“I know what they say about me,” Victor said.
Colin put his tongue between his teeth and bit down.
“The thing about rumors,” he said, “is that they start with a misunderstanding.”
Colin’s leg began to twitch and he pressed it into the floor mat. When would it happen? How long would Victor make him wait?
“From there it’s just an annihilation of trust.” He turned to him. “Trust is important.”
Colin nodded without taking his gaze off his knees.
“Don’t believe everything you hear, Colin. You’re too smart for that. Sometimes you just need to think things through for yourself.”
The car was not quite silent with the tires’ groan on the asphalt and the backseat’s creak as Paul rocked back and forth. Even the stuffy, heat-scorched air they shared seemed to be muttering, as though it doubted them.
“Okay?”
Colin moved his lips but his voice had deserted him. He coughed and tried again. “Okay.”
He began to recognize the houses around him—first one, then another, then every house on a block. His mother’s car was in the driveway and he grinned like an idiot. Had he prayed? Was this God? Victor pulled his car behind hers and turned to face him. “Here we are!”
“Thanks.” He clutched his backpack to his chest and reached for the door.
“Colin.”
He stopped. The door handle—this thing of cold steel—felt beautiful in his fingers.
“There are people who care about you,” Victor said. Colin wasn’t looking but it was impossible to imagine him not smiling that smile. “Have a happy Thanksgiving.”
He nodded. He hoped it looked like a genuine, thoughtful nod instead of what it was. The weak November sun tried to warm him as he retrieved Paul from the backseat. Colin didn’t look back until he heard the car roll out of the driveway. He didn’t know if you’d call it danger, or if this was anything like an escape, but his hands could barely guide the key into the lock.
The house was in a different state. Despite the sun’s reach through the uncovered windows, all the lights were on. Closets had been left open. There were bottles and cans all throughout the house—Endust, glass cleaner, countertop spray. A bucket of dull water waited in the middle of the kitchen, its mop reaching for the sink. The floor looked like two floors stuck together, one shiny and one dull. The whole thing looked like an art installation his father had taken them to in Chicago. Where was that, in the notebooks? Where was a list with Mop, Cleaning products, Half-mopped floor? Why hadn’t he cared enough to write the word Colin, or Heather? There were screwdrivers and old keys and batteries scattered on the countertops. He unshouldered his backpack and let it fall to the floor. The house smelled like lemons and ammonia.
His mother was scrubbing the carpet in her bedroom, singing beneath her breath. The words he couldn’t make out. It sounded more like a lullaby or a church hymn than something you’d hear on the radio. The closet was drawn open and Colin could see his father’s suits and shirts on the far right. He reached for a brown wool jacket, something you’d wear to a funeral. It felt scratchy and he rubbed his fingers to make the itch go away. Adjacent was a black dress shirt with grey stripes, and he saw his father wearing it. He didn’t know what day of the week it was, or even what month—only the garage door roaring closed as his father came into the kitchen, the smell of lasagna in the oven, Heather’s laughter from the living room. Colin looked at the other shirts, desperate for more, but they were only shirts—ones he had to imagine his father wearing, and that was just fake.
She glanced up. “You’re home.”
“Yeah.” He slipped his hands into his pockets. “What’re you doing?”
“There’s a stain here. I’ve been meaning to get rid of it for years.” She pulled a rag from a basket near the bed and pressed down as if the floor were wounded. “I came home sick.”
The dresser and the nightstands had been polished, wet with light from the bedside lamps. The bed itself looked like something from a furniture commercial, its pillows centered on each side, the comforter flipped so you could see the egg-blue sheets. He couldn’t remember if she’d left the sheets in a tangle since her sudden scramble for the basement, or if she’d made the bed a long time ago and this, right now, meant nothing.
“I forgot how sunny it gets in here this time of year,” she said. She balled up the rag and looked at the carpet. The wet spot was a shade darker but there was no stain, if it had ever been there to begin with. She nodded and threw the rag back into the basket. With a groan she got to her feet and turned to the closet, pushing clothes aside as though he wasn’t there.
“Therapy is going okay then?”
She paused to look at a green dress. “What do you mean?”
“I don’t know. You seem different.”
“Different how?” She shook her head and pushed the dress aside. Colin could see himself behind her in the mirror, and behind them both the window with its blanket of rusting sunlight. It occurred to him that maybe Victor hadn’t left, and that he was spying on them from the other side of the light. It really had been an escape, his leaving the car. At any second, Victor could have pulled into a hidden driveway or parking lot and tied Colin’s hands to the door, drawing from his boyhood whatever purity was left. He thought of the things Victor would’ve whispered in his ear as he held him down against the seat. That he was standing there, in front of his mother, with a growing longing for Victor set it all in stone: he deserved this pain, and more.
He touched his father’s pillow. “Are you gonna start sleeping in here again?”
“What?” She flipped another hanger down the rod, the screech of metal on metal enough to make him wince.
“Never mind.” In the mirror he got up from the bed and straightened his jeans. Boxed in like that, in the mirror’s frame with the sun’s orange rectangles thrown all around the room, he looked not like himself. He looked, he thought, like a boy who’d never done anything wrong. Like a boy his mother could actually love—not the deviant he’d become.
