Orient

by Christopher Bollen

Paul pinched his lips before he spoke. “You know nothing about your parents? Who they were, what happened before they gave you up? I mean, you must have some idea, right?”

  “No, nothing—not a name or a reason,” Mills replied. “And I never asked, either.” The truth was, Mills had asked. For several years, on his birthday, he had gone to his caseworker and his counselor to ask for information, but they’d always shrugged while examining his file, UNKNOWN being their only response. He had tried other routes, with more enlightening results, but Mills liked Paul too much to burden this first night with sad stories. “I’m not a wounded kid, you know,” he said. “It could have been worse. I learned how to tie my shoes same as everybody. If you don’t know it, you don’t miss it. And I had love around me most of the time.” That was the second lie he’d told Paul Benchley in the past two minutes.

  Paul nodded, as if he understood. “Well,” he said, and let that be the final word. They drifted toward the front rooms, Paul extinguishing each light behind them, and Mills felt the impulse to wipe his feet when he reached the hallway, as if his shoes were soaked in a past he didn’t want to track through the rest of the house. Paul placed his hand on the banister leading upstairs.

  “I forgot about the picnic,” he said as Mills lifted his duffel bag over his shoulder. “I hope that wasn’t awkward for you. Meeting all of those neighbors in one fell swoop.”

  “I don’t think your neighbor likes me. The mom,” Mills said.

  “Oh.” Paul touched his shoulder delicately. “Pam’s harmless. And I called ahead to let them know you were coming. Some people out here think the world ends at the causeway and anyone who manages to drive over it is trying to steal their souls. Or better yet, their views of the Sound. But most Orient people are pretty nice—if you answer enough of their questions and don’t give them too much to gossip about.”

  “I won’t tell them about your back rooms,” Mills promised.

  Paul laughed, clapping his hands together. “That’s not what I was thinking of. But thanks.”

  They climbed the dark staircase—perhaps there was no switch on the ground floor, or perhaps Paul preferred the blue trail of moonlight that poured across the upstairs landing—to the colder second floor. Mills could feel the wooden beams shift under his sneakers, the house adjusting to his unfamiliar weight. Paul navigated the hall with quieter footsteps, walking past closed doors and less amateur seascapes framed in gold, limping slightly, as if reminded of a knee injury that was still healing.

  Paul opened the last door and led him into a small bedroom. A different slant of moonlight, watery and white, spilled from the single window. The room’s ceiling slumped downward, and cobwebs grazed Mills’s forehead. He dropped his bag on the mattress, stiff from disuse, maybe never used. Maybe Mills was Paul’s first guest. He noticed a small door and opened it, expecting a closet until he looked inside and realized it was bigger than that, though too small for a bed. It was a room with no obvious purpose, and with almost nothing inside—not a lamp or a desk or a bookshelf. The only decoration on the wall was a poster of a lighthouse, a squat, doom-windowed structure blistered by a sunset of pinks and grays. He called to Paul, who had taken a folded green towel out of the closet and set it on the dresser, placing a plastic-wrapped toothbrush on top of it.

  “Weird room,” Mills said, stepping farther into the tiny chamber. He felt his left foot give way, dropping into a bowl-shaped recess in the floor.

  “Isn’t it?” Paul leaned against the doorframe, hands shoved into his armpits. “It’s a birthing room.”

  “A what?” Mills jumped from the hole, as if the basin might still hold amniotic remains.

  “A birthing room. Women used to deliver babies here.”

  Mills shivered, he didn’t know why, some childish spook about a room where long-dead babies had been pulled from long-dead mothers. They didn’t have birthing rooms in California.

  “Jesus—is this where you were born?”

  “No, of course not.” Paul’s crossed arms suddenly read as a sign of rebuke. “But these were quite common in nineteenth-century homes. Whole lives would begin and end in one house. The purpose of a parlor, for example, was for the viewing of a dead body, for relatives to gather for their final visitation. It was only when entrepreneurs realized they could make money on death as well as life that the function of the home parlor was outsourced to the business of the funeral parlor. In fact, when death finally left the home parlor, the name of the room was changed to—”

  “A living room,” Mills guessed. “I never thought of that.”

