The War for Gloria

by Atticus Lish

  Corey couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He told Adrian, “I barely know you, but I’ve wanted to be you all my life.”

  “Oh wow,” said Adrian. He was so pleased to be admired.

  He lived on Mount Auburn Street in Cambridge with his mother who, in a bizarre coincidence, had brain cancer.

  “My mom’s sick too. This is crazy. Are you on Facebook? How do we stay in touch?”

  As a first act of friendship, before they left together, Corey erased the picture that Adrian had been drawing on the blackboard when he came in.

  “What’d you do that for? That was beautiful.”

  “I don’t want you to get in trouble.”

  “No one’s going to know it was me.”

  * * *

  —

  Corey lasted less than a week before he emailed Adrian. In the afternoons when Corey got home from school, where he was bored and depressed and driven half-mad by attacks of longing for the tan, dark-haired girls in his class, he had a habit of borrowing his mother’s laptop—he got home an hour before his mother—and he used the time to do an online bikini search. He looked at an image or two—or three or four or twenty images—of bikini models—it was sometimes hard to stop—while listening for the sound of his mother’s car arriving. After relieving his tension, he cleared his history. On this day when she got home, he was, as usual, sitting a healthy distance away from the laptop innocently doing his homework. He asked her permission to email his new friend.

  “You don’t have to ask my permission. You know that.”

  He wrote Adrian and asked him how physics was going.

  Sometime later, while he was away at school, a reply appeared in Corey’s inbox. Adrian said he studied seven days a week until ten at night. He was doing an exhaustive review of basic mechanics and could use a study break. Corey took the Red Line north to meet Adrian in Harvard Square.

  Corey saw him waiting at the top of the long escalator that led out of the T station.

  “Hey, man.” Corey smiled and grasped his hand. Adrian fumbled their first attempt at a handshake.

  “I guess I don’t know what I’m doing.”

  “You’re fine.”

  “Is it a high-five or a shake?”

  “It’s just a dumb convention.”

  “I guess conventions are dumb,” Adrian said.

  Adrian took him to the Harvard Coop bookstore. Corey looked at the book selection in awe. The store smelled like espresso. Adrian said he spent a lot of time in Philosophy and Psychology. He led the way to the P’s.

  On the way, Corey noticed the Harvard women sitting in the coffee bar. They were writing papers amid their shopping bags, purses, bags of candy and open laptops, drinking cappuccinos, flipping through magazines, consulting iPhones, checking Facebook. Corey said, “Hey, how’s your homework going?” to one girl—she had chestnut-brown hair and Arabian eyes—but she gave him such an alien look that he apologized for disturbing her.

  “That chick was gorgeous,” he told Adrian. But Adrian claimed he hadn’t seen her.

  In the P’s, Adrian started telling Corey about the theory of plyometrics. The goal was to build explosive power by taking advantage of the muscle’s stretch reflex. You hurled the weight ballistically and exerted all your force in the opposite direction until you overcame momentum, which could be colossal. As he spoke, he stared at himself with extreme interest. He seemed to freeze in midsentence, losing himself, charmed by his own body. He expanded his hand over his bicep without touching it, as if it were even bigger than it was. He treated himself as if he were a massive piece of expensive lab equipment.

  Tall philosophy graduate students, aggressive in their own rights, didn’t know how to get around him to the Heidegger. Adrian didn’t move an inch for them. He didn’t know they were there. He kept on lecturing in his droning nasal voice, which he seemed not to know how to modulate. He was the only person talking in the store and, if anything, he was getting louder.

  “The animal with the most explosive muscle in the world is the panther. It has a seventeen-foot standing vertical leap. If I could get some panther muscle, I’d graft it into my own body.” He mimed doing surgery. “I’d connect up all the nerves. It’d be so awesome. I’d run right outside and jump up on a building.”

  He gripped his arm, showing it was a unit that could be replaced. His enthusiasm filled Corey’s heart with hope.

  Everyone could hear him—all the Harvard girls efficiently planning their weekends.

  * * *

  —

  The motorcycle jacket fit him tightly. There was, at most, room for a sweatshirt underneath it. Adrian refused to wear a hat. He left the Coop with his black, leather-clad shoulders hunched up around his ears. The temperature had dropped very low that night, and the asphalt roads were streaked with frost.

  Corey, in a forty-dollar bubble jacket from the Burlington Coat Factory, asked, “How come you don’t get yourself a parka?”

  Adrian stopped on the redbrick sidewalk, pressed his hands together and flexed his chest to stop himself from shivering. “The cold gives me a simple thing to overcome.”

  Instead of sneakers, he wore last season’s tattered wrestling shoes, a thin piece of rubberized plastic between his feet and the ground, which offered no insulation or support. He made a heaving throat-clearing noise to deal with his phlegm. He had a cold. “It’s an infection,” he smiled. He was unshaven. “I like having bacteria in my throat.”

  They hiked down Mount Auburn Street to the house where Adrian lived alone with his mother. His parents had gotten divorced when he was a very little boy.

  “I love making everybody sick.”

  * * *

  —

  His house was the color of cocoa powder with brown trim. It was inventively designed—a set of different-sized boxes put together to form an un-box-like shape—certainly not the kind of simple, peaked-roof house a five-year-old would have drawn with eyelike windows, a sun in the sky and a dog in the yard. Corey saw a rearranged face, à la Picasso, with eyes, nose and jaw stirred in a circle.

  The boys went inside. Adrian’s home boasted hardwood floors and a cathedral ceiling, and a kitchen with a breakfast nook and barstools. A cast-iron woodstove crouched on a platform in the living room. Everything was open plan. The axes of the different rooms were set at surprising angles to one another. The walls were very white.

  No one was home. Adrian led him up a spiral staircase. It was open too, and the climbers were suspended in midair above the living room before they went through a ceiling. As they climbed above the second floor, the staircase and the walls—the house itself—seemed to tighten around them like a fist.

  In the narrow quarters, Corey thought he smelled an animal.

  “Do you own a pet?”

  “That’s just me,” Adrian said, and the two of them started laughing.

  Adrian had his bedroom on the fifth floor. His room was laboratory-neat. The first thing you saw when you walked in was the desk against the high white wall cut by the angle of the roof. He had a skylight, which showed the night. A physics textbook rested on the desktop. It was positioned in the center of that surface. A pen lay next to it, parallel to the spine. The book was closed. Corey had a clear vision of Adrian sitting there, his muscular shoulders hunched over his physics book until precisely ten at night.

  He had a lamp with a flexible neck that clamped to the edge of the desk.

  The bed hardly looked big enough for someone of his size. You would have thought a fifth-grader slept in it. A copy of The Basic Writings of Nietzsche sat on the bedside table.

  Despite the wealth in the Cambridge apartment, Corey picked up a strange sense of deprivation here.

  He asked to see Adrian’s Nietzsche. The book was full of handwriting—in the margins, between the lines—in all block-capital letters. He saw
mathematics and the language of self-help psychology all jumbled-up together in the form of strange equations. Certain phrases leaped out at him as he flipped the pages. One was Develop Self Esteem. Another one was Happiness Equals The Integral of Power. The handwriting was so strong he could feel it in the page like Braille. He jumped ahead a hundred pages and found still more of it, blacking out the margins—an astonishing amount of obsessive note-taking, which spilled over onto the blank sheets at the end of the text. On the very last white space of the book, the inside cover, he came across a calculation and stopped to read it, his eye having picked up the number 2070, which he correctly identified as referring to a year. It took him a minute to figure out what he was seeing. It appeared that Adrian, using high school probability and statistics, was predicting the date of his own death.

  “I’ve never been comfortable with science,” Corey said. “But you are.”

  “To me, it’s a way of overcoming problems and controlling the universe.”

  “What’s the biggest problem in your universe?”

  “My mother.”

  “Me too,” Corey said. “Me too.”

  And Corey spoke to Adrian at length about his mother’s illness.

  It struck him that Adrian listened with remarkable sensitivity—or interest. His precise words to Corey were “I’m sorry you’re going through that.”

  “I’m sorry your mom has cancer. That must be rough,” Corey said in return.

  Adrian frowned. “It has its disadvantages. Obviously you don’t want someone else to suffer. That would be immoral. But if somebody uses her illness to take advantage of you, that’s immoral too.”

  As Adrian talked, Corey began to gather that his new friend felt very differently about his mother than he did. Adrian described his mother as “controlling.” After speaking in philosophical terms for several minutes, he concluded by saying, “I feel morally absolved from worrying about her.”

  * * *

  —

  Adrian wasn’t just smart, he was funny too. He was always talking about his own ass. He farted loudly—explosively loud, cracking farts, where one could hear the muscular sides of his buttocks reverberating—and he would do it in public. He would do it right next to a woman standing at a bus stop, and Corey would die laughing.

  It was almost always night when Adrian could see him. Corey had to work around Adrian’s inflexible self-improvement schedule. They studied together in Adrian’s white room. They read books together in the Coop when the rest of the world was getting ready for Thanksgiving. He followed Adrian on meandering walks through Cambridge, listening to him talk relentlessly, using physics as a metaphor for everything. They hiked all through the dark hours of the night. Corey texted his mother at three a.m. to tell her not to worry, he was learning to develop himself. They broke into Adrian’s high school gym together so he could watch Adrian working out. Adrian played his violent workout music, and Corey listened. He watched as Adrian refueled his giant muscles by drinking gallons of milk.

  Corey told his mom that he had found a real-life Vairocana on which to model himself.

  In view of Adrian’s greatness, Corey had to see his drawing on the blackboard at MIT as something out of character. It was the same cartoon one sees on every shithouse wall: a disembodied female genital display between a pair of open legs.

  6

  Holiday

  At her November clinic day, she told them at the hospital, “I’ve got a refrigerator full of kale and I’m only getting worse.”

  Gloria’s physical therapist had been planning to teach her range-of-motion exercises to unfreeze her progressively stiffening limbs: Lie on back, bring knee to chest, exhale.

  “That’s a lot like yoga, only easier. What else you got?”

