Real Life

by Brandon Taylor

  “That’s true,” Wallace says. “You’re right.”

  “Vincent,” Emma says. “Maybe calm down.”

  “No, Emma. It needs to be said. He doesn’t get it. He doesn’t get how people’s relationships aren’t toys for him to play with. That he doesn’t get to fuck it all up for other people. This is real life, Wallace. Do you understand that? It’s real life.”

  Wallace nods slowly, carefully, making sure that the gesture is immaculate, perfect, a faultless contrition. He can do this. It is a skill in life, serving this function, to be contrite, to pay obeisance.

  “I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m sorry for causing you so much trouble. For hurting you. I didn’t think.”

  “You didn’t think,” Vincent snarls. “You didn’t think that it would have consequences. That other people wouldn’t suffer. It’s not a game. It’s my life. It’s Cole’s life. Next time, think of others.”

  “I will. I’m sorry,” Wallace says quietly, his voice hot, like asphalt congealing. Miller and Cole share a look of horror, of shock. Emma is making soothing sounds, rubbing his knee. Vincent goes back to his mimosa.

  “Wallace,” Cole begins, but Wallace looks up at him and smiles.

  “It’s okay, Cole. It’s fine.”

  The others at the table settle into tingling quiet, which eventually is broken up by the clatter of their forks and knives. It is a re-creation of last night’s dinner, how after Roman humiliated him, they all went back to eating, sitting in polite refusal to acknowledge the blow dealt to Wallace. He is not sad. He is not overcome with grief or sorrow at this. He has prepared himself for it, after all. It is a blow Wallace has been anticipating since last night; he is only surprised that it took this long to land. He wipes his mouth with his napkin, cuts another segment of crêpe, and he eats.

  The taste is bland, but he chews anyway. Miller looks at him anxiously, as if Wallace might vanish at any moment. Wallace drinks his coffee.

  “Emma, what are you doing for the rest of the day?” Wallace asks.

  “Oh, I’ll nap, probably,” she says, laughing. “Maybe I’ll read.”

  “Me too,” Wallace says. “I got that book Thom mentioned. I like it so far, I guess.”

  “Do you?” she says wryly. “Don’t let Thom hear; he’ll never stop suggesting things to you.”

  “I’d like nothing more,” Wallace says. Thom is too busy wolfing down his crêpes and bacon to pay much attention to them. He is a nervous eater. That is, when anxious, he eats with a single-minded ferocity. Wallace can relate. His appetite swells when he’s nervous. “What are you reading?”

  “I’m on a strict Judy Blume diet,” Emma says. “Classics, you know.”

  They share a bittersweet laugh. Emma’s eyes are red. She is angry again on his behalf, but she, like the rest of them, remains silent.

  “What are you two whispering about over there?” Yngve asks. “The rest of us could use a laugh too.”

  “We’re talking about books,” she says suggestively. “Big books.”

  Yngve’s expression grows more curious, and he says in a loud whisper, “I love big books.”

  Emma is not sure what to make of this. Wallace laughs. Lukas says, by way of explanation, “He’s not lying, actually. He loves the Russians. And Muir, for some reason.”

  Emma frowns. Thom looks up with renewed interest.

  “Russians? I’m writing a critical analysis on Russian literature,” he says. “All the infidelity.” The word makes Cole and Vincent flinch. Wallace watches it happen, the slow play of their features, the gathering of tension and cessation of movement on their faces. “The Russians, you know, and their morality. Very strict.”

  Yngve nods, but because of what he knows of the situation, he squirms uncomfortably.

  “Yes, dear, very nice,” Emma says. “Very strict, yes.”

  “Some think that Tolstoy—”

  “Are we going sailing today?” Miller asks Yngve.

  “Do you want to? We can.”

  “I’d like to go sailing,” Emma says.

  “Me too,” says Lukas.

  “Do you want to come, Wallace? We can get a big boat,” Yngve says. The thought of spending the day on the water beneath the sun, all that churning makes him want to vomit. What he wants is to crawl into the cool darkness of his bedroom and sleep for an eternity or more.

  “No, no, it’s fine. I think I’ll stick close to home.”

  There is a look of disappointment on Miller’s face, but Wallace cannot rise to it. He cannot bring himself to spend more time outside in the world. He wants to sink down and down, hide himself.

  “That’s too bad,” Yngve says. “We’d have a lot of fun with you along.”

  “You have to,” Emma says, pulling on his arm. He gives her a look that he hopes is apologetic and pathetic enough. He’s had enough of people and enough of the world. He’s had it. He’s full up. He can’t bear it a moment longer. He can’t go on this way, with them.

  “I can’t,” he says. “I better get going.” It’s just like Friday. The days are repeating themselves. He kisses Emma’s cheek.