In victims of autism, scientists have observed a unique reaction to the world around them. Words appear useless, as does any expression of emotion—crying, yelling, laughing, putting one’s hand over one’s mouth. Six years ago, based on several decades of research, Dr. Ursula Alagóna made a previously overlooked deduction: “If their response to external stimuli is inconsistent with their surroundings, perhaps their surroundings are different from our own. Perhaps what they perceive to be the world is not what we perceive to be the world.” In the photo from the newspaper, Dr. Alagóna seems radiantly tired, with the glow of someone who’s just run a marathon. Perhaps Paul, his father had written, is in another world, and perhaps our speech, our methods of what we perceive to be communication, are to him nothing but white noise. I’ve often imagined the two of us sitting there, what his world must look like, what the darkness or blindness must be like, what the aloneness must be like, until he feels my hand in his hair or on the back of his neck. How does that world bloom the way mine blooms when he walks into a room? How does the sudden dissipation of loneliness look, in his world?
Colin remembered how Paul seemed a different Paul only when his father was there. His parents had always said they didn’t play favorites, but it was easy, now, to see that lie for what it was. It hadn’t occurred to him until then how lucky he was that his parent—the parent who understood the world to which Colin belonged—had survived.
“I’m gonna go hang out in my room,” he said, pausing in the doorway where the blue carpet met the white carpet. His eyes met hers, in the mirror, and he noticed hers were full of tears. “Have fun,” he said—the only words he seemed to know, right then—and he left.
That night, he decided that the only way to prove himself strong was to never again think of Andy, of Victor, of anyone else who inspired his body to rebel. It made the long weekend seem longer, his abstinence. His best defense was to remain at his mother’s
side. “You must have something you want to ask me,” she said as he lit her cigarette. She reached out to brush his hair into place.
He took a step back and glanced into the kitchen. “There’s lots of turkey left in the fridge.”
“I know.”
“Do you want a sandwich?”
She formed her lips into an O and sent a perfect ring of smoke sailing across the room. “That sounds lovely.”
With a nod he slipped into the kitchen and took the plate of leftovers from the fridge. She likes mustard and mayonnaise, he was thinking as he washed his hands. The soap dispenser was plugged, and when he pushed harder it shot across the counter, a long pearlescent strip. It kept his attention as he pressed himself against the cupboard.
Somehow, he made it to Monday. Diane went to work. Colin and Paul went to school. Heather went to the mall to fill out applications. It had snowed a little in the night and the grass looked covered by a grey moth-eaten blanket. Thanksgiving weekend was over, and as he went from class to class he remembered what it meant to pay attention and take notes. Andy’s voice, his smirk, his cologne—nothing had ever been so toxic, and Colin spent his lunch period in the library. He went the whole school day without eating.
The sight of his science teacher was no better. He too made Colin hurt the way only chaste bodies could hurt. Which fear was worse?—what the world would do when he closed his eyes, or what he would do to the world if he couldn’t stop staring at Victor’s crotch while he lectured about bodies maturing, of how they grow, of their industry, he said, their autonomy, their drive, their flawless systems? “The adolescent male must ejaculate several times per week to keep his sperm healthy,” he was saying, and as the other boys in the class snickered—he could hear Andy’s above all the rest like a favorite song in a crowded mall—Colin felt like tearing off his clothes and showing Victor just how healthy he could be. Or he could wait until the class cleared out, until it was just the two of them after school. He heard Victor’s footsteps cross the room as he described the passage of sperm through the body. Colin steadied his hand as he wrote SPERM in his spiral notebook, as though a clue to acing a test.
At the end of class Victor passed back a graded quiz from the week before. Colin was indifferent to the A+, but he noticed a note scribbled in the margin above his name. Thank you for the conversation last week. Anytime you need a ride, just ask. Colin flipped the page face down. He thought that maybe for some untold reason the bell would ring early, just this once. Victor smiled at him, and with a pirouette placed another quiz on another desk.
When the bell did ring, Colin remained. He folded the quiz into his backpack, pausing to read the note once more. He got to his feet and watched Victor erase vocabulary from the board: vas deferens, epididymis, seminal vesicle—all these things inside him he’d only begun to understand. The slamming of locker doors echoed from the hallway. It was hard to believe how fast the school could empty, like a spilled can of pop. He leaned against a desk and it groaned across the linoleum.
Victor hadn’t looked up. “Did you have a question?”
There was still time to back out. Colin shook his head, leaning on another desk. Another groan. “No,” he said. “I don’t think so. No.”
That same smile. “Well then, have a good night. You’ll have to hurry if you want to catch your bus.”
He nodded. The voices were fading again. His heart was pounding again. He shifted his weight from one leg to the other. The halls were quiet again. “I was gonna ask for a ride.”
Victor’s eyes were on his desk. Colin could see his tongue move along his teeth. He saw how he, too, shifted from one foot to the other. He began filling his briefcase with books and assignments. “You could still ask.”
