by Chris Lynch
“You know, Keir, sometimes just trying, making like you care, showing some respect, can go a long way with people.”
“I’ve been trying, I do care, I have respect,” I say, but I’m not even doing a good job of selling it to myself. I tip back over and lie on the bed on my side as soon as Fabian leaves me. It feels like some effort to roll my lifeless self over on the bed to look out at the broad bright sky that seems like it has been right there and exactly this perfect every day since I got to Carnegie. I can hardly believe that sky and I are both in the same place, that we are both real.
I start to cry. Again.
It’s unlikely that I got more than an hour and a half of sleep in total last night. I would roll and wrestle myself for ages and then finally nod, only to fall into dreams that were waiting for me, and then it would get even less restful than thrashing around awake was. Awake, I could not stop my tumbling mind from rolling through all the things here, in this life, so good, so right, so according-to-plan but that were getting away from me at a sickening pace. It was not supposed to be like this. It was supposed to be so many other things, other ways.
• • •
When we danced, her hands did most of the dancing, flittering up and down her back, sides, hips, pursuing my hands like squirrels chasing each other up and down a tree. Somehow, it seemed every place I put them was an inappropriate place, so I had to keep moving them, and then the way I was moving them became the problem, so you can appreciate that Gigi Boudakian was being a little difficult to deal with.
At the table it was more of the same. She was holding my wrist with one hand while holding her idle fork with the other. Then she was elbowing me. Then she was whipping out her cell phone and dialing . . .
“What, what, what?” I said pleadingly, folding my hands prayerlike and earning a reprieve.
“You are drunk, Keir,” she said.
“No,” I said seriously.
“Yes,” she said.
“Not really,” I said.
“Yes, really,” she said.
“A little.”
“A lot.”
Hmm.
“Well, everybody is drunk.”
“Not everybody.”
“Everybody.”
“Not me.”
“Well, whose fault is that?”
“Listen, Keir . . . ,” she said, and there wasn’t a tremendous amount of suspense about where this was headed, since she had her phone out and buttons beeping as she spoke.
“I’m sorry,” I said into her free ear.
She looked up at me with a hard, penetrating, not unkind or unfair look.
She was so decent. She was lovely and sharp and she was smart and classic. I suddenly felt like I had been wiping my hand on my sleeve, shouting obscenities, fighting, pissing in the punch bowl. She was great. She was lovely and decent, and so, so deserving of all the best things, and would surely wind up with them later on, in college, in love, in the carpet business or on Broadway, in life, if she could get through the degradation of this.
“Please, please don’t leave,” I said. “Please. Please.”
She looked at me harder still.
“Please.”
Damn, she could look at you a long, cold minute.
“Get it together,” she said firmly.
I felt like the luckiest guy there. I got it together, while Gigi Boudakian and I never did. Though I never stopped thinking about it.
• • •
It was a good plan, for good reasons. I would find love here, and purpose and direction and respect, and I was on my way, I was.
Then sleep was no escape at all but instead an even more desperate fight, trying to keep all the other beasts at bay, keep the bad things, the wrong things back there where they had to stay and were supposed to stay. So many miles, so many turns, so many stinking rotten buses were supposed to have settled this. So many separations, endings, shifts. Deaths.
From all that, I should at least have earned my freedom. From what I had to leave behind.
So I spent my night awake, mourning, grieving my pathetic failure to reset the clock. And asleep, in terror of all the dead stuff promising never to leave me alone. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Not anymore, not again. It was a long time now since I felt this, the awful two hearts at war inside me, threatening to break me in half, split me from the chest on out. I’m only supposed to have one now, here. I have done everything necessary to make that happen. Everything has been for that, and everything has been for nothing.
I can feel them pounding so hard, so loudly, I cover my chest with my hands, desperate to keep it to myself. They are two strong angry hearts with two different tales to tell, and one of them has got to win. I thrashed all night with them, powerless to do a thing.
Except, I cried a lot, I know I did. Probably loud enough to keep my innocent roommate awake nearly as much as I was. But he didn’t let on then, and here facing the window, I’m trying my best not to let him know I’m at it again now. It would be too much, unfair to him and humiliating to me. I couldn’t even explain to him why I’m like this. I’m better than this, I’m stronger than this. When did I lose all that, and how and why?
“You want me to come with you?” he asks from his perch at the foot of his bed. I can tell his location, because I know the dynamics of this room and its residents by this time. Probably better than I know anything else.
This alone, this one small sentence has me emotional again. The mere sound of this odd, unfathomable human, offering me his modest solidarity, is enough to make me feel like bawling again. But I can’t, I don’t. I say, “No, thanks,” instead.
Because Fabian does things according to some unique internal programming I will never understand, he responds in a way that doesn’t make any sense to me.
“I can come with you to the meeting,” he says, as if the subject has not come up already.
“Thanks,” I say. “Good of you. It’ll just make me look even sadder and weaker than they already think I am. But, yeah, thanks.”
“You’re welcome,” he says.
Neither one of us moves, or makes a sound, for several minutes. Again, a thing that never happened before, my being in a room with another person and no sound for so long, is happening for the second time this week.
