by David Hopen
My mother sat silently, lips pursed, eyes to the floor.
“A quiet chevrah?” I repeated, forcing a laugh. I felt an unfamiliar upwelling of rage coming on. “Why would I want that?”
“All I’m saying, as I’ve said from the beginning, it’s not your old friends,” my father said. And then, with gruff self-satisfaction: “Halevai!”
“They’ll be responsible,” my mother said without lifting her gaze from the tablecloth. “They’ll have fun.”
My father scoffed. “Fun?”
“You never wanted that as a teenager, Yaakov? Freedom?”
“‘Never put thyself in the way of temptation,’” my father said, translating the Gemara into English. “Even Dovid HaMelech couldn’t resist.”
My mother stood. “He’s going.” We all froze at this act of open confrontation. Glassy-eyed, my mother returned her stare to the floor; red-cheeked, my father kept his eyes on me in a vaguely accusatory fashion. Nobody said a word. I left for my room.
* * *
I LOVED THE HOTEL FROM the moment I saw the lagoon-style pools and oceanfront rooms. Oliver booked a suite at five hundred a night. “Early birthday gift from the parents,” he said, changing into one of the white satin robes hanging in the bathroom closet. “I only do king-size beds.”
We spent the afternoon in the ocean, drank heavily after dinner. When we were sufficiently drunk—Oliver had already vomited and smoked it off—we made our way toward Duval Street, epicenter of Key West nightlife, according to Noah. We ducked in and out of bars, Oliver buying drinks: shots of pale-blue tequila, Irish car bombs, bile-tasting vodka set aflame. A group of sophomore girls from Florida A&M picked out Evan from the corner of a cowboy bar. They matched me with a raven-haired twenty-year-old who told me she intended to become a horse veterinarian and had the habit of steering me with her hands. A local attempted to sit on Noah’s lap; he sprang to his feet and into the bathroom with the same speed he pushed fast breaks. We passed a small, grime-streaked house, aglow with neon lights. Two women beckoned from the porch.
“Pricing?” Oliver yelled drunkenly, stumbling on his feet.
“Hundred an hour,” one said.
“A bargain,” Oliver said, nearly pitching over into a garbage can. He went for his wallet but Noah and Amir hauled him away.
The A&M group bought a table at the back of a club. Evan’s companion took a vial from her purse and, her friends keeping watch, cut lines with her credit card. I watched with muted horror as she used a rolled-up twenty and passed it around the table. Oliver and Evan each accepted, snorting with violent, euphoric looks. Noah, drunker than I’d ever seen him before, considered the prospect for a moment until he snapped to his senses and relocated to the other side of the table to sit with Amir and me.
The veterinarian draped her arm around my shoulder. “Can I ask you something weird?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“What’s with that—thing?” She nodded at the top of my head. “The beanie.”
“Oh.” I grabbed my yarmulke and stuffed it into my pocket. No one else was wearing one. Amir had an MIT hat pulled toward his eyes. I felt exposed, suddenly, as if someone had stolen my clothing, as if I were sitting there with my jeans removed. “That’s nothing.”
“Fashion statement?” she asked, laughing.
I typed a text to Kayla: in KW, haven’t yet been knocked out by Hemingway—how are u? “Yeah. Exactly.”
She had more beer. “Don’t you do this in school?”
“Do what?”
She gestured toward the other end of the table. I considered asking whether she assumed we were in college. “No,” I said instead, checking my phone. No response from Kayla. “I don’t.”
“It’s real good.” She had beery breath. “Try it.”
I excused myself for fresh air. Out front, Evan was leaning over the porch railing, facing the dark street, drink in hand. He didn’t address me, I didn’t address him. It took a moment to realize he was crying.
“Evan?”
He didn’t turn. I approached the railing, seeing tears on one side of his face.
“You all right?”
He thumbed away whatever was left under his eyes—two or three quiet drops. “It’s nothing.” He rubbed at his nostrils. “Just that powder.”
I didn’t say anything as he moved back toward the entrance. The door opened behind me and I felt a surge of relief; I wanted to be alone, even briefly. Yet when I turned around, I saw that Evan had changed his mind and was still standing there. The tears were gone. I wondered if I’d imagined them.
“Know what, Eden?”
