a stop on his desk. Ellen. A single word surrounded by a wet scrap of paper. The one time in the letter I had used her name.
I slammed the window shut, sat on the crate, and cursed myself until I felt better.
Chapter 7
Over the next month I settled in, concentrating on my schoolwork and the assignments Dr. Cade was finally giving me—massive, daunting reams of untranslated text that I tackled during the weekends. But it was work, something I could lose myself in, and so I stayed with it without complaint, and it seemed the more I did the more Professor Cade gave me. I’d leave a stack of papers outside the door of his study Monday morning, and by that Friday an even bigger stack would be placed outside mine.
In early November I became briefly involved with a red-haired girl named Tania, from my English literature class. I remember only two things about her: She loved Ezra Pound, and had tried to get me to drop acid with her. We stopped seeing each other after I’d brought her to meet my housemates, and Art had eyed her with cautious disapproval, especially after she made a comparison between Pound and Boethius as an example of English being a more appropriate medium for poetry than Latin.
My dating Tania was attempt number one to exorcise Ellen from my mind. Attempt number two was visiting Nicole, every night, for two weeks straight, having sex like a madman until my knees rubbed raw from her dorm-room carpet, and at last I was able to mostly confine Ellen to my dreams, where she reigned like Morpheus, coming and going as she pleased. My dreams vacillated between the sexual and the macabre. We’d be having sex and I’d look down to see my dick mangled and pulpy, her privates transformed into steel clamps. A deep kiss would quickly degenerate into suffocation, her naked legs wrapped around my waist, the inside of her thighs pressed tightly against my hips, pelvis grinding into mine even as she sucked the air out of me. Sometimes I’d wake up in the middle of the night, my back soaked with sweat and the front of my boxers sticky with semen.
We never spoke about the letter she found—not even later—and it simply went away, one of those strange shared moments that dissolves by virtue of it being ignored. But emotional homeostasis, I decided, was far too important to risk on a woman who, in all probability, had absolutely no interest in me. I considered my decision pretty mature for a sixteen-year-old. I even consider it pretty mature for someone my age now. Of course I was kidding myself; covetousness is the stickiest of threads, strong like spider silk. If there had been someone to talk to, perhaps I could have dealt with it better, but I had no one.
Medieval philosophers studied the phenomenon of love like they would any other science, and so, in desperation, I turned to those minds. The concept of Amor de lonh, love from afar, a poetic notion of affection ennobled by suffering, desire increased by deprivation, and the necessity of obstacles for the fragile ideal to exist, for if given the opportunity to flourish, such love may prove false. Maybe that’s it, I thought, maybe I didn’t truly love Ellen at all—how could I?—and if the opportunity ever presented itself my delusions would crumble and blow away.
I remember one night in particular. I was rummaging through the refrigerator when Ellen walked into the kitchen, wearing a pinstriped men’s shirt, the tail of it barely covering her green silk panties. She smiled at me with her tired eyes and set about to making tea. “For my throat,” she explained, stroking the front of her neck and wincing. “I’m allergic to dogs and with Nilus here…sometimes my throat swells up.” She didn’t turn the kitchen lights on, working instead under the cold light coming from the open refrigerator.
My stomach seized and I stood there, frozen in terror. I had a frighteningly powerful urge to grab her and pull her toward me, and shout Have you no idea? She stood on her toes, reaching up for a box of teabags, and I watched the thin striations of her calves rise in a gentle swell of muscle before sloping upward into the back of her knee, where they blended seamlessly into the soft sheen of her skin. The skin of her bare thighs was taut, unmarked and so perfect that I felt ashamed, as if I were gawking at the legs of a physically precocious twelve-year-old.
“Is something wrong?” she said, standing with teabag in hand. It swung like a hypnotist’s watch, its string held between her thumb and forefinger.
I shook my head. There she was, Phoebe resplendent in silken green panties.
“You look older,” she said, half-smiling. Her index finger trailed along the event horizon of her upper thighs, the point at which the shirt tail ended and her flesh began. She hooked her nail under the fabric and tugged it up, slightly. As if scratching an itch. “Perhaps it’s just the lighting in here,” she said. Her voice was husky, lower than usual.
“I’m still sixteen,” I said, and then I immediately cursed myself. Of course you are you fucking idiot. The refrigerator door remained open, my hand resting atop its edge.
She smiled and let the shirt hem drop back down. A whisper of green silk lay within its shadows, underneath which I imagined lay all sorts of soft, wet delights.
The teapot began to whistle. Moonlight filtered from the window behind her, shining through her hair. She was Phoebe, goddess of the moon, at least at that moment.
“Your water is boiling.”
“Thanks,” she said. Her tone was ambiguous. She turned her back to me and took the pot off the stove.
I stood there for a few more excruciating moments, kept company by my optimistic erection, and then I retreated back to my r
oom, my single-minded soldier straining at the front line, again bitter at having to withdraw.
The day before Halloween I’d come home in the afternoon and found Dan sitting on the couch, reading a book, dressed in a red wool hunter’s cap and matching coat. I thought it was his costume—maybe he was supposed to be a low-budget version of Sherlock Holmes—but as I slipped off my shoes, he looked up and smiled.
“What are you doing for the next few hours?” he said.
I had planned to sit at my desk and study, maybe take Nilus for a walk before it got dark. Dan stood up and jingled keys from his hand. They were for Howie’s Jag.
“I have it for the day. Howie took a ride with Art to school, to look at some maps in the library…” Dan tossed me the keys. “Want to go to Horsehead Hills?”
“I don’t have a license, but what the hell,” I said. I had driven a few times before, my friends’ cars, late at night, down many of Stulton’s dead-end streets.
Dan walked to the living room window and peered out. “There’s this farm in Horsehead called Wiktor’s Orchard. We went last year. Fifty acres of Macintosh and Cortland trees, sprawling hills, little ponds scattered about. It’s like something out of the Welsh countryside. We can grab some lunch at the Whistle Stop, if you want.” He looked ridiculous standing there in his old English hunting outfit, brown corduroys sagging around his ankles, thick-soled brown shoes crisscrossed with scratches and scrapes. He had a birthmark I hadn’t noticed before, a small port-wine stain under his left ear, which lent some variety to his otherwise entirely unremarkable face. Standing there in Dr. Cade’s living room, in the full light of an autumn sun, I felt as if I got my first good look at him. Every other time it seemed we were buffered by those around us: my first dinner at the house, that day in the Quad with Nicole, the time when Art, Dan, and I spent the afternoon raking Dr. Cade’s front lawn and then burned the leaves in a frighteningly large fire that had threatened to immolate a nearby maple.