“What are you afraid of, Keir?”
“I don’t know.”
“What’s the worst that could happen?”
“I don’t know. I’m trying not to think about worst things.”
I’ve been thinking about nothing else.
“Do you think . . . No, I’m not asking you any more questions, I’m just going to say, maybe it’s not completely real, whatever’s happening in your head.”
He’s only trying to be kind, trying to help. But he does not know, could not know, and I can’t simply allow this wrong perception of me to hang there unchallenged.
“You don’t understand, Fabian, all right? You can’t, nobody can, only I can. That is the reality.”
He is not lost for words on the subject, and his reply comes quickly and smoothly. “ ‘Is all that we see or seem, just a dream within a dream?’ ”
That is so precisely, murderously the wrong thing for me to hear after the night I had that a chill runs through me. I grasp and clutch and pull the sheet all bunchy over the parts of my back and hip it can reach without my having to work to untangle it. I’m certain now that he heard me struggling through the night. Screamy dreaming the revival of the nasty, old reality. Waking panting over the dying new, pathetic, stupid reality. And over. And over again.
“What the hell was that?” I say.
“Edgar Allan Poe.”
“Well, don’t do it again.”
The silence that happens now is an eerie silence I don’t like, one that I can stop and must stop.
I roll over, stand up strong, and give him a look to assure him that I am ready to go to this meeting and ready to take care of my own business.
He
stares a few extra ticks. Studying my posture, my face, my eyes in a way he’s not supposed to, before hopping up off his own bed.
“Right, that’s it, I’m coming with you.”
• • •
It’s our first spat, as I go about the process of getting ready, finding clothes that will help me stand in that room as an equal with whoever is there, an adult whose opinion and point of view need to be taken seriously no matter what outcome results from all this.
I will present myself like a man, dignified, the way I have always known a man should carry himself.
I never iron, I don’t make an honest effort at folding, I’m inconsistent in how I decide whether a shirt is clean or dirty after a single wearing. I’m trying my best to assemble outfits one at a time from articles out of my dresser and closet. One at a time I dress in these outfits and present myself to the mirror. Each time when I see what’s there, I wince and stoop over a little farther as I skulk out of the mocking mirror’s range. It mocks, and it can’t even smell the worst of it.
Fabian pretends to ignore me, but even the mirror is onto him. By the time I try to drag myself in front of it a fourth time, Fabian refuses to allow it. He steps between me and the reflection that will defeat me before I even get out the door.
“There is no more time for this ridiculousness,” he says, holding a pressed, vibrant sky-blue button-down shirt on a hanger.
“It is pretty nice,” I say.
“Put that on,” he says. “The black pants will just about do.”
I’m putting on the shirt, smelling it, not perfumey detergent or anything, just the scent of clean, just exactly that. It’s hard to think of a better scent than clean. He’s now slipped over to his closet and returned.
“What’s that doing here?” I ask.
“And you’ll take a vest, to finish it off nicely,” he says.
“What did I do to you?”
“This will make you look smart, sharp, confident.”
“Well, that sounds like a powerful vest. But you’re thinner than I am. It’ll be too small.”
“Nah, we just adjust these two straps in back and you’re set.”
I stare at the thing dangling in front of me like a big spider dropping from the ceiling. It is so far from anything I ever would have worn before.
Which is as good a reason as any to wear it now.
“For luck,” I say as he slips it over my shoulders like a professional tailor.
“For luck,” he says, adjusting those buckles before I attempt to button up the front.
• • •
“I thought I said you couldn’t come to the meeting,” I say as we walk up the long hill to the admin building and the athletic director’s office on the third floor.
“You did,” he says. “I’m just on my way to the Yurt, so I thought I’d walk along with you.”
“The Yurt is way back there.” I point out with my thumb.
“I know. But I need the exercise, you need the moral support, and the vest needs an escort.”
“I’m the vest’s escort.”
“Yeah, well I’m vestcorting both of you. Because frankly, you’re a walking disaster right now, as my grandmother would say.”
“So, you don’t trust me to walk up the hill, without your vest coming to some kind of harm.”
“Relax, I don’t think it’s your fault.”
I don’t know if it’s his intention or not, but Fabian manages to keep me engaged with that kind of nonsense the whole way. Until I’m standing in front of the building, ready to pull the door open, almost forgetting why I’m here.
“What is the Yurt, anyway?” I ask as I open the door.
“The Yurt is all things to all people.” He shoots past me to get inside.
“No, I don’t think it is, and what are you doing?”
“Walking up the stairs. You should join me.”
“Fabian, come on now. You shouldn’t be here.”
“I’m just seeing you to the door. Because right now I wouldn’t trust you to find your ass with your own two hands, as my grandmother would say.”
I start following him. “That’s what she would say, would she?”
“More or less. I cleaned it up a bit because you’re fragile.”
“Hey, I don’t know what you think you might have heard last night . . . but you see me as fragile?”
“As a china teacup.”
We reach the first landing. “This is terrific. I thought you were supposed to be boosting my confidence.”