  “I’ll go too,” Miller says.

  Wallace wants to scream. He does not know if he can stand to relive the entire weekend. He does not know how he will survive this folding back of time upon itself. But he does not scream. He tamps it down.

  “But we’re sailing,” Yngve says, trying to extract the promise before Miller is gone from the table.

  “We’re sailing. At three, maybe.”

  “Okay, I’ll call ahead for the boat.”

  “Perfect. Thank you, Yngve.”

  “Of course,” Yngve says, waving him off. Wallace is already leaving the table, and Miller lopes up beside him. When they turn the corner, away from their friends, Miller reaches for his hand. Wallace lets him take it.

  “Are you okay?” he asks.

  “I’m fine,” Wallace says. “But I’m tired and want to go home. I want to be alone, if that’s okay.”

  “It’s okay,” Miller says. “I’m sorry about what Vincent said.”

  “I had it coming,” Wallace says, looking down the street ahead of them. Miller squeezes his hand in a gesture that Wallace assumes is meant to comfort him, to bring some sort of reassurance. What is Miller trying to assure him of with this gesture? What is he trying to smooth or fix?

  “You didn’t,” Miller says. “You didn’t deserve that.”

  “Who ever deserves anything?” Wallace asks.

  “Come on.”

  “No,” Wallace says. “It’s fine.”

  “It’s not.”

  “I cannot have this conversation a single time more, Miller.” Wallace stops abruptly. He takes his hand away. “I can’t. I’m not angry. I’m not mad. But I cannot have this conversation again.”

  “Wallace.”

  “No, Miller. I can’t.” It is perhaps the truest thing he has said all morning. The refusal to go forward, to repeat the pattern, to let himself be folded up into this language that robs the world of all its honesty. He does not want to get swallowed up by it again, by this way of looking at things without looking at them, by this oblique shadow-speak. Just because you say you’re sorry, or you say that someone doesn’t deserve something, does not erase the facts of what has or has not happened, or who has or has not acted. Wallace is tired.

  “Can’t what?” Miller asks. “What can’t you do? You don’t want to talk to me? Fine. You don’t want to be around me, fine. Go. Okay. Fine.”

  “That is not what I meant.”

  “What did you mean, then?”

  That he wants to be alone. That he does not want to speak to anyone. That he does not want to be around anyone. That the world has worn him down. That he would like nothing more than to slip out of his life and into the next. That he is terrified, afr
aid. That he wants to lie down here and never move again. What he means is that he does not know what he wants, only that it is not this, the way forward paved with words they’ve already said and things they’ve already done. What he wants is to break it all open and try again.

  “I don’t know,” he says, and then, “I just want to be alone in my apartment. I just want to sleep.”

  “Fine,” Miller says. “Okay.”

  Miller digs in the pockets of his cardigan. He extracts a pack of cigarettes and lights one, takes a long drag and exhales. He runs a hand through his hair.

  “Fuck,” he says. “Fuck.”

  “I’m not mad,” Wallace says.

  “I know. It’s fine. I’m just fucked up over this.”

  “Over what?”

  “I don’t know, Wallace. Over you, over me, over the shit with Cole and Vincent. I don’t even want to go sailing. I just said that because of the drama.”

  “I know. I figured. I mean, I’m sorry.”

  “But I’ll go sailing,” he said, taking another drag. “I’ll go fucking sailing with Yngve and the others.”

  “I can’t go, Miller.”

  “I know you can’t. Will I see you later?” His voice is soft, low.

  Wallace touches the edge of Miller’s cardigan, slides his hand inside its coarse knit, to the place where his skin is bare. “I don’t know, Miller. Maybe.”

  “I need more than a maybe, Wallace,” he says, blowing smoke from the corner of his mouth. “I need something. A yes. A no. But more than a maybe.”

  “Why do you want to see me anyway?”

  “The weekend’s not over,” he says, smiling, but it’s that shy smile from before, the one that started all the trouble in the first place. Wallace looks away.

  “Call me,” he says. “We’ll see.”

  “I’ll take it,” Miller says, and he draws Wallace in for a hug. He smells like smoke and ashes, and also like oranges. Wallace wraps his arms around Miller’s waist, and he doesn’t make to leave. For all his talk of wanting to be alone, having been brought close to another person, he realizes that what he would like more than anything else is to be held. But he can’t bring himself to ask for that now, and knowing himself, he’d only change his mind later, would regret it the moment he got what he wanted.

  “Well, I better go,” he says.

  “So you say,” Miller says. Wallace laughs, and then steps backward out of Miller’s arms.

  “See you,” he says.

  “See you around.”

