Homo Superiors
Page 2
Then there’s all the hard work to be done for the sake of partying, and while he finds much rewarding in these pursuits, it does leave him with a touch of what his mother generously assumes is a cold when he comes home for the holidays. In fact, after a day and a night back home, even with a grandma and grandpa over, and a great-aunt whoever from Canada, and at least two of his three brothers all milling through the house, no one seems to think Ray’s outrageously hungover. No one takes him aside for a talking-to at least, although that could be Ray’s own careful trickery at work.
Ray resorts to several artful maneuvers to hide his delicate condition from his family. Here’s how he talks himself through that first weekend back home:
First: plead motion sickness from the bus ride home so you can sleep it off a little longer.
Second: claim you’re too tired for dinner tonight, and say, “Besides, it’s better to save up space for the big Christmas feast!”
Third: thank whichever deity you’d like for the fact that this is a Christma-kah household—with a Jewish dad and a Catholic mom, they just throw all the best parts together and leave out anything too boring for the opposite-faith in-laws to tolerate; you know you couldn’t sit through all that claptrap without turning green tonight.
Four: when the sweats break over you because you’ve gone and stood up too quickly, find something cool to casually lean against wherever you are—the marble of the stairs’ chunky starting newels works, or a nice window encrusted with the snow outside, or the stainless steel of the refrigerator if everyone’s standing around talking about the food.
Five: DO NOT put any of that food in your mouth or even stand too near those dizzying fumes.
Six: if you’re hungry you can be forward-thinking and smuggle some crackers and water into your room (and try to get those in you right before you fall asleep so you don’t have to deal with digesting them).
Seven: spend some time thinking about which bathrooms are farthest from your resting relatives while you’re kept up by a vague nausea; you know, in the worst case scenario that whatever damage you’ve done is so profound that when you finally sit up, you have to rush to the bathroom to puke up that detainee dinner you just had, and wonder if its pinkish tint is just the color of stomach acid, or if it’s blood.
Eight: the next day when it turns out someone did hear you vomiting in the night, and your mother’s diagnosis of cold is upgraded to flu, and your father secretly offers you some warm brandy instead of medicine, quit trying to be a hero and just drink it.
Nine: the cure ALWAYS involves some touch of the curse, that’s what science the boys at the house taught you, so just pace yourself this time.
Ten: and pace yourself the next time you know you have to be home in the morning, you’re seventeen already and this is childish.
It’s a trustful gesture on his dad’s part to sneak him some booze, since even with his older sons he doesn’t approve of drinking, thinks it finds weaknesses in men that might otherwise never be discovered, makes them lazy and complacent. He’s so sure all his lectures over the years on alcohol have been heeded, he acts like Ray’s never raided this cabinet before. It could be a wink-wink, nudge-nudge sort of thing, or maybe with four sons he never could know which one had been at it, and he just assumes it wasn’t the young duckling who started college when most kids are starting high school. Maybe with his CEO position at Sears he just doesn’t have time to notice what state his family is in unless they make him late for a meeting. Who knows, maybe the maids replaced the missing booze with water thinking they’d be blamed. Ray never spares too much thought to his extraordinary luck. It’s tough to think critically about what has always been right in front of one’s face, or at least that’s what his sociology professor says.
“Don’t tell your mother,” his father says to him with a playfully warning smile. “Or her mother, or my mother either.”
“I just won’t tell any of the women about it, how’s that, Dad?” Ray says, sipping carefully and wincing—he doesn’t like the taste of brandy, and his throat is still a little raw from puking. His father probably takes it as proof-positive that this son isn’t much of a drinker. Good old Mom and Dad: they’re as generous in their high opinions of Ray as they are with their money.
“That’s a good plan,” his father tells him. “That’ll serve you well when you get married someday.”
“But not any day too soon, right?”
“That’s right,” his dad laughs. “You really are the smart one in the family.”
Getting married, how Raymond shudders to think of it (or is that the cloying taste of brandy shivering through his body?). He never wants to get married.
He’s having too much fun.
5
NOAH DECIDES TO FINISH OUT the year before switching schools. He arranges with the University of Chicago to have the classes transfer over, he plans to speak with a few professors at Michigan to make sure they won’t forget him when it comes time to get recommendation letters for law school, and . . . he does hold some hope that Ray will come around to say goodbye.
But as his family’s old driver used to say when Noah’s parents weren’t in the car: “Wish in one hand, shit in the other, let me know which one fills up first.”
For months he waits. He shadows Ray’s classes so as to glance him from both near and far. Noah reaches pathetically for metaphors as he lets Ray walk past him, surrounded by admirers: he’s a lightning rod among weathervanes, a ball bearing among food pellets, a steeple among chimneys. It wasn’t that long ago that Ray saw Noah the same way—not in the sense of coordination or looks or wit or anything appreciable to most people, but in superior thought and conception, in mental brilliance. Ray is brilliant in everything he’s made of: a ray of glittering sunlight piercing through a dull, dim blanket of clouds.
But come April, Ray never manages to catch Noah’s eye or feel his presence or think to stop by his room (that was the longest shot in all the world over anyway, but still Noah held out a shred of hope), and so it’s up to Noah to stop by Ray’s frat house.
Sure, they’ll spend all summer in Chicago about a block away from each other, but who knows what kind of complications will erupt back in Chicago: old friends, family vacations, that strange tendency to regress when home from school that makes them both act like kids again, act their true age. Leaving Michigan feels like the end of something, a closing book. Noah wants to see him one last time before it’s over.
He stops by the ZBT house, a testament to how necessary this feels, because he hates this place and it’s no fan of him either. Or, not the physical place—that’s irrational—but certainly the people in it.
“Here to see your boyfriend?” some bro asks when Noah steps inside. “We were worried you guys broke up.”
Noah rolls his eyes and moves through the common area. The floor is scuffed and filthy, thinning linoleum under a flattened, dirt-grayed dorm rug. None of the furniture matches. Noah can smell the couch from across the room. Something black and viscous is oozing from the refrigerator door. The trash can is heaped as high as it can go, and is surrounded by a corona of fallen garbage. Noah tries not to even touch the walls as he makes his way upstairs.
Ray is assembled on his bed like a pile of spindly camp fire sticks—one knee up, one arm straight across it holding a bent-back book, one elbow crooked behind his head.
“Nice,” Noah says from the door.
Ray smirks without looking up from his book. That’s Noah’s invitation into the room.
“I should be Basil Hallward right now, you look like you’re posed.”
“University Youth In Recline,” Ray says.
His roommate’s side of the room is empty, the cracked plastic mattress stripped bare, revealing the indelible white stains that all the school mattresses seem to have. Noah avoids them by sitting on the roommate’s wobbly desk chair. Ray’s chair is covered with clothes.
“Packed yet?” Noah asks pointlessly.
“Nop
e.” There are clothes on the floor too, books piled all over—on the desk, the floor, on top of a stack of dirty dishes. School books mostly, but the collection is infested with his ubiquitous detective novels, and some few philosophy books as well.
“What’s that you’re reading?”
Ray keeps reading (or pretending to read) but lets the book’s cover loose so Noah can see that it’s A Clockwork Orange.
“That’s a good one, no wonder you’re so enraptured you can’t look up.”
Ray smirks even more and finishes a sentence (or pretends to, one never can tell with him) and finally sticks a scrap of paper in it and sits up.
“So are you gonna miss the place?” Ray asks, holding his arms wide enough to indicate the campus, maybe the whole state.
“Nope,” Noah says back. “Maybe you a little, but not this place.”
“Maybe me,” Ray mumbles with amusement. “Help me pack.”
He gets up and starts to separate out his things, and Noah—supremely disappointed in himself but unable to do anything about it—gets up to help. His one claim to dignity is that he makes Ray deal with his own dirty clothes and only touches the guy’s books.
“Doing anything this summer?” Noah asks, trying not to wince even as he says it. This was supposed to be goodbye, but it looks like some poor bastard can’t seem to help himself.
“Maybe,” Ray taunts again. He runs a hand through his hair in a distracted way, though Noah knows he’s practiced doing that, saw it in a movie or two, adopted it because he can get away with it. His hair is just the right length to stay where he pushes it, in a soft little wave above his ear. Noah’s own hair is too greasy to touch much after he combs it down each morning.
“I’m going to keep up my birding classes I think,” Noah says.
Ray whistles low. “My God, you know how to have fun, don’t you?”
“Obviously I do, since I’m here helping your worthlessness pack for nothing. You haven’t seen me once since my mother died, you know that, right?”
Ray freezes, then turns to look at Noah with a genuinely shrewd look in his eyes. The light from the window is cutting through one iris and making it glow like a glass of iced tea.
“Would you have really liked me better if I came running over to console you? If you ever tried to hold my hand through a tragedy, I’d never speak to you again.”
Noah considers this just as seriously: did he really want Ray to be one more person in the endless single-file of the Sorry-For-Your-Loss people? Of course not. Ray’s a lot more special for being the one person in Noah’s life who didn’t immediately infantilize him.
“I’d respect you for that, I suppose. Pity is contemptible, to give or receive,” Noah says.
“I should hope that you’ll always respect me,” Ray says, going back to sorting. “It means more coming from you than from anyone else I know.”
Noah smiles, but tries to twist it off his face before Ray sees it.
He suspected—he knew—that this wasn’t really meant to be goodbye after all.
6
RAY’S SUMMER VACATION STARTS OUT as boring as paradise. Two days of sleeping, one week in the pool or on the tennis court without a single thought in his head except stroke-stroke-stroke, and then a day of finally unpacking his dirty laundry and settling back into home.
In line with that tired axiom, Ray believes that a change in work is far superior to the mental stagnation of rest. He cuts back on his partying significantly just as the general herd begins to stir to the promise of summer in the city. Backyards and rooftops and lakeside lolling are what everyone will be doing—everyone who’s home from school like Ray, and young like Ray, and of the moneyed unemployed like Ray. There’s nothing so resistible to Ray as being just like everyone else.