I took his spot against the railing. “What, Evan?”
“You’re hiding what you are.”
I could hear shouting inside as some DJ came onstage. “I don’t know what that means,” I said, “and to be perfectly honest, I’m really not in the mood.”
He finished what was left of his drink. “You’re an affectation. A fucking mask. Know why I think that?”
I didn’t. I didn’t know why my heart was pounding, either. I considered never drinking again. “Nope. But, uh, thanks for that, as always.”
He set down his empty beer bottle to the floor. “Actually, I’m not saying that as a challenge.”
“No?”
“What I mean is that”—Evan stopped himself, gently kicked over the bottle, which rolled toward me, coming to a stop at my feet. “Maybe I’m a bit too fucking gone right now, I don’t know. But what I mean is that I wear the same mask you wear. I’m just as isolated from everything and everyone as you are. I’m just”—he coughed briefly, sniffed loudly—“I guess I know how you feel,” he said, nodding. “Because somehow you might be the only person in my life who understands what it’s like.” He said this and headed back inside.
What did I have to show for my life? Eighteen years of minimal evidence proving that I was a real person, someone who wanted things, felt things, recognized emptiness. Sometimes I could hide, restructuring myself into a different person entirely. Other times I could not. I wondered if Evan, too, viewed himself as shapeless, flitting between anonymity and omniscience, capable of shrinking or expanding into nothingness.
Our night ended with a beach bonfire. Evan had slipped off with the girl he met. Oliver, meanwhile, was nowhere to be found when we left the nightclub. “He’s fine,” Amir reasoned, collapsing on the sand. “He’ll show in the morning.” Noah had enough after a while and went up to FaceTime Rebecca and steal Oliver’s bed, leaving me alone with the veterinarian. It was close to three and I was beginning to sober; the idea of returning to the room made me feel unwell. She lit a joint and we walked along the water, barefoot, jeans rolled to our ankles. The water was black and cold. I thought about the last time I’d been to the beach in the dark. I thought about meaningless distances, about seas and heavens. I thought about Sophia’s lips against mine.
“Something’s wrong with you,” she said, burrowing her heel into the sand, “isn’t there?” She was coked, her eyes glossy red.
She sang beyond the genius of the sea. I wasn’t listening. I was elsewhere, body not wholly body. “I think there might be.”
“I think so, too.”
“Sorry about that.”
“Are we going to sleep together?”
I smiled pleasantly, too high, shook my head.
“There’s a girl?”
We kissed, first by the waves, soon on the sand. We rolled into the water. The sky went black, flickering around the edges.
* * *
IT WAS A HAZY, TORPID stretch. We spent the daytime baking in the sun: parasailing, kayaking, deep-sea fishing (this last activity leaving me incredibly seasick, vomiting for hours from the side of the boat, the captain refusing to turn back). Save for Noah, who insisted on greeting sunrise by sprinting five miles along the ocean, we rose at noon, were drunk by one and remained so for the duration of the day, drifting from outdoor bars to buckets of iced beer to restaurants that went heav
y on shots, particularly with Oliver tipping. We were in Cleopatra’s Egypt, disposed to mirth, and in our idleness I tried my best not to think about Sophia or Columbia or my parents or any of the other changes under way in my life.
Food was the issue. There was nothing kosher in sight, and so for the first few days I joined Amir in subsisting mostly on canned tuna, peanut butter and pretzels. Growing tired of this diet, feeling a surreal sense of escapism in my surroundings, I decided to break kashrut for the first time in my life, much to Amir’s disapproval.
“You all.” He pointed to Evan, Oliver and Noah after I’d caved and ordered pizza instead of another soggy garden salad at one of our meals. “You’ve done this to him.”
Noah, filleting an expensive branzino, grew silent. Oliver raised his glass.
Evan only smiled. “You’re blaming us?”
I looked at the floor, feeling guilty, the way I did when my parents fought.
“This is our fault?” Evan said. “Because you don’t seem to have any trouble resisting. You’re still keeping kosher. This is Eden’s problem.”
“What I’m doing is not the point,” Amir said testily. I swallowed the piece I was eating and placed down my slice.
Evan leaned forward. “Would you say Eden’s stronger or weaker for doing this?”
