by Austin Bunn
“Oh, come on, Jed,” Henry says. “He’s just goofing around.”
“You just called me a drugged-up monster. I heard you.”
Henry sighs. He and Jed, the oldest and the youngest, are the two last boys to be picked for the team, and they need to band together. “We’re all trying here,” Henry says, but trying for what? To be themselves, finally, and it is goddamn exhausting.
“I’m going to take a walk,” Jed says.
It’s plainly a bad idea, but Henry wants his time with Van, and he won’t stop him.
“Knock yourself out,” Van says.
Once Jed is gone—they listen for his footsteps on the stairs—Henry whispers, “You see what this place is like.”
Van lies on the bed, against Henry, oblivious to his power. “Maybe it’s good for you,” he says. “We both know you need to get over me.” And the shock of its delivery detonates. All these months, Van knew his secret desire and now speaks it aloud like a boring headline.
Henry wills himself to grab for what he loves. He rests his hand on Van’s knee, the closest he can come. “I don’t think that’s true.”
Van pats Henry’s hand. “I’m on the wrong team, buddy.”
Henry feels the moment between them dilating, narrowing to a point. “I don’t think you’re on anybody’s team.”
Van lifts Henry’s hand off his thigh and deposits it on the mattress. “And now I will avail myself of a libation,” he says, and heads out. Henry hammers his pillow. The question that he came up here to answer—who can I love?—is not a question after all. It is an impossibility. The downstairs phone rings and continues to ring. Henry yells for someone to answer it. Finally, the ringing stops, and in the silence, he hears music.
Downstairs, the men are missing, but the door into Spike and Bodi’s private area is open. From inside comes the murmur of voices and a heavy muddle of incense. He enters, through a long hallway, which opens to a living room where Van and the others have collected, sipping from coffee cups. The room is cramped, more like a passageway converted into a parlor, with Van smoking a joint in an overbuilt recliner in the center of the room, like a cockpit for television consumption. Ronnie attends to the stereo, setting a Judy Collins song on the turntable, while Doug, sways back and forth on a loveseat, mouthing the lyrics.
“Welcome, Chief,” Van says coolly, and offers him a toke. Henry grits his teeth and tries to stare accountability into him.
“This is a really bad idea,” Henry says.
Ronnie combs through the LPs. “This really might be the gayest record collection on the planet.”
“Is there any Cher?” Doug says with his eyes closed. “Please let there be Cher.”
As a stage manager, Henry is known for his quiet control and firm hand, but now he sees the fantasy of it. He has no intrinsic authority, only what is given to him. So he takes a seat on the couch next to Doug and surrenders. When Doug passes the joint, Henry takes a single, ferocious inhale, welcoming the chance for a new personality.
“So Van, if you’re not Henry’s boyfriend,” Ronnie asks, “are you anybody’s boyfriend?”
Van grins and there’s this one crazy tooth that can still break Henry’s loyal heart. It’s as if he wants to pass here, among them. Ronnie swings around to Van’s side and gives Van a shoulder massage with a boldness Henry can only imagine. “You know you have great hair,” Ronnie says. “It’s muy Pirates of Penzance.” The recliner shifts back another notch, setting Van more prone.
“I took a Body Electric class once,” Ronnie says.
“Is that where they call it massage but you just end up jerking each other off?” Doug asks. It is, based on the longing in his face, a genuine question. Henry’s thoughts drift toward a class that is also, somehow, quasi-public group sex, and how anything gets done.
Ronnie dismisses Doug. “People think that because people are ashamed of their own body’s capacity for pleasure.”
“So it is about jerking each other off.”
“Jesus,” Ronnie says.
“Whatever you’re doing feels awesome,” Van says and begins, with drunken volition, a story about his ten-year-old son, his soccer games, and his growing pains, “leg cramps that got so bad he’d just ball up and cry.”
“You’re a dad?” Ronnie says.
Van marvels at a private happiness. “Yeah. You should try it. It’s amazing.”
Ronnie asks, “Where’s he now?”