He shuns groups over his summer, makes himself a mystery. He answers cryptically every message or phone call or shout from across the street that comes along:
A call answered: “Hey, Ray-Ray! Where you been all summer, man? Don’t tell me you’ve got a job! You’re too young to go out that way, man.”
“Not a job, but several occupations.”
“What?”
A text responded to: We’re doing a bonfire on the beach this weekend, and if you aren’t there before midnight I’ll throw myself on the fire, so be there or be responsible for my death.
Try now, we can only lose.
What?
A holler returned: “There you are! Stop by this weekend, me and Eber have some girls coming over.”
“Not the kind that’ll be coming over any of us I bet!”
“What?”
“I’ve already got plans.”
Ray has found people usually assume the best about him, the exact opposite of how they treat Noah. Ray says he’s busy, and it’s got to be some girl, some party so exclusive that no one’ll ever hear about it, some lucky trip where the pictures are too scandalous to even take. He doesn’t know why they do it, just a certain je ne sais quoi he must have, a mischievous spirit about him. Noah tells him he’s puckish. Ray has warned him never to use that word around anyone normal, as it sounds filthy.
They’re right in their suspicions, but entirely wrong in their conclusions. The real pursuit of Ray’s summer is . . . pursuit.
There are only so many detective and spy novels a man can read before he starts looking at the world differently, before his movements become furtive and his eyes dodgy. Ray has been watching people for years—it started with a telescope from his bedroom window as a kid, an eagle-eyed vantage from which he could take notes about the comings and goings of neighbors, then he graduated to the more complicated art of watching all the other people on the same bus or train compartment. He learned how to look at people only when they weren’t looking at him, to use reflective surfaces, to use an ‘accidentally’ dropped item to gain a better vantage—all skills he later tailored quite expertly to hustling his friends at cards.
But this summer Ray wants to do more; all that he’s perfected has become boring to him now. This summer is his first and last in a way—he turns eighteen on the eleventh in this very month of June, becoming an adult in the eyes of the law, never to be a child again. He decides to embrace this change, and step up his game.
The way to learn how to follow people is to start easy, start with people in all your own brackets. For Ray that means young white males, the kind who dress nicely but not ostentatiously, because they’ve been brought up with rules for how not to get mugged. Next try older men, the kind who might be wary of any younger man as some new brand of thug.
A level harder: follow women of any sort, progress by following them in darker and lonelier circumstances without them becoming aware. They’ll hunch and hurry like a rattled cat if they feel your gaze, and it’s best to let it go after that; a lot of them carry mace or even Tasers.
Next level: get out of the suburbs, out of your own comfortable neighborhood, and try to walk and stalk unseen on the South Side, which turns out to be hardest of all for a boy like Ray. Suddenly he turns disturbingly visible; he considers it a valuable experience for gaining insight on his targets, but does not repeat this exercise.
And what is this all in preparation for? Nothing so far, just a natural extension of his curiosities. Ray can pick a few types of locks now, nothing too crazy, just household doors, drawers, and file cabinets, but you never can tell when a skill like that might come in useful. He’d like to learn how to get into parked cars at some point, just for some light marauding with purses or computers left under seats or people’s toll booth quarters. Just enough so that they lose a little that Ray gains, just for laughs.
He gets home from these outings with lies for his parents, too, but complex ones. It’s a litany supported with witnesses, the kind of lies that are half-true, gathered from all his other interactions:
“Dad, I know you want me to keep to my studies and not get a job, but what do you think about a summer internship? I feel a little useless.”
“Tommy, you should get to know Eber’s little brother—there will be girls over there this weekend. I would go but I’ve got this chick on the line . . . Mom keeps giving me advice, she might be that kind of girl.”
It’s so easy to show them all who they want to see. Lying should make him feel bad, that’s what his old nanny used to tell Ray, but why should he feel bad about making everyone else so happy?
7
NOAH’S SUMMERS ARE A NECESSARY evil. With no classes he has time to read literature, to write bird articles and send them to the journals and websites he respects, and to plan his future with the same numbered precision that his father sets down when considering a new business venture. It’s numbers numbers numbers. Three, possibly two more years until graduation if he keeps taking online courses. Five, maybe four more years of graduate study. One hundred fifty, maybe two hundred thousand dollars of his father’s carefully accumulated wealth to turn his son into a lawyer, and then it’ll be more numbers numbers numbers, because Noah plans to practice estate law and not criminal.
So his summers are needed: locked up and hot in his bedroom as he was during his sickly childhood, where he learned all this focus and discipline, where he learned how to learn for stimulation because he was never allowed out to learn from experience.
“Why birds?” people ask him when he is ‘of the world’ during the school year. Why would any man who isn’t retired care about birds?
Noah never tells them the truth. Birds are all he used to see out his window that held any fascination for him. His mother loved them too, for the very same reason: the sick must love birds.
Noah’s mother was fading for so long that they had time to finalize two wills over the years. She mostly had her good days when the weather was having good days. Noah was as quiet and present as she was growing up, and he knew some of her friends thought she was faking.