  “I know that might sound like progress, but from an architect’s perspective, I think it’s pretty sad. No one is born or dies at home anymore. Now we just live in temporary units, made of shitty drywall as interchangeable as renters who tape up a few pictures and call a place home. There’s nothing real about living anymore, is there? Every decade less and less.” Paul wiped his mouth, and Mills stepped back into the bedroom. He was too tired for more architectural wisdom, another lecture on the wonders of doorknobs, the majesty of the hinge. There’d be time to hear them tomorrow. “Don’t worry,” Paul said smiling as Mills snaked by him. “It’s not haunted.”

  “Oh, I don’t believe in ghosts.”

  Paul nodded. “You’re all set then? Have everything you need?” He retreated into the hall, saying good night as he shut the door.

  Mills pulled off his shirt and slid out of his jeans, peeling off his white socks and tucking them into the cups of his shoes. In his underwear, his skin was blue, his nipples black as the moles that dotted his stomach. He slipped into the sharp bedsheets and stared out the window at the branches of an oak tree whisking against the glass. In just one day, he had gotten so far from New York. If he held his breath he could hear the water slapping against the shore. He wasn’t sure if coming to Orient had been the right move. Part of him wanted to hitchhike back across the body of the woman on the map, racing toward her head to crawl through her eyes and return to those acquaintances whose nights were just beginning and wouldn’t end until he awoke. Those places without birthing rooms or jungles of dead people’s possessions—that seemed more like living to him, no matter what Paul said, maybe more so for all their drywall and borrowed furniture, so that the living stood out. He thought of his friend Marcella with her chubby scorched fingers and mmmmm-ing breaths, his friend Lucas with his unbuttoned shirts and hamster-cage ribs rocking over his knees.

  An erection jabbed in his underwear. Out of habit, Mills rotated on his stomach and balled the sheet against it. His penis was darker than the rest of his skin, as if permanently stained in ink. He had been circumcised at birth, not sloppily like some men he had seen, but expertly cut, as smooth and round as a bicycle helmet. Why had he been circumcised? Had his parents requested it, out of religion or hygiene or tradition? Or was it because a doctor asked and they were too stunned or indifferent to care? It was the only clue his body carried of his birth, which, for all he knew, had taken place in a room as empty as the one ten feet from his bed.

  He pushed his hips slowly against the sheet, wondering about Tommy next door. Was he circumcised? Here was a secret Mills kept: at nineteen, he was still a virgin. Only technically, and only concerning the opposite sex. He had been with men, and that’s what he preferred; he’d been certain of it for years and more so every day, with every erection pointing like a compass needle on its own magnetic pull. He pictured Tommy next door, maybe gay, likely not, exotic to him for being so unexotic, his short blond hair only a few shades deeper than his skin, his eyes dark and sunken and blue.

  Before his mother had called him away, Tommy had asked him a zillion questions about New York—did he live downtown, had he gone to clubs, was he a skateboarder, a gutter punk, some sort of artist, did he smoke pot, was it true that people still flinched every time they heard a loud noise, expecting an explosion—the whole time standing confidently on his parents’ property, with the toughness of every spoiled suburban kid who
imagined himself a gangster in his own front yard. Tommy had also asked about his earring—did it hurt—nodding to the stud in Mills’s right lobe with its small, gold cross. Tommy seemed so intrigued by the pain it must have caused that Mills didn’t have the heart to tell him he’d gotten it after a five-minute wait at a Sacramento strip mall, that eleven-year-old girls bore the puncture without much more than an oh. Did it hurt? Yes, and that’s why he did it. Tommy was tall and wide-hipped, but Mills couldn’t tell what kind of body lay underneath the black T-shirt and jeans, what kind of person, what kind of smell or ability to reach over in the dark. There were certain things a person could only learn by touching someone else.

  The bed started to creak against the floor, and Mills forced himself to flip onto his back. No wonder men learned to use their hands. Mills didn’t know how far away Paul’s bedroom was, so he pulled his underwear over his waist and collapsed his arms on his chest. He stared out the window and tried not to think about Manhattan. Maybe curiosity about Tommy was reason enough to stay in Orient, although Mills assumed teenagers with extremely normal existences were probably hopelessly disappointing in that respect. No, he would stay in Orient for himself. He smoothed his fingers over his chest and shut his eyes. Mills was still young enough to believe that his body, with so much of it uncharted, was the only home he would ever need.

  CHAPTER 4

  Gentle rocking, a splash in the water.

  He came awake, drunk. Cold water choked him, salt guttering through his mouth and nose. He treaded, swimming, his hands clawing black liquid like a cat climbing a curtain just to keep his head above the surface. He felt the slapping waves of the bay against his cheeks and his heavy pant pockets weighing him down.

  A boat groaned nearby, as a body pulled itself out of the water and slumped into its hold. He remembered sitting in the boat with a bottle of gin wedged between his thighs, as they steered into the harbor. Beefeater, too expensive not to drink. He must have blacked out. They must have capsized. “Hey,” he shouted. “I’m still out here.” He lifted his arms into the night air, but a second without treading brought him under. He gulped salt and paddled his hands to bring him back to the surface. Something was wrong with his legs. They weren’t kicking right. “Hey,” he called again. Nearby, waves lapped against the boat’s hull. Stars melted around him, little broken shimmers. Water plugged his ears.

  “Wait,” he screamed, panicked now. “Get me the fuck out of here, would you?” He tried to bend his knees, but the motion jerked him under. He shut his eyes and squirmed his fingers down his uncooperative legs. He felt rope knotted around his calves, slippery as seaweed, too tight to unpick. Must have gotten tangled when they overturned. He tried to kick the rope clear. His ankles scraped together but wouldn’t liberate. Liberation, babies, paddy fields so orange they were kindling on a bonfire, all that air, all that oxygen burning up. It was an old memory, too old for longing or repentance and not a good one either.

  He shot his arms through the surface and pulled oxygen into his lungs. He saw the causeway one hundred feet to the west, strung like a tree branch in white glowing lights. He tried swimming toward it. The rope tightened and wrenched him into the black. He swam in the opposite direction, toward the deeper bay, but the rope yanked him back for another mouthful. He was caught in the eye of a clock and made rounds to all the numbers but couldn’t break through them, couldn’t go anywhere but straight up. He was punching the water at his neck now, the sleeves of his sweater weighted with what he punched. And, through the headache of sea and gin, he sensed the first fatigue of his muscles.

  He heard an oar slip into the water. “Help,” he yelled. He could hear himself as loud as day. “For fuck’s sake, I’m stuck. Help me.” A shadow rose from the boat’s bow, alerted to his calls. The beam of a flashlight flooded his face. “Thank god,” he sputtered, squinting through the shine. He paddled toward the light, which beaconed a few feet beyond his leash. “Thought I lost you. Got my legs wrapped in a rack rope. Gimme a knife or your keys or something. Hurry.”

  The light from the flashlight was tender, almost warm, and he saw the motion of an arm reach over the side. But the arm launched a streak of glass, and the bottle struck him on the forehead, knocking him under with a blunt jolt. He floated downward, stunned by the blow. When he swam to the surface, coughing and spitting, the light returned to his face, a light that took him a minute to realize was receding, fading like a sunset clocking out. “Wait,” he shouted, “you can’t do this. You can’t leave me here.” The light clicked off, and the boat careened away.

  The gin bottle bobbed just beyond his reach. It went south with the tide. He dove under the water, tugging frantically on the rope, the only thing he could hold on to, the only thing that wouldn’t give him up. For a second, he laughed, still drunk, this is a bad dream, and when it wasn’t, exhausted from pulling, he tipped his head back on the water’s surface, the wind on his nose blowing from ocean to land. I won’t pick a last memory, he reasoned. If I don’t, I’ll stay here until somebody finds me. I’ll wait all night if I have to for the sun. They need me. They’ll notice I’m gone and come looking. Fish slithered around him. The stars moved in and out. He would remember how they moved, closer and then farther back, pushing at planets, wiping his coldness away, as his head dipped forward, and the night came in.

  CHAPTER 5

  At 5:58 A.M., the mist rolled off the water and into the tall brown grasses like steam off a gutted animal. There was the smell of life in it, the algae and the wheat, and the sun was low and waxy in the sky, rolling the mist white and not yet strong enough to burn it clear. Bryan Muldoon crouched in the scrub alongside Ted Herrig, both of them camouflaged in faded tan jackets, mint green cargo pants, and black rubber boots. Chip and Alistair crouched a ways behind them, the tops of their hats poking above the grass blades. Bryan had his prize in sight, a white-tailed doe eating the sweeter grasses thirty feet away, her mouth chewing lazily while her neck lifted by the urgency of her eyes, searching for anything that would cause her to run. She dipped her head down, content. Bryan drew his hand up and pointed at her to signal Mine!, but it was still 5:58 on his wristwatch and the legal state hunting hours began at six o’clock.