Colin looked at Victor’s hands. His eyes passed to the desk beneath the briefcase, to the chair behind him, the front of his khakis.
“Go get your brother. I’ll be ready in a minute.”
When Victor delivered him to his house untouched, there was no way Colin could hide his disappointment. He thought of Victor’s hot breath on his neck, what it must feel like.
What made the night hard was solitude. Heather was out. Not long after his mother came home, she took Paul to the hospital. He’d tripped and landed on his finger—a simple dislocation, she said, but with a son who screams every time you touch him, what are you supposed to do? Colin wished he’d gone with her. Alone, it felt like he was sweating out a fever or infection. He tried a cold shower but only shivered in the stream thinking of someone watching, the naked boy they would see. For a half hour he sat on the front steps knowing he couldn’t try anything in public. Then it began to snow and he came inside. At eight o’clock he called his mother’s phone but it went straight to voicemail. With nothing left to do he went to bed, spending the next hour with another of his father’s notebooks. He held it close to his face so it blocked out everything else. When he felt tempted he put his free hand behind his head and thought of his virtue, how this might redeem him from everything he’d done. It was just after nine when his eyes grew tired. He slept in his jeans and pretended they were made of iron, that he couldn’t touch it even if he wanted to.
Whenever you thought hell was something you could understand, it did something new. The wings and burnt feathers of his father’s new frame were softer than anything he’d ever touched, and, gathered up in their embrace, Colin shivered. In hell the moon is a dark lump of red-splintered amber and its light is scattered on the grass and in that dream he closed his eyes to its splendor. He felt touched on all sides, touched all at once, and there was nothing he could do but moan his wordless prayers into the bedsheets. At five in the morning he changed out of his dampened briefs and buried the notebook at the bottom of his desk drawer. First he’d killed his father, and now this—a dream you couldn’t pretend was only a dream. He spent a long time staring at himself in the mirror, chastising and berating, shaking his head, making promises even he knew he couldn’t keep.
In ancient Rome, in colonial America, in twenty-first-century Thailand—since the invention of fire and iron—slaves have worn artful scars on their foreheads. A felony to harbor or feed a fugitive, a slave is forever dependent upon one person for food, water, and shelter. Should that fail, most would find it difficult to run without feet.
Even though she’d dismissed them, back in October, Tim’s words had followed her. They’d climbed into her car and sat in the backseat. “There’s a lot about you that would charm any man,” she said in her deepest voice, laughing at herself in the rearview mirror.
From then on her hands felt empty. She did what she could to occupy them, smoking more often, squeezing her fingers until they could hold a plush paper-wrapped filter between them, grinding her teeth until she could flick away the ash with a twitch of her thumb. There was always a song in her head and she tapped its rhythm against a tabletop or a steering wheel. Her knuckles never felt satisfied and she pushed her fingers forward even when they didn’t ask to be cracked. She touched people. It was impossible to get through a conversation without removing a piece of lint from someone’s sweater or asking to feel strange fabrics. When Colin came into the room she’d take up his hand and look at his fingers. “You still bite your nails,” she’d tell him, running the pad of her thumb along his sharp places where she knew her skin would snag. She hugged him when he stood at the stove, when he washed dishes. Not long after Halloween, Paul stayed home sick. As he lay on the couch she couldn’t help but part his hair how she’d always liked it. It wasn’t as if she expected anything new or miraculous, but she sighed when he groaned and slapped her hand away. All day she’d carried the touch of his hair on her fingertips, that tingling like she was wearing gloves of spidersilk.
It wasn’t until the first week of December that she realized what she was looking for. Cleaning the bathroom on a Sunday afternoon, she found a disheveled copy of Penthouse in the rack next to the toilet. Before she threw it away she remembered the night she and Alan had read
each other letters, squinting in the candlelight. That was so long ago, she realized—back when he was still a good man, someone who smiled at her more than he didn’t, someone who resembled the man she thought she’d loved. She locked the bathroom door and tried to conjure his voice, but she didn’t recognize any of the stories. It wasn’t until the air in the house changed, the front door drawing in an outside breath, that she realized she’d read half the magazine. She felt dizzy when she shoved it down into the bag, covering it with a gardening catalog, and as she left the bathroom her armpits prickled with cold sweat.
She drew a bath that night and was dragging a razor across her shin when she began to shiver. There was nothing new—the same old band of flesh flanked by shaving cream—but the water murmured when she rinsed the razor; it lapped against her breasts when she returned it to her leg. Her entire calf was tingling as though just woken from some anesthetized sleep. Her fingers felt stiff and she bent them back against the tub’s fiberglass wall. Only one knuckle responded, but it rang out like a gunshot and sent pinpricks galloping down her spine. There were little white crests on the ripples in the bathwater. She turned on the faucet to silence herself.
Now, in the last days of December, she’d made a decision. Not something for New Year’s—not an arbitrary promise or a vague resolution. Instead it felt like breaking a promise, as though she’d been good for so long and now deserved to treat herself to this one thing. That she’d been alone for over a year without the thought exploding inside her—wasn’t that a mark of how she’d grown, over time? Hadn’t she been the exemplary, chaste wife?
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