“Forget it,” Amir said, digging furiously into his salad. “I’m not doing one of your talks.”
“No, seriously. I know you think we’re corruptive, but it’s just as compelling to argue that Eden’s losing his morals on his own.”
“Dude,” Noah said, putting his hand on Evan’s shoulder, “let’s not upend lunch here.”
“He did stop wearing a yarmulke all of a sudden,” Oliver said, sipping peacefully at his piña colada. “Or are we just not acknowledging that?”
I reddened, gripped my fork. “I’m wearing a hat.”
Oliver shrugged. “What about that girl? And have you been davening every morning?”
My scalp burned underneath my hat. “Fuck off,” I said.
“Hey,” Oliver said, “it’s not any of my business.”
“Point is,” Evan said, “we can mock Eden, but that’d be nearsighted. It’s the kneejerk reaction, the superficial takeaway, when really he deserves to be praised.”
I looked up in surprise. “What?”
“Think about it. Here’s someone who’s been raised a certain way, right? Accustomed to a particular and rigid way of living. And yet, this guy desires things, even when they’re incompatible with his lifestyle. So how does he respond? It takes time, some encouragement, but he seizes them, and this seizing is actually more morally attractive than if he’d simply conformed to custom. What does that Gemara say? Performing an action when you’re obligated to do it yields greater reward than when you’re exempt? Same idea here, really, just inverted a bit. We”—he motioned at Oliver, Noah and Amir—“were born into a sort of moral indolence, at least compared to Eden. We’ve been raised with all sorts of contradictions and hypocrisies. And so Eden actually should get more credit for breaking through because his barrier—the moral activation energy required, so to speak—is substantially higher than ours.”
“There’s definitely something wrong with you,” Amir said. “This theorizing bullshit, it’s . . . it’s fucking peculiar.”
Noah pushed aside his fish. “We were so damn close to a nice lunch.”
“I’m with Noah,” Oliver said. “Let’s not Bloomify this.”
“Last night, when you were passed out, Ev?” Amir said, clasping his hands together. “I couldn’t sleep, so I went looking for some reading material. Know what I found?”
Evan didn’t blink.
“I picked up one of your books, rifled through it a bit. Lot of notes in the margins.”
“Which book?” Evan asked.
“Schopenhauer.”
I bit my lip. “And?” I asked, after Evan didn’t respond.
Amir shrugged. “Complete gibberish. Some shit about how Lucretius erred here or that guy erred there. Whatever, I don’t know, it was basically the ravings of a lunatic.”
“It’s impolite to intrude upon someone’s privacy,” Evan said calmly. “Maybe I’ll sue you.”
Noah motioned to our waiter for the bill. “Cool, so anyone want to Jet Ski later? Think I found a good deal online.”
Evan raised his Red Stripe. “A toast. To Eden, for being brave enough to submit to desire, for making a beast of himself to get rid of the pain of being a man.”
I tried ignoring what Evan said, to no avail. He was right. I was wading farther from whatever I’d previously thought was my life. When my mother called that afternoon for the first time since I’d left, I didn’t pick up, for after hearing what Evan said I couldn’t bear fielding questions about what I was eating or if I was wearing tefillin or whether there was a shul nearby that corralled a minyan. And when later that night I nearly accepted the vial from the veterinarian, Evan’s voice returned once more at the thought of where I was—on a beach at an ungodly hour, the last inch of a jay between my teeth, a half-dressed stranger dabbing at her nostrils. I was not the person I had been, nor was I the person I’d hoped to become when I left Brooklyn. I’d been filled, finally, with experience, and yet along the way I’d been emptied out. Eliot claimed poetic growth demanded “a continual extinction of personality,” and this is what I began to feel during those evenings: an annihilation of something essential within me. My world had changed gradually at first, but now, almost overnight, it had changed seismically. If my ceremony of innocence had not yet drowned, it was shuddering beneath the water.
* * *
WE WERE ON THE BEACH on our final night, sparking a joint near the boardwalk, the drinking and smoking and general sleep deprivation weighing on me so that I ambled around in a fog. The wind blew forcefully over the ocean. I was trying not to shiver.
Oliver waved his phone, showing us a text. “The A&M ladies sent an address.”
