by Chris Adrian
“It’s just a thought,” his father said, waving his hands as if to dismiss the notion as silly, but he added, “It’s not like the ice cream will all melt if you go away for a few days.”
“I guess not,” Will said. His father offered him a beer, holding up the half-depleted six-pack that he’d brought with him into the living room. Will took one and opened it and had a sip, which was what he usually did. His father talked for a few sentences about San Diego before he said, “I just want to make one thing clear.” There was always something that he wanted to be clear about, that he loved his wife or that he thought Will was special or that it was in everybody’s best interest when Sean moved out of the house or that getting married was the worst thing that could happen to a person or that it could be the best thing. That night he wanted it to be absolutely clear that he absolutely did not go out drinking until five in the morning with his copilot, who happened to be a lady. “Maybe it’s inappropriate for her to be in the cockpit at all,” he said, “but that doesn’t mean there was any inappropriate behavior.” He scowled at his beer can. “Certain people can think whatever they want.” He went on for a while about how it said something about you if you could never trust someone, and how you could drive a person to do exactly the sort of thing you accused them of, how mistrust could make an innocent person guilty just from the force of violent spite, and wouldn’t that serve you right, if it did? Wouldn’t it serve the hater right, if it did? Will nodded, but it was even harder for him to pay attention than it had been with his mother.
“Are you going to drink that?” his father asked, and Will handed over his beer can. The empty plastic rings were at his father’s feet.
“Sorry,” Will said.
“Just don’t want to waste it,” his father said. “I think I’ll watch some television, now that certain people have gone to bed.”
“I’m pretty sleepy,” Will said, when his father asked him if he wanted to come, and they parted ways at the stairs, Will suffering his father’s hug awkwardly because the embrace brought a thought to Will’s mind in a heated rush and he wondered what it would be like to hug the lady.
Sean was sitting on Will’s bed upstairs, surrounded by a small collection of kitchenware and decorative statuary. In his hand he held a meat mallet, blond wood with a shiny, wicked-looking head of corrugated steel. “There you are,” he said.
“Are you going to hit me with that?” Will asked.
“Do you remember this?” Sean said. “Or this or this?” He held up a garlic crusher and a solid plaster statue of the Infant of Prague, chipped on the head. “Or how about this?” He reached behind him and produced a croquet mallet.
“What are you doing?” Will asked, because their mother had made a weapon of everything on the bed, at some point over the years hitting their father with it or throwing it at him. “Starting a museum collection?”
“I’m showing you,” Sean said. “I’m showing you what I mean, since I can’t just tell you, not in the right words. There’s still blood on these,” he said. “There’s still blood all over the place in this house.”
“I thought it was shit,” Will said.
“You know what I mean,” Sean said. “All of these”—he waved the croquet mallet around—“have been put to unnatural uses. You can’t just watch that. What I’m trying to say is that there are consequences, and that’s why you have to come with me.”
“I’m really tired,” Will said.
“You’re not listening to me. Now you’re just tired. Now you hardly think you notice it, but later it’s all you can think about. And the only thing that makes it any easier is the thought that you can take somebody else out of it. Nobody could take you out of it, but you can do it for somebody else? Do you see what I mean?”
“Really, really tired,” Will said. Sean sighed and started to gather up the statues and mallets and trivets and heavy spoons. As he walked by he thrust his hip out to Will, drawing his attention to a piece of paper in his pocket.
“That’s a note,” he said, “to them. It explains everything. I’ll leave it tomorrow night, after they go to bed, and then we’ll just go. We’ll just get going, and everything else we’ll figure out later. Okay?” Will moved away and pushed the croquet mallet under his bed. “You don’t even have to answer now. You just need to know I have a plan.”
“I don’t care,” Will said, not turning around. “I don’t want to go anywhere with you.” Sean dropped something—Will heard the impact on the carpet—but didn’t say anything. Will waited till he was gone before he turned around. Then he sat on his bed.
He took the lady’s card from his pocket, lay back, and held it up to look at it. It was the size and shape and stiffness of a business card, but all it listed were her name and her number, as if her name was all there was to her job, or just being herself was her profession. It was after midnight, but she had said he could call anytime, and he chose to believe that. He listened for a moment to the dial tone, unreasonably afraid that his mother might be listening in, and then he dialed the number. She picked up almost right away.
“Hi,” Will said.
“Hi,” she said. “Who is this?”
“Will. From Thom Tickle’s. The ice-cream shop.”
“I knew who it was,” she said. “That was a joke.”
“Oh,” Will said, and tried to laugh but only managed a cough.
“Are you sick?”
“No,” Will said. “How are you?”
“I’m good,” she said. “I’m pretty good. I was hoping you would call.”
“Really?”
“Sure.”
“So am I. I’m glad I called.”
“Well,” she said. “Then we’re on the same page.”
“I guess,” Will said. Then she didn’t say anything for a while. Will might have been afraid she had hung up, but he could hear her breathing. He wondered if he had said something wrong. Maybe he should have said definitely instead of I guess. “Anyway,” he said.
“Do you want to come over?” she asked.
“I bet she has syphilis,” Lauren said. “You can’t go around fucking every soda jerk in Central Florida with no consequences.”
“Nobody has syphilis anymore,” Will said. “It’s like leprosy.”
“It’s on the rise,” Lauren said. “None of that bad shit ever really goes away. Anyway, you better wear a condom.”
“It’s not going to happen,” Will said. “I don’t want it to happen. Haven’t you been listening to anything I’ve said?” He had told her about the phone call, and then wished he hadn’t. He hadn’t gone over, but before Will hung up they had talked for another twenty minutes about what might happen if he did.
“She has spots on her palms, I saw them. I’ll buy you some condoms, if you’re too embarrassed.” Before Will could reply, Thom came up with a hot towel and told Will to polish away the frost on the ice-cream canisters.
Fancy-looking ladies came and went, but Will’s lady stayed away. They closed at ten, but because Thom was there it took a little longer to finish cleaning up, because he hovered over every spot and smudge, though he never actually cleaned anything himself. Sean had told Will that he wanted to leave at midnight, and had offered to help him pack that morning and sneak his bags past their parents. Will had just shaken his head.
“Do you need more time to think about it?” Sean had asked, and Will had said, “Maybe.”
“Take all the time you want,” Sean had said. “Take all day.”
“Okay. I don’t think I want to go anywhere.”
“You say that now,” Sean said. “But will you say that at midnight?”
It was eleven when Will left the store, and though he started toward home, he took a detour to 813 Old England Avenue. It wasn’t totally out of his way, and he told himself convincingly that he just wanted to see where the lady lived. At the end of their phone conversation she had said he could come by anytime, exactly how she had said he could call anytime. Still, he was o
nly going to stand in the driveway. It turned out to be a guesthouse set back away from the road, and long sweeps of Spanish moss hid her windows from the sidewalk. Will walked down the driveway, meaning to leave as soon as he had counted her windows, but he knocked on her door instead, and it didn’t occur to him until after he had knocked to worry that she might have a family.
“There you are,” she said, and seemed to appraise him as he stood in her doorway.
“I guess,” Will said.
“You look better out from under those fluorescent lights.”
“Thanks,” Will said. “You too.” That made her laugh. She turned around and walked inside.
“Do you want something to drink?” she asked him as they passed her kitchen.
“I don’t think so,” he said.
“Me neither,” she said, and took his hand. They passed through the rest of her tiny house to get to her bedroom, but she wasn’t giving him a tour. In brief glimpses he saw her little living room and dining room before she led him upstairs. Her bedroom took up the whole second floor, and her bed, king-size and strewn with green and blue pillows, was the biggest piece of furniture he had ever seen. She let go of his hand and lay down, turning to face him as she raised her hands over her head, stretching and sliding in a way that made him feel like he was watching her at the bottom of a pool. “There you are,” she said again.
In his fantasy it seemed like the right thing to do. There, he imagined a moment when, inside her, he paused to consider that this was how things were supposed to be, and he made a point of enjoying how nicely they fit together, how something or someone in charge of them both had engineered things such that they fit together. He imagined himself thinking, This is perfect.
The actual fucking left him little time to think, or really enjoy it, though it went on a long time. He came right away, while she was still nosing around in his groin. She surprised him by shoving her tongue in his ass, and more than pleasure he felt the most immense and startling surprise: at the narrow, suspicious look on her face, at the way his cock arched and bucked without being touched, at the fountaining geyser of semen and the discrete noise it made when it fell on her pillows, a rapid series of soft tip-taps that sounded like some fleet little creature had just run across her bed.
“Is it over already?” she asked, but he wasn’t done. He put away all thoughts of his fantasy, because he hadn’t really imagined any of it correctly, and they did things that he probably couldn’t have imagined, because he thought it was disrespectful to imagine such things. He stopped thinking altogether, and just did what he was told and when they were finished he continued not to think, but lay away from her on the far side of the bed, silent since his third big shout, which was only a peep compared to hers. He stared at her, not holding an opinion one way or the other about her or what they had just done, until she made an odd noise, a burbling sigh the sort of which he’d never heard come out of anyone’s mouth. When she did it again he realized it wasn’t coming from her mouth but from between her legs. It broke the silence and his unthinking reverie and seemed like the greatest and suddenly the worst surprise of the night, and for all that it was just a meaningless utterance of air, like the beginning of a regretful conversation he would have with himself for the rest of his life.
“I have to go,” he said.
“Of course you do,” she said into her pillow, half-asleep. “But don’t stay away too long.” Will picked up his clothes and dressed on the stairs, and started to run as soon as he was out the door, not really understanding why it seemed like such a good idea now, after all, to get in the car with Sean and drive and drive and drive, but knowing it as certainly as he had ever known anything. It was hardly a mile to his house from hers and he was home by twelve-thirty. The house was brightly lit and his mother and father were both waiting up for him, but his brother was long gone.
Part Four
13
As she ran, Molly heard her mother telling her it was too soon after eating to exercise so vigorously. When she heard the noise of the iron doors falling down, she had sprinted out of the feasting chamber through the nearest door and hadn’t slowed down since, running at top speed down a featureless gray corridor that opened every few minutes into another marvelous room, but she knew it would be stupid, or even deadly, to stop to see the sights. The more she ate, the hungrier she had felt, and even though she had gravy on her lips and pudding in her hair, she felt very light on her feet and was sure she could run a mile, or swim two, if she needed to. She went along with a bottle in her hand, sure she could feel the threat behind her as an actual pressure and heat against her back and her bottom. When she finally paused for breath, she took a long sip of the wine.
The more she drank, the more clearheaded she felt and the more coordinated she became. As she ran, everything was feeling for the first time like it was making sense: she was lost in a cathartic dream of instruction, peopled by incarnations of her neuroses, and the deadly threat behind her was nothing less than the roiling mass of her feelings for her dead, abandoning boyfriend. She neither knew nor needed to know why those feelings should take Peabo’s form in the same way that she didn’t need to worry anymore about whether or not what was happening was real. It was real enough to demand that she deal with it, and sometime very soon she was going to need to stop running and turn around, but not quite yet. The lesson of the meal she had just left was that there is always room to enjoy yourself, and always something to appreciate, even when you’ve lost your mind and lost all hope and have clawed your way down not just into the slough of despond but beyond it into the subsequent sloughs of despair and please-kill-me-now. She hadn’t meant or wanted to enjoy that unexpected feast, but she had, and it made her feel big in her soul, how she could delight in the texture of a crispy bit of chicken skin at the same time that she mourned her lost boyfriend and her lost mind, and she didn’t have to choose between delight and despair: she could experience them both to their fullest simultaneously. She didn’t know whether that was progress or just a detour on her road to suicide-survivor recovery, or if this double capacity for feeling might dissipate when she turned around to be rent by monster-Peabo. But she was going to enjoy it for a while. If she was drunk, this was the best drunk of her life, and she wanted it to go on and on. She sped up, sure she could be sprinting down a balance beam as easily as a sidewalk, and gave it a try, fleetly placing one foot in front of the other, and then leaping imaginary candles perched along the imaginary balance beam, and then stepping through tires set at intervals between the imaginary candles on the imaginary balance beam, and wondering, just before she tripped and fell, if she could see the tires and the candles so clearly, why they didn’t just appear, here at the approaching bottom and climax of her allegorical recovery dream adventure?