Van doesn’t answer, seems to fall into himself. Ronnie’s hands pinch and knead his shoulders in what is a definitively nonerotic, fully half-assed massage. Ronnie mouths to Henry, Oh my God, did he die?
Henry sits up, summoned back into the present moment. “Look, just leave him alone.”
“What’d I do?” Ronnie says.
“Can’t you see he’s upset?”
But when Ronnie retracts his hand, Van grabs it and keeps it on him. He swipes his face and replies, “It’s fine. Keep going.”
Ronnie goes back to the massage and Van groans, a sound in their years of friendship Henry has never heard him make. With that single sound, the room suddenly seems more dense, a hot close dream. A tiny metallic clack: Doug undoing his belt. “That’s right,” Doug says, his eyes jumping all over Van’s body, like he’s checking to see how pieces of machinery come together. He kneels at Van’s side and rubs the inseam of Van’s pants and Van flinches.
“Just relax,” Doug says.
“What are you doing?” Henry asks quietly.
Doug pulls Van’s shirt up out of his waist and Henry catches a glimpse of a white blade of flesh at Van’s groin before he closes his eyes.
He hears the rustle and give of the leather recliner, the rake of Ronnie’s fingers. The teeth of a zipper giving way. It would be so easy for Henry to join. He’s close enough to feel the transgression with his hands. “Fuck yeah,” Doug says over and over, in a hungry loop.
He can’t watch Van be taken, fed upon. There are certain rules to things. Aren’t there rules? Henry walks calmly, decisively, out of the room, taking the stairs two a time, back to his room, where he sits on the bed, disoriented, his blood thumping. He throws open the window and gulps in the cold. Across the lawn, Jed, in his orange coat, treks in the fresh snow at the perimeter of the house lights. Henry calls out to him, the other exile, but Henry discovers he has nothing to say. So he waves hello. Jed waves back, sweetly, like they’re two boys departing from each other after an evening of play. Then he moves further and further out until Henry can no longer see him at all.
Henry wakes up in his clothes. He stares at Jed’s bed across the room until he realizes that it is immaculate, the way Jed had left it the night before. He never came back from his walk. The morning assembles itself, finally, as an emergency.
He searches the other rooms, the bathroom. Nothing. He’s not inside. Downstairs, Henry finds Van on the living room floor, cocooned in a crocheted blanket. His shoes and socks are off and Henry sees on Van’s foot a little meadow of hair split by a scar, a scar about which Henry will never know the story.
Henry nudges him awake. “What?” Van asks, bleary, and Henry stares at his face, slack from sleep, the closest he’ll ever come. And he feels nothing, the end of an idea. It’s not a kiss Henry wants, but a chance to be known, fully, in this life.
Henry says, “You need to leave.”
“Now?” Van says.
“Now.”
Bodi enters the living room and gives Henry a noncommittal nod. He’s not angry, or at least he’s oblivious; the men must have cleaned up, erased the night from the room. They will get away with it. Nothing will be noticed. Bodi goes to the front window to stare at the feet of snow piled on the lawn, the heap of the night’s weather.
“Everything went all right last night?” Bodi asks.
“Jed’s missing,” Henry says. “He went for a walk and never came back.”
Bodi’s face falls. “Oh, Christ, my fucking insurance.”
He rings the house b
ell and Doug and Ronnie collect in the foyer, purposefully missing each other’s eyes. “The kid went AWOL?” Doug asks. “Could have called that.”
Bodi asks them to go looking, and Henry’s first to be outside, happy to be free of the house. He punches through the snow, going to the trees, where he last saw Jed. At the edge of the forest, he turns back to look at the other men, splintering across the lawn. Van’s at his car, wiping the snow from the windshield, preparing to go. They see each other, for a moment, a final view, until Henry turns away. By Monday, Van will have quit and be moving to Florida.
About fifty yards into the trees, Henry comes across Jed’s body, propped against a spruce. At some point in the night, Jed unbuttoned his orange jacket, with nothing underneath. No shirt, just his skin exposed to the air and covered by a light ramp of snow. Henry kneels beside him, and Jed’s eyes open and find him. His face is glazed, but he’s alive. Inside the lining of Jed’s jacket, tucked in the pocket, is the spray paint can with a red cap.
“Leave me here,” Jed says, barely over a whisper. “I’m not right.”
Henry takes the cylinder of paint from the jacket and palms it. The metal is frigid to the touch, nearly empty, and the ball clacks inside. Henry tosses the can into the woods, as far as he can. It’s a good throw, a good release. “You’re coming with me,” Henry says, committing to it. Then he curls his arms around the boy and lifts.
P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .*
About the Author
* * *
Meet Austin Bunn
A Conversation with Austin Bunn
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* * *
Austin Bunn Recommends
About the author
Meet Austin Bunn
AUSTIN BUNN is a fiction writer, playwright, screenwriter, and former journalist. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Zoetrope, The New York Times Magazine, Wired, Best American Science and Nature Writing, The Pushcart Prize, and elsewhere. He cowrote the screenplay to Kill Your Darlings (Sony Pictures Classics), starring Daniel Radcliffe, Dane DeHaan, and Michael C. Hall, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. He is a graduate of Yale University and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and a recipient of a Michener-Copernicus Fellowship. Currently, he teaches at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.
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A Conversation with Austin Bunn
A dialogue with Austin Bunn about The Brink and his writing process. Questions were posed by his editor at Harper Perennial.
How did you latch on to the idea of “the brink” as one that would guide your work?
Like millions of us growing up in the late 1980s, I grew up terrified of nuclear war. Nevil Shute’s riveting novel On the Beach—about survivors of WWIII living out their last days in Australia—was bedtime reading. In the era of mutually assured destruction, I was convinced I’d never make it to adulthood. Eventually, I got distracted by Robert Cormier novels, dream research (aka watching my best friend sleep and taking notes), and filming new scenes for a horror film called Grondak IV on VHS. My insecurities became more social, suburban. By the time I was an awkward, sarcastic, undeniably annoying teenager with an Ogilvy Home Perm (maybe—probably—yep, gay), I was discovering there was life on the other side of my anxiety—the annihilation of one version of yourself didn’t mean that you were over. That link has drawn me to stories about the resilience and transformations that happen at that moment when one way of life ends and another begins. I was always somehow jealous of the fiction writers who seemed capable of deciding on a theme or topic and exploring it prismatically (as in Adam Haslett’s You Are Not a Stranger Here, or Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad—both tremendous models). But my imagination just wouldn’t organize itself that way. So while I never set out to write stories about these “brinks,” I just discovered, when I read them all together, they circled around the same theme. Our obsessions reveal us.
What do you make of the apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic trend that has taken fiction, and particularly young adult fiction, by storm? How do you think this collection fits into that trend?
I spent seventh and eighth grade writing apocalyptic short stories—the apocalypse was the only thing I really felt comfortable writing about. And as far as I could tell, the apocalyptic sublime had long been literary gold: Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, Shackleton’s Antarctic misadventures, Stephen King’s The Stand and the Bachman Books, Lovecraft’s “At the Mountains of Madness,” Camus’s The Plague, Thomas Disch’s The Genocides, Harlan Ellison’s “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream.”. . . One thing fiction is good for is giving your mind’s eye something truly terrifying to think about: making your way through a dark Holland Tunnel full of corpses; life inside a machine that has taken over the planet; or an endless walk that is both a game and death march.
It’s the notion of a teenaged (and often female) protagonist in these newest scenarios—in a world of unparented other teens—that strikes me as genuinely novel and honors the anxieties of the echo-boom population of new readers. What I appreciate the most is their metabolism: the trust in pure story and propulsion. I like to think the stories in The Brink share some of the unnerving appeal of an off-kilter world and the raw nerve of change.
What is your draft process? Where do these stories begin?