  Wallace goes down the street, and every so often he looks back. Miller is there smoking each time, watching him. There are more people now. The sun is out. It’s bright. It’s hot. Eventually, it is impossible to discern Miller from all the other people crossing the street or walking toward and away from the capitol. Eventually, they are all just people going about their lives, shopping and eating, laughing and arguing, doing what people in the world do. This too is real life, he thinks. Not merely the accumulation of tasks, things to be done and sorted, but also the bumping up against other lives, everyone in the world insignificant when taken and observed together.

  He stops on the corner and supports himself against the building there, closing his eyes. The world spins, shifts underfoot. The week is ahead of him, waiting, with all its demands, its structure, and soon enough another academic year will begin. If he advances toward it, marching ever closer, will it swallow him, till the sound of his weight traversing is absorbed into its bulk, his life no more discernible from the outside than the lives of others on the street are to him?

  He would like to sleep for a long time, but there is lab, the nematodes, and so while he might go home, he knows that he must leave again. He pushes off from the building, gathers his strength, and points himself toward home—a little rest, he thinks, he’s earned that much.

  7

  A bird has flown into a window and lies dying on its back, Wallace discovers when he arrives at the biosciences building. The day is still cloudless, and the sky is an almost iridescent blue, the way it can be in late summer. The sight of the bird startles him. He has retained a fear of birds since childhood. This is one of those vague Midwestern birds, gray with a white belly. Its head is nearly crushed down inside its body, and its long dark legs are like twigs from certain bushes. Occasionally, its wings spasm open. A thread of dark ants already stretches from a nearby bench to the bird, and Wallace knows, without thinking too hard, what will happen next.

  This reemergence of death in this immaculate city of the North—the suddenness of it jolts him almost as much as the bird itself. He cannot remember the last time he actually saw something die, not counting the worms he burns at the end of the titanium wire. How long has it been since he came across such a clear and present illustration of the order of things, of life ending, moving on? Long enough to have grown comfortable with death happening elsewhere, off in the margins. Or perhaps he’s making too much of it, imbuing the moment with more significance than it warrants, in the wake of all he told Miller about Alabama.

  How did his father look at the hour of his death? Or later, at the funeral? Was he buried on a day like this? No, it must have been warmer, surely, in Alabama, at the height of the heat, the crying cicadas. Wallace breathes, turns. He hops up the steps and enters the building. Enough, he thinks.

  The familiar rattle of the machines greets him, and he relaxes. It’s dry and cool indoors; he feels the humid tent of his sweater begin to dry. He takes the elevator to the third floor, lets his fingers glide along the wooden railing as he walks past the balcony. Down below, a field of purple tiles depicting the molecular structures of various sugars and biomolecules. There is an error down there somewhere, a carbon with five bonds—a Texas carbon, they call it, after the points on the star on the flag of Texas. Someone pointed it out to him during orientation, and he strained to see it, squinting while the others merely laughed and shrugged. They didn’t need to see to get the joke. Someone had to explain it to him later: because five bonds on a carbon is impossible. He smiled, nodded. Of course: A carbon can make four bonds, not more. He knew this. He had learned it in chemistry.

  He majored in chemistry at a small undergraduate institution in Alabama. His undergraduate research was in organic adduct reactions, trying to understand how and why molecules merge, become other molecules, within the specific context of environmental chemistry. His adviser, a tall, wiry man with a long, sloping step and a mild tremor, was a respected if minor researcher in the field of acid rain. His work described a process, the slow accumulation of particles in the air that when combined become toxic or acidic, washing out of the sky into rivers and cities, destroying buildings and homes. Wallace’s job in those days was to watch as his professor mixed various solutions in a slender capillary tube and stuck it in a machine to measure its spectra.

  It was beyond Wallace to understand such things then, but he was good at memorization, and he took detailed notes. He was interested enough in science, enough to know that it was his way out of the South for good. That day during orientation, when the tour guide told them about the Texas carbon, Wallace blinked slowly, dumbly. He had never heard of such a thing. The drawings from which he had learned chemistry had left no room for jokes or humor. It had never occurred to him that there could be five bonds on a carbon, even sarcastically. He had learned chemistry the way one learns French in school: too properly, too much by rote and routine, by memorizing all the rules, which of course is no way to learn a language that one intends to use.

  The lab door is already open, and Wallace drops his bags at his desk. An email waits for him—from Simone. He doesn’t have to answer it. He doesn’t have to read it. But he does, doesn’t he? It’s only a matter of time. Besides, if he doesn’t answer this one, it will be followed by another and another and another, a hail of emails falling down on him like knives until eventually he must.

 
Beyond the window, the birds are gone. He bites the corner of his lip, opens the email, skims it. Among the responses to his last progress report, flagