Orient

by Christopher Bollen

  “Have you two met Mills?” He glanced back and beckoned him onto the porch, apologizing to him with his eyes.

  “Mills, this is Ted and Sarakit Herrig. They’re neighbors from over on—”

  Sarakit gripped his hand, keeping his fingers buried between her smooth palms. “I’ve heard so much about you,” she said. “I was wondering when we’d meet. It’s nice to have visitors in the colder months. It’s so gorgeous out here in autumn, and most people don’t stay to appreciate it.”

  Ted extended a hand, giving Mills an excuse to pull away from his wife.

  “Ted and Sarakit are on the Orient Historical Board,” Paul said. “I was just giving Mills a lecture in local politics.”

  “I hope you said nice things,” Sarakit said. She dipped her head. “You should come too,” she told Mills. “It’s important to get the youth involved. Like Obama.” She smiled at Mills as if she’d just mentioned a pop star that bridged generations. “Fang is coming. That’s our oldest. He’s almost getting to be your age.”

  “Sarakit, he’s only fourteen,” Ted said.

  “I know how old our son is,” she sang from the side of her mouth. She returned her attention to Paul. “So we’ll see you. We’ll count on your being there.”

  They backed down the porch, lost in the night before they reached the sidewalk. Paul closed the door and found his empty wineglass, shaking his head as he poured a last sip and drank it back.

  “Not everyone in Orient has two minds. The historical board certainly doesn’t.” He gathered the plates, twittering his thumbs on the china. “Magdalena’s not dead a day, and they’re already out lobbying. Don’t let the quiet of this town fool you. It’s all just—”

  Mills had stopped listening. He was looking at a pale face in the dining room window. Tommy blew a perfect smoke ring against the storm glass.

  Mills feigned exhaustion and went up early to his bedroom. He waited until he heard Paul turn on the shower at the end of the hall, then put Jeff Trader’s book in his back pocket and closed his bedroom door behind him. Thinking he could impress Tommy, or at least seize a minute’s focus in the screaming playground of his mind, he told himself that he wasn’t betraying Beth by showing him the journal—that Tommy, the self-declared keeper of Orient secrets, might be able to shed some light on its contents. He tiptoed down the stairs, slipped quietly through the first and second door, and stepped out into the cold. House lights beamed onto driveways and porches across the street, safety lights that Mills hadn’t noticed on previous nights. He should have brought a jacket. The wind ripped through his shirt, sticking the fabric to his skin.

  Tommy, bundled in a bulky Sycamore Bucks sweatshirt, stood by the hedges. He flicked his lighter and placed the flame under his chin to jack-o’-lantern his face.

  “What took you so long?” he huffed. “It’s fucking freezing. And it’s not like I’m waiting out here to get laid.” Mills smiled in disappointment. “You really need to get a cell phone. Pray for the teenager without a cell phone. I don’t think you realize how unarmed you are for the vicissitudes of the future.”

  “Vicissitudes?” Mills repeated.

  Tommy rubbed his chest, as if to assess any spontaneous muscular development. “You’re so lucky you never had to study for the SAT. My dad’s forcing me to take an SAT prep class an hour before school starts, just when the girls’ cross-country team is showering in the locker room. There I am, in the same building with all those naked girls, and I’m stuck memorizing a bunch of twenty-syllable words. Rebarbative. Pusillanimous.” Tommy paused to imagine the melee of locker-room crocuses, or, at least, he seemed to want Mills to think he was.

  “Let’s go down to the beach.” Tommy walked fast, but Mills had learned the geography of Paul’s backyard in the past week, and he managed to avoid tripping over the lawn sprinklers or stepping into the marsh weeds. Tommy brandished his silver flask, took a gulp, and offered it to Mills. “It’ll keep you warm,” he said. “Lisa left a bottle of Jägermeister in her room, knowing I’d find it.”

  Mills took a small pull. It tasted like cough syrup, or like syrup to induce coughing.

  “Crazy shit today, huh? With Ms. Kiefer dying like that. I mean, granted, she was ancient. And not even a week after Jeff Trader. You know I swam out into the harbor to get him, right?”

  “Yeah.” Was Tommy so self-absorbed that he’d forgotten that Mills had gone with him to the beach that afternoon? The question answered itself.

  “Thank god I was stoned or I wouldn’t have had the courage. Man, he was heavy. Like a bag of potatoes soaked in water. Skin like potatoes too.” In the moonlight, Tommy’s cheeks were the color of blueberries; the rest of his skin and hair was ghost white. “It’s a shame no one bothered to take a picture. That was a heroic scene. A thing of legend. And where were the reporters? You don’t see an act of courage in Orient very often. Why are there always cameras around when some kindergartener at a craft fair has her face painted like a cat and the Suffolk Times runs that huge on the front page? But when a local high school student, Thomas Muldoon, seventeen, bravely strips to his underwear and reels in a dead man, there’s not a reporter in sight. I mean, I didn’t do it for congratulations, but it still would have been nice. You didn’t take a picture, did you? Oh, right, no phone.”

  “I’m sure there’ll be a next time,” Mills joked. Either Tommy didn’t get the joke or he didn’t find it funny. It hung awkwardly in the air, exposing fragile hope.

  Tommy took another sip from the flask. He leaped over the rocks that descended to the pebbled shoreline, stopping just short of the black shallows. Mills followed slowly, careful of the cavities between the rocks. The far-off house lights of Connecticut sparkled, fog-stunted, across the Sound. Tommy had his hands tucked in his front pouch pocket, pulling the sweatshirt’s deer-head emblem flush against his chest. Odd, Mills thought—the high school mascot was also the area’s most-hunted animal.

  “Wanna go for a swim?” Tommy asked with a grin. Mills studied the water. It must be freezing. As much as he’d like to swim into the Sound with Tommy, shivering in close circles, he didn’t have the willpower to endure the cold past his knees. Tommy steadied himself on Mills’s shoulder and started kicking off his shoes.

  “I can’t go in there.”

  “Oh, come on. Don’t be a pussy.”

  Mills pushed Tommy’s hand off his shoulder.

  “No way.”

  Tommy nodded, laughing. “I was only kidding. It’s below zero.” He pinched his pants at the knees and walked a few feet into the water. “Freezing,” he reported, jumping as he returned to the beach. Bright water dripped like coins from his ankles. They found a boulder ten yards down and sat on it, side by side.

  “You think it was just a coincidence,” Mills asked, “that Jeff Trader and Magdalena died within a week of each other?” He was trying to propose the possibility of murder to Tommy. That could be the secret they shared, the fantasy of a psychopath running around Orient; that mutual belief could bring them closer together, perhaps close enough to convince Tommy, so willing to try anything, to try something new with him. It was using the idea of murder in the service of lust.

  “What? You mean you think they were taken out or something?” Tommy considered it for a minute. The tide raced in and receded. “That hadn’t occurred to me. You know, Jeff Trader was pretty stuck on that rope. I didn’t cut him loose. Beth’s husband did that. I didn’t go under to see how he was caught. But the first thing my mom said when we got back to the house was, ‘Jeff Trader has a set of our keys.’”

  “I know something about those keys.”

  “What?” Tommy grabbed Mills’s wrist. “Tell me. Come on.”

  Savoring the moment—Tommy at full attention with his hand on his wrist—Mills finally conceded a few secrets. He told Tommy about Beth taking him to Jeff’s property, about the book she’d been looking for and the jar of keys they hadn’t found in his truck. “Then we went back, and Magdalena was dead.”
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  “Fuck,” Tommy yelled. “You’re kidding me. I don’t know, though. To kill an old man for his keys and then an old woman for wanting them. That’s pretty desperate just to gain access to some of the most boring houses on Long Island.” Tommy was speaking so loudly that Mills hushed him. “No one can hear us out here,” Tommy said, quietly now. “It’s just us.”

  Just them. And with Tommy’s fingers still pressed against his wrist. Mills wished for the confidence to wrap his hand around Tommy’s neck and make a move that wouldn’t result in a punch. Instead he sat there shivering. Their bodies were practically the same age, covered in the same smooth material, running with the same blue substance, fast and cold as Canadian rivers. They were separate ecosystems coming into near contact, hosts to separate microorganisms and shaped by separate storms.

  Tommy let go of Mills’s wrist, jammed his hands into his sweatshirt pouch, and pulled his flask out for another sip.

  “Not likely,” he said with stinging breath.

  “Maybe he was killed for this book.” Mills took the journal from his pocket and waved it. “Jeff was writing down secrets, I think.”

  Tommy grabbed the book before Mills could pull it away.

  “Holy shit. Addresses,” he said, holding the flame of his lighter against the pages. He slumped forward, trying to decipher the tiny black print. “What kind of secrets was he into?”

  “You can’t have it,” Mills said, reaching to recover it.

  Tommy blocked his arm. “Why not? You don’t know the people here. What difference does it make to you? You’re a stranger. These are my neighbors.”

  “I need to give it back to Beth.”

  “Screw Beth.” When Mills reached for it again, Tommy pushed him in the chest, harder than either anticipated, and Mills fell backward, slipping off the rock and slamming his shoulder against the beach. The fall hadn’t hurt, hadn’t destroyed much more than one-sided romance, but Tommy stared down worryingly, as if the reason for the shove had entirely escaped him.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, reaching out to pull him up. “Just let me borrow it. I’ll give it back to you tomorrow.”

  Mills shook his head. He sat on the rock again, a few inches away.

  “Look, I promise,” Tommy bargained. “There could be things about my family in here. Jeff Trader fixed our porch last month.”

  “I thought you said there was nothing wrong in your family.”

  The Sound spread against the pebbles. Tommy’s face whitened in the water’s reflection as he watched its flow and retreat.

  “You’d need to have had a family to understand,” Tommy mumbled, his voice a broken chord. “Like my father. Nothing but a cheater. Cheats all the time. I don’t blame Lisa for going to college way upstate just to get the hell away from him. I’ll do the same thing when I’m done with school. As far as I can, with whatever money I can find. There are more fucked-up creatures in this town than the one that washed up from Plum.”

  Mills wanted to put his arm around Tommy simply to comfort him.

  “You’re not the only one with problems,” Mills said. “I wouldn’t be out here fixing up Paul’s house if New York hadn’t been filled with them.”

  “What did you do?” Tommy looked over with interest.

  Mills knew he could impress Tommy simply by listing his missteps. He could so easily describe New York as a paradise of lurid dreams: drugs and all-night music and half-nude bodies twisted across couches, a version of the truth decorated into a brag. But Tommy might find that version a dream worth believing in, might see that mirage in the west and head toward it, arms and mouth open. No young person was ever enticed by the reality of a place, its mornings and not its nights.

  “Drugs, the worst stuff,” Mills said in the dullest voice he could muster. “It’s not something I’m proud of. It was the easiest thing to fall into, and the weakest are the last to stop. I guess I didn’t care anymore once I got to New York. Like I’d hit the end of the country and wanted to keep moving, however I could. At the end, it didn’t feel like moving. It felt like dying slowly on someone’s floor. To be honest, experience isn’t always such a good thing.” There went his chances of seducing Tommy on the endless upsides of new experiences.

  Tommy pressed his knuckles on Mills’s leg. Maybe he was just part of a generation that always needed to do something with their hands.

  “I caught that about you,” he said softly, so unlike the Tommy Muldoon that Mills had come to know. “I figured as much. You know, you really aren’t that hard to read. I think I know what you’re about.” Tommy turned to him with shivering teeth.

  Branches broke. Frozen grass snapped under foot in the black shrubbery behind them. Mills spun around. Tommy searched for his shoes.

  “Someone’s out there,” Mills whispered. “Behind us.”

  They concentrated on the silence, trying to pick up loose sounds in it.

  “Tommy,” a woman’s voice called. “Are you out there? You need to come in this instant. You’ve got school tomorrow.” A dark shape shifted near the trail leading to the beach.

  “It’s my mother. I’ve gotta go.” Tommy shoved his feet into his shoes and raced up the trail. He had left his silver flask on the rock, but not the book. Mills wanted to call him back for it, but he was afraid Pam Muldoon would recognize his voice and ban him from ever seeing her son again. He waited for five minutes, angry for losing the book, worried that Beth would stop by tomorrow and demand its return.

  He climbed the rocks, shoving the flask in his back pocket as he crossed the lawn. The light in Tommy’s window blinked on and off like a boat signal in the ocean. He reached the porch and opened the front door.

  Beeping invaded the foyer. A box above the light switch in the parlor flashed red. Paul sprinted down the steps in a T-shirt and sweatpants, his shoulders bunched and his hands in clumsy fists until he caught sight of the intruder. He went directly to the box and punched in the code. His eyes were fluttering like canaries in a shaken cage.

  “Why did you turn the alarm on?” Mills asked.

  “For security. I thought you’d gone to bed.”

  “I thought you weren’t scared. I thought you said there wasn’t anyone dangerous out here.”

  Paul turned around and feigned a calm smile.

  “It was you who put that in my mind,” he wheezed. “And anyway I was just testing that the damn thing still worked.” Paul balanced his hand on the wall and filled his lungs with air. “Okay, I admit you frightened me.”

  Mills apologized, tugging on Paul’s shoulders as they climbed the steps. Mills put the flask in the bowl of the birthing room for safekeeping. Out the window, the light in Tommy’s room was on, a kid catching up on his reading. Maybe Pam Muldoon had been right to worry about Mills’s influence on her children. Mills couldn’t shake the ominous feeling that he’d just introduced Tommy to the kind of book that would destroy him.

  CHAPTER 11

  Naked and wet from the shower, she walked assertively through the darkened bungalow. Too assertively, Adam Pruitt thought, as if she’d only recently come to understand the dynamics of her body. He was naked as well, lying on his bed, arms splayed across the sheets and his legs forming the number 4. Tattoos decorated his ribs: on his left an orange tiger, on his right a black treble clef. They trembled as he breathed. He watched as she slid her hand under the chair cushion, located her cell phone, scrolled through missed calls and texts, and returned the phone to its soundproof hiding place. She climbed onto the bed, weightlessly mounted him with corrugated knees on either side of his shoulders, and spidered her fingers against the wall.

  “You want some?” she asked. “Go on.”

  He liked hearing her talk like that because he knew it was foreign to her. The fact that he wasn’t actually in the mood might have put a damper on the situation, but Adam did not consider himself a selfish sex partner. He stuck out his tongue.

  “You want me to lick it?” He looked up, beyond the smooth white vase of he
r stomach, between the two rounded cones of her tits, up to a throat that gulped and a bottom lip that trailed white from scraping teeth.

  “Yes,” she said.

  He rooted his tongue between the entry doors, drawn together like the dorsal wings of a beetle. His tongue chafed against trimmed hair and hit a pocket of emptiness, which gave him a hard-on because now he was inside of her, so inside there was no barrier. His nose snailed against her pubic hair. He expected her to moan in pleasure but she remained silent, and Adam quickly broke from his time-tested approach and burrowed his face in, sloppily licking. Neither of them made pleasure moans, and Adam wondered if he was doing this only for her benefit and she was letting him only for his, the usual sex paradox. His hands climbed her body and found her arms. He yanked her down until she lay next to him, and he flipped on top of her.

  “Condom,” she said. He grabbed a gold square off his nightstand, tore it open, and milked the rubber down his shaft. These were awkward seconds for a man, no matter how attractive the woman under him appeared—legs open, breasts resting on the rib cage—because a man has to stay hard while the woman watches in some negative quiet where irrevocable judgments are formed. She did the right thing, pinching his left nipple, not painfully but enough to give him an electric prod. He had a difficult time putting it in her, but finally her body accepted him. That’s all it took: he jiggled it, not in and out but clockwise, and the tension of her muscles made him come almost instantly. When he realized he was coming, really coming, running home instead of to first base, he started thrusting in and out, determined not to leave her unsatisfied.

  “Oh,” she said.

  “Fuck,” he said through clenched teeth.

  “That’s right. Okay.”

  “Fu-u-uck.”

  He spent, and their lips met when he fell against her. He rolled over. His skin was wet from perspiration and from the shower water she hadn’t toweled off. Her hair was almost black when it was wet, though in a matter of minutes it would dry light brown. Adam waited until it was light brown to tell her she shouldn’t be here.