When I begin drafting, I start with voice—the dramatist in me hears a story first: I think about register, attack, urgency. Chuck Palahniuk (and he would credit his mentor Tom Spanbauer for this) talks about “burnt tongue”—the idea that your protagonist enters the fiction needing to talk, having just survived something. For me, the first-person story was my starting point. The testimonial tradition (in stories like “Ledge” and “The End of the Age Is Upon Us”) has a relationship to the monologue in ways that I’m still understanding and exploring. Both my parents were language teachers, and it’s voice that grabs me first. That said, I’m a traditionalist when it comes to story structure. I believe fiction’s job is to show us some kind of encounter with difficulty and ultimately a choice, a sense of agency. It might be a limitation of mine, but I want to think stories do something for us, that we read for a reason, which is to understand transition. The short story is the ideal form for a distillation of those elements. So I hammer and hammer on story, trying to grasp where the narrative wants to go. And once I find an ending, then I spend days making the trip as vivid as I can.
One of the big questions about story collections for authors is know when they are done. What made you decide the book was finished?
Honestly? Failure. I had a novella I’d been working on for months that became years that became a file-cabinet drawer’s worth of notes, drafts, excisions, drawings (seriously), carefully curated encouraging feedback from friends that I consulted during my creative melancholias. . . . Screenwriters talk about “breaking a story,” and I like the resonance of that, that the narrative is wild and uncontrollable, and you need to rein it in. This one story just wouldn’t break. I had long imagined this novella as the capstone piece to the collection, but when I found myself revising its first page for the nth time, I finally decided to abandon it and see if the book could stand without it. Now I don’t even miss it. Letting it go was the most freeing thing I’ve ever done. I highly recommend it.
You’re a playwright, screenwriter, and fiction writer and have worked as a journalist. How do all these genres influence your fiction?
I’ve always been promiscuous genre-wise, and I can’t help but think that’s that part of the zeitgeist: novelist David Benioff writing for television, journalists like Mark Boal moving into film, filmmakers writing books. . . . It’s all writing. I always admired the writers with range—Joan Didion, John Sayles, Jess Walter, all of whom write nonfiction, novels, films. My own creative instincts tend to go to scene writing, even as a journalist, and in that way, they spill in a variety of directions. Increasingly, I’ve come to find the cons
olations of prose—the things that books do that other forms such as film don’t, like consciousness and interiority—a deep artistic reward. But one thing screenwriting teaches is economy, and how to have indefatigable energy and openness when it comes to revising. You have to keep showing up. You just have to. Then, one day, you look up and you’re done.
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Austin Bunn Recommends
AMONG DOZENS of astoundingly good writers I might recommend—Kevin Brockmeier, Annie Dillard, Jess Walter, Sam Lipsyte, David Mitchell—I include these as potentially unexpected inspirations for the book in your hand.
Blindness, José Saramago: An absolutely mesmerizing speculative fiction about an epidemic of blindness that overtakes a South American city.
Selected Stories, Philip K. Dick: The metaphysical dilemmas, wrapped up in utterly accessible and driving science fiction.
War Fever, J. G. Ballard: What I love most about Ballard’s heady, sinister stories is their formal restlessness. In one story, a series of reports from within an unmanned space station turns into a Borgesian exploration of infinite scale. In another, the answers to a questionnaire reveal an assassination plot that boggles the mind.
Close Range, Annie Proulx: For muscle tone.
Childhood’s End, Arthur C. Clarke: The kind of book you read one way as a teenager and another way as an adult. It’s wickedly difficult to craft such tectonic shifts in perception, but this book has one for the ages.
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Acknowledgments
Deepest thanks to the editors who helped me with these stories: Hannah Tinti, Michael Ray, Andrew Snee, C. Michael Curtis. To the persevering Nathaniel Jacks at InkWell and the wonderful Emily Cunningham at HarperCollins, who believed. To the teachers along the way, Don Faulkner, Jackson Taylor, Sam Lipsyte, Samantha Chang, Jill McCorkle, Margot Livesey, Adam Haslett, and others. To friends and readers for encouragement and bullshit meters: Caitlin Horrocks, John Krokidas, Brian Leung, Josh Spanogle, Yahlin Chang, Kevin Moffett, Matthew Vollmer, Corinna Vallianatos, Mara Naselli, Nina Siegel, Nic Brown, Leslie Jamison, Anna Solomon, Michael Balliro. To my family, Colin, Mary, April, Mom, Slinky, and Bob.