I didn’t realize how high I was until I stood and heard an invisible crack, as if someone snapped their fingers in my ear. A sudden Doppler effect: light waves changing in frequency, cold nausea falling over me. I bent over, held my head in my hands, waited for it to pass. It didn’t.
Noah, looking glazed, roused himself by slapping at his face. “You good, bro?”
Evan eyed me impatiently. “Don’t start, Eden. Climb out of your head for a bit and just fucking enjoy it.”
“I—” The moon above, full and fragile. The wind picking up. My teeth chattering. “Was there something wrong with that stuff?”
“Impossible,” Oliver said, kicking sand in my direction as he ordered an Uber. “Evan picked it up himself.”
A car materialized, whisked us to a beach house. I spent the ride with my face out the window, night made formless, dark swirls obscuring my vision, the ringing in my ears making me wince. The house swarmed with bodies: college students, locals, homeless people, an old man with a cane.
Pushing, yelling, dim corridors. My friends disappeared, I closed my eyes: I was alone, kneeling in the backyard, facing the ocean, vomiting into the grass. A woman was sitting cross-legged to my right, counting twenty-dollar bills, waiting patiently for me to finish dry heaving.
Ashen-faced. Flinching eyes. A mouth from Beckett. “How old are you?”
I wiped my mouth. “Eighteen.”
She gave me her left hand—thin, veiny—and ran black nails over my cheek with her right. “Take these.” She put two bullet-shaped pills into my palm. “They’ll help.” Explosions of gold, snakes falling from trees, the Tiger in the monstrous deep. I tried asking: who are you? Instead, I swallowed.
She told me to get up. It didn’t seem to be something I could refuse. This time I asked who she was. She laughed. “Why do you ask my name?”
We went inside. Dizziness ossified into delirium: bare walls, soft carpets, cracks in the ceiling, my reflection in mirrors. She gripped tighter. White noise. Upstairs, a long hallway. I liste
ned for the piano. Nothing. I’d like to turn back now, I told her. She was quiet.
She opened the door to a bedroom, revealing a circle of people on a bed, cutting lines on a hand mirror.
“Oh shit.” Hunched over the mirror, Noah looked up in surprise, nostrils swollen, eyes bulging with guilt. Oliver and Evan were beside him. “Where, uh, where’ve you been, Drew?”
Evan, an arm around his A&M companion, eyed the woman leading me by the hand. “So you two found each other. I had a feeling you had it in you, Eden.”
“I want to leave,” I said again, this time to no one in particular. “I’m trying to leave.”
One of the men on the bed stood, pointing at the girl and then at Evan. I squinted, tilted my head curiously; he was speaking Spanish, something about money, and seemed rather upset. Evan was yelling back. And then: I was on the ground. I’d been punched squarely in the mouth.
Noah was there first, in a singular motion leaping from the bed and toppling the man. I was horizontal, taking in the ceiling, something warm trickling from mouth to chin, thinking about how odd it was to be unable to lift my limbs. Someone threw himself on Noah; Evan punched him in the jaw. Noah and my attacker wrestled to my left. The woman fled. Oliver, from the bed, laughed, threw white powder into someone’s face. I noticed blood on Noah’s knuckles, I was hoisted to my feet, I was dragged out. We bolted down the staircase, found Amir outside—making out drunkenly with a woman who looked at least forty-five—and piled into the back of a loitering cab.
* * *
I NEVER WENT TO CAMP. Instead, my summers were spent cooped up in our small house. My trip to Key West, as such, was the longest I’d been away from my family. When I returned, I discovered a pained charge had descended upon the silence of my home. My parents scarcely spoke with each other, my father retreating into his study with a Gemara, ignoring my offers to join him, my mother alternating between venting to Cynthia and hovering over me in my room. They didn’t reference the trip or the fact that my lip was slightly swollen. They didn’t notice that I walked up my driveway bareheaded, that I nearly forgot to excavate my yarmulke from my suitcase before I went inside my house. I didn’t acknowledge the guilt I felt from having plunged my parents into their state of enmity or from piling nonkosher food into my mouth or from carousing with the veterinarian. Above all, I didn’t draw attention to the unmistakable sense of freedom I’d achieved, even briefly, while being on my own over the last few days. All this silence, at the very least, saved me from having to manufacture a week’s worth of lies.