She felt like she’d been running as fast as a car, and she tumbled along, rolling and spinning, as far and as fast as if she’d fallen out of one, finally coming to rest seated with her legs splayed out on either side of her and listing so far to one side that her hair swept the ground before she righted herself. She kept her eyes closed and patted herself on the head and arms and legs, feeling for fractures and bruises, but her bones and her muscles felt pleasantly numb all over, as if she were touching someone else entirely. She straightened her hair and cleared her throat and opened her eyes, half expecting to be back at the feasting table or face-to-face with Peabo, but she was in another giant room, this one not quite empty but filled with portraits.
The corridor that had brought her here was nowhere to be seen: it might have ended here, except that she remembered having seen it shortly before she tripped, stretching featureless and gray into the distance. Now the darkness all around was broken only by puddles of light thrown upon the wall at regularly spaced intervals, lighting up pictures of boys. They stretched to her left as far as she could see, until the puddles of light shrank to specks. To her right they ran to a wall in the far distance, where a brighter light fell down upon some kin
d of sculpture. She didn’t like museums; they made her feel sleepy and overwhelmed, and though she considered that in her dream of transformative drunkenness she might have an opportunity to change that, she didn’t care to feel any differently, and she just wanted to get out of there. She walked toward the sculpture, hoping to find a way out, glancing at the portraits as she went.
Somebody really likes little boys, she thought as she walked along, because none of them was older than eleven or twelve, and some were only fat little toddlers. The pictures were executed in every different style, and some of the boys were clothed in beads or feathers or scraps of cloth or little swarms of bees, but they were all very pretty, and they all shared an expression, a vacancy to their smile that made them look mildly dissatisfied and a little drugged. She felt sure, in her state of heightened drunken genius, that she knew the point of them and the point of the gallery: they were an installation of lost boys who were iterations of her own lost boys. It would not have been a surprise for her to see Peabo there with a 3D Jesus poking out of the painting. “Now you are getting obvious!” she said aloud to her subconscious, when she came to the portrait of the tan boy with the crew cut. It was Ryan, of course. It took her a moment to recognize him; she wasn’t sure she would have known him if she hadn’t been expecting to see him. What she couldn’t understand was why his picture was just one of many, not the last in the row and not elevated to a position of honor, and why the picture next to his—a brown-haired boy with enormous ears—had a black X painted over his face. She pulled at Ryan’s picture because it felt like the right thing to do, to move it forward in line. It came easily off the wall and was much less heavy than the thick wooden frame made it appear. It was another twenty or so portraits—blond boys and buck-toothed boys and freckled Tom Sawyer types and a minority of minorities, a black boy and an Indian boy and a mestizo boy with a heavy Frida Kahlo unibrow and one weeping toddler—to the front of the room, to the sculpture, which she now saw depicted a dead boy on a funeral bier. There was indeed a door there, on the far side of the sculpture, but she didn’t go through it yet. First she tried to hang Ryan’s picture on the wall, but there were no nails, and though it stuck briefly by itself, it wouldn’t stay. She decided to put it on the sculpture, since that was a sort of pride of place, too, that would be different from the hundreds and hundreds of other pictures. She didn’t know what the significance might be, or how moving pictures around in a dream might make her real life and the real world bearable, but it felt necessary and right, and she half expected, as she set the picture down, balancing it against the very lifelike sculpture of the reclining boy, that she would wake up.