“That was just motivational crap to get you out of bed. Once you walk out the door into the big uncaring bastard world, you can decide for yourself whether to be predator or prey, young man, it’s no skin off my nose.”
“Your grandmother?”
“Yep.”
“I think I might be starting to understand you,” I say, continuing up toward the third floor. “But in that case, you should just scram, save your nose skin, and leave me to it, no?”
“No. If you turn out to be prey, it can be your own shirt that gets shredded and bloody.”
We reach the third floor and the sign saying OFFICE OF THE ATHLETIC DIRECTOR. Fabian goes straight in before I can catch him.
“Hello,” the secretary says immediately, in a reassuringly friendly manner. She’s got soft-looking red-blond hair, painted turquoise fingernails at the tips of fine-boned hands. She could be not much older than us, but with adult-world responsibility. She’s the gatekeeper in possibly the most powerful office in the whole college, where I’m just hanging on by my much grubbier fingernails. She has dimples when she smiles, and I would bet somebody loves her a lot.
We’re only in the outer office, which is bigger than most inner offices I’ve ever been in. It’s all dark wood, paneling, plaques and trophies and photos of great CC sports moments surrounding us. Most of it relates to the football team, but there’s enough broader representation to make it clear that Carnegie College is a very successful NAIA program for boys and girls and badminton players and everybody.
“Hello,” Fabian says when I pause too long on the dimples and the athletic display that he couldn’t care less about. I don’t mean the dimples, which I’m sure he appreciates just fine. “This is Keir Sarafian. He’s got an appointment.”
“Oh, right,” she says. “Hello, Keir.”
I startle at the sound of my name, and at the pleasant delivery of it.
“Hello,” I say, and wave as if she’s passing in a bus or something.
Before she has to do anything, the main office door swings open and the main man comes through it. “Kayley,” he says while wagging a very unmenacing finger at her, “I thought we agreed that you would stop mesmerizing my visitors.”
“We didn’t agree to that, Dad,” she says, closing her eyes to him and the scene.
The athletic athletic director strides into the room with his handshake hand already drawn out of its holster. He’s six foot two, about 205 pounds, and I would be surprised if his default walk wasn’t permanently locked on stride. He was a two-sport guy, football and basketball probably. Maybe baseball and basketball, since there’s no detectable limp.
“Hello, Keir,” he says, and the power of his handshake has me guessing football again. “I’m Mr. Evans, the AD here. But please call me Pete. I’m glad we are finally getting a chance to meet. I know there are a hundred different ways to communicate these days and I love them all, but I simply never feel quite right making decisions and judgments on people when I haven’t had the chance to see them face-to-face. You can let your mind go all kinds of silly places before you actually shake a person’s hand and get a sense of that person for yourself.”
“That’s true, sir,” I say.
“Okay, I’m not going to force you to call me Pete. But sir? We have to be able to improve on that, no?”
I shrug, completely wrong-footed by this guy who is not the guy he was supposed to be. Not yet, anyway.
“Sorry, sir,” I say. �
�That just feels right to me.”
“Good home training,” he says. “Good for you. You’re a credit to your folks.”
“Sorry . . . Pete?” Fabian says.
“Yes, my young friend?”
“Do I need to leave?”
“That depends. Are you here for some nefarious purpose?”
“No, not at all. I’m Keir’s friend.”
“Absolutely, absolutely. Any friend of Keir’s is welcome here.”
“Cool,” Fabian says, very helpfully, “but I’m pretty much it, so no need to bring in a bunch more chairs or anything.” He laughs. Kayley gives her head a slight pity tilt in my direction.
“At any rate,” Mr. Evans says, “I think it’s a good idea, actually, that Keir has a witness for himself in the room while we chat. Kayley will be in there, but she could be considered biased. She can’t stand me. Right, Kayley?”
“Right, Pete,” she says, dimpling on through the hatred.
“Okay, folks, come on in, get comfortable. I don’t intend to keep you long.”
As we file into the inner office, I lean close to Fabian’s ear. “Hear that? Witnesses. That isn’t good. When are opposing witnesses required for anything that isn’t horrible? I was right. Here it comes.”
“Way to go, Keir,” he sighs. “Just keep that up, and the power of positive thinking will see you through.”
Right, as if silver lining mining is going to alter events that were decided before we showed up.
Kayley is the last one in, and as she’s closing the door, she says, “Great vest, by the way.”
I don’t get a word out before Fabian jumps in. “I was going to wear one too. He made me take it off because he thought we would look like twins. We don’t even look alike. But yes, yes, it is a fantastic vest and ideal on him.”
“Right, lady and gentlemen,” Mr. Evans says from his high-back leather chair behind his sprawling oak desk. He swivels like a navy ship’s radar dish as he addresses the assembly. And he’s the first person I ever met who is more intimidating seated than standing up. “You know why we’re here. We have a bit of an awkward situation none of us could have anticipated. . . .”
• • •
“The one thing he was right about,” I say, running dangerously fast, headlong down the stairway. “It was good that I had a witness with me. Jesus, what a shit, huh?”