  Bryan was a man of principle, an adherent to the minute details of regulations most other, lesser men breached. If he weren’t here, even Ted would have rounded 5:58 to the hour, pulled the bowstring to his ear, the whole weapon wired like a mosquito hungry for blood, and taken the shot. But shave two minutes, and soon it’s twenty, then an hour, and then the rules don’t matter anymore, nothing but empty vessels tossing in the waves. The idea of floating out there in a sea of meaningless rules, where latitudinal and longitudinal lines tangled like seaweed, made him queasy.

  His friend Ted was the geography teacher at Sycamore High, a man, like Bryan, who had a wife and three children, although his wife, Sarakit, was of Thai descent, and his children had been adopted from China, Vietnam, and Cambodia. Ted and Bryan served together on the Orient Historical Board, and they had hunted side by side for more than twenty years. Long ago, they had made a pact that if anything bad were to happen, each would look out for the other’s children. As a result, Bryan was always auditioning Ted for the role of surrogate father, and he didn’t necessarily approve of his friend’s laid-back approach to life. Weren’t Asian kids supposed to be the hope for America’s future? Ted’s children were blithe and style-conscious and destined for careers in fashion or TV, the kind of junk that blighted the Muldoons’ living room during Theo’s Saturday morning cartoon binge.

  “Go on,” Ted whispered. “She’s there for you.” The doe craned up, her ragged ears turning 280 degrees to pick up predatory vibrations. Bryan wrenched his eyes at Ted, code for silence. The 8 on his watch changed to 9. Ted’s watch already read 6:01, but Ted didn’t set his watch to International Atomic Time like Bryan did every morning before a hunt. International Atomic Time was based on the readings of three hundred atomic clocks located in sixty labo
ratories around the world; Bryan took comfort in the idea of those clocks, buried in disaster-proof orbs all over the globe, army-guarded and ticking to the same precise heartbeat. Time was the single asset that every country, every market, depended on. Bryan so admired those atomic clocks that for his eldest son’s last four birthdays he had given him books about time and state-of-the-art GPS watches. His son had long stopped feigning gratitude, throwing the gift boxes on the sofa in defeat, his face as blank as a watch face without hands. It was an expression all parents understood in the vicinity of unwrapped, unwanted presents: You don’t get me, do you? it said.

  Another venture that held no interest for his son was hunting. Bryan had taught him the basics of the longbow, but on their single father-son hunting expedition two years ago, Tommy had brought along his iPhone and yawned each time he aimed and released an arrow, without enough velocity to puncture a balloon. Bryan assumed he would come around, but that window was rapidly closing, shutting them off from each other, a glass divider through which they could still see each other but not speak or touch. Had he failed as a father? Lisa and Theo loved him dearly, he was sure of that. But Tommy was a remote province in the Muldoon kingdom, accepting orders, attending the necessary functions, but without any of the patriotism that united them as a clan. Sometimes, late at night, Bryan peered in at Tommy asleep in his bed, and his eyes would water at the sight of his son, not because he loved him so much but because he knew him so little. He found himself getting emotional over Tommy far more often than he ever did over Lisa’s stack of college brochures or the buttery swirls on the back of Theo’s head. If only he could have a chance to try it all again with his son, to shake Tommy awake and show him what they were missing, what little time they had left.

  His watch read 5:59. He locked the bow in the shaft and waited.

  The joints in his knee tingled. The weight of crouching caused the arthritic pain in his ankles to shoot through his calves. He was getting too old for the squatting posture required for hunting. He’d soon have to give up the longbow for the easier January muzzleloader gun season, or take up the minimal torture of fishing in the bay. Bluefish instead of venison steaks on the grill. That would be the first outward sign of old age, which so far had been contained to his body. His wife had noticed it before he had, in the sinewy droop of his arms and legs. And so had Holly Drake in that embarrassing finale of their six-month affair, when he couldn’t manage an erection in the motel bed, when his penis bobbed, expanded an inch, shyly refused to venture farther, and finally deflated against his testicles as if in spite.