  “We could try some weights.” The physical therapist—speaking in a soft western accent and projecting a calm that seemed to come from somewhere beyond the professional realm, like a trail guide who refuses to raise her voice out of respect for nature—brought out a pair of rubber-coated dumbbells and, kneeling in her olive cargo pants, showed Gloria how to use them. Gloria went home and started working out.

  She changed into an old Lesley College athletic shirt and sneakers, previously unworn. Up to now she’d always been a sandals-and-boots woman. She moved her holistic healing books out of sight behind her bed, stacking them on her art books, the rumpled pages of her abandoned essay, put on music from her barmaid days at the Rathskeller, bent down and rowed the dumbbells to her belly.

  The therapist had also recommended that Gloria begin taking a protein supplement, one that was complete—contained the essential amino acids. So she went to Whole Foods and bought a canister of protein powder and set it on the kitchen countertop. She started drinking one scoop three times a day in orange juice.

  Corey would see his mother’s little tub of protein every time he went to the kitchen—it had a vanilla bean on the wrapper—and he’d associate it with the spirit of self-development and progress that he was absorbing from Adrian, who was dedicated to building himself up from the smallest possible molecule.

  Throughout the rest of the semester, he would watch her standing on her yoga mat, pushing the small weights up in the air, her white legs bare in gym shorts, varicose veins in the backs of her knees, sweat dampening her shirt, hair sticking to her forehead, the radio playing Hüsker Dü while she did her sets—the strange sight of her in sneakers.

  He stopped his brain from seeing certain things. The dumbbells weighed eight pounds each. They hung from the last joints of her fingers. They were a hair away from falling. She couldn’t close her hands. The only thing that stopped them was friction between the rubber and her skin. She would graduate to five-pound weights, then threes, before she had to give them up completely.

  * * *

  —

  At night, to avoid the electricians, she had stopped going to the Half Door. She went to Acapulcos Mexican Family Restaurant & Cantina. She was there on Thanksgiving, eating dinner alone. She hid her body beneath a long down coat. The Greek fisherman’s hat she wore was a size too big for her skull. One would have seen her short blonde hair and the stalk of her neck, the disease rounding her spine, giving her a hump back, as she sucked Long Island Iced Tea through a straw. It was getting late.

  Her son texted her, “r u ok?”

  “I’ll be home soon,” she wrote with her weak fingers, the software in the phone finishing the words for her.

  She hadn’t made him dinner. She declined the bartender’s offer of a refill and ordered a fifteen-dollar entrée and took it home to Corey in a round aluminum foil container with a cardboard top.

  One night that same Thanksgiving week, she had a run-in. After the bar discharged her, a man saw her crying on the shadow side of the street. He approached and asked what was the matter. It was midnight and she was a little drunk. She told him she was dying. He said he could cure her for ten thousand dollars. He must have expressed concern. Or certainty. He offered to walk her to the Bank of America ATM on the corner.

  When she got home, she woke Corey up and told him what had happened. Her son stared around the house in alarm. “Did he get anything from you?”

  “No. He followed me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He followed me until the bus came. I waved at the driver and he took off.”

  “What the hell did he look like?”

  “I was scared. I didn’t look at him.”

  “What did he look like, Mom? I want to know.”

  “Just a man.”

  * * *

  —

  The episode triggered a childhood memory in Corey’s head:

  Joan was wearing a short black silk robe. She made him spaghetti and opened a jar of Prego.

  The year was 1999, Corey was four years old, and Joan and his mother slept together at night. T
hey all lived together in the apartment in Cleveland Circle, which had plaster walls, wood floors, lots of rooms, few windows, shelves full of books and CDs, a basket of VCR tapes, and a TV. It faced the living room couch, which was dirty, soft and velvety. Joan sat next to him on the velvet cushion and gave him food.

  “Can you eat it like a big boy? You’re wicked mature.”

  The remote didn’t work. She got up and turned on the TV by hand, bending over in her short robe, and flounced back down again and her leg touched him.

  “What’s this? Yo, MTV Raps? Snoop Doggy Doooog! Bow wow wow, yippeeyo yippeeyay. I love Snoop. I think he’s a braciole. I’d let him put me in his dog pound. Nah, that’s messed up.”

  “What is?” asked four-year-old Corey.

  “Guys thinking they can be big mac daddies. What gives them the right? You’d never do that, would you? Dog a girl?” She looked down and adjusted her robe over her legs. “You’d never two-time your girlfriend, would you?”

  No, he said. He’d never do that!

  His mother was leaving. “Bye!” she said. She squatted on the floor and spread her arms and he jumped off the couch and ran into her embrace. With his eyes closed, he felt his mother’s cheek against his face, the hard cheekbone and jaw, the thin pad of her cheek. A mother’s face feels just right to her child.

  She stood and Joan, who had strolled over bare-legged, put out her arm for Gloria. The women kissed. Corey looked up at the women talking, saying goodbye. Their legs were at the level of his eyes. He embraced them like trees in his play forest.

  He knew that everything was not okay outside the door of the apartment. A man was out there in the city and he was making problems for them. Of course—as he would appreciate when he was older—“the man” was just Leonard—but as a child Corey had believed that Gloria was in danger every time she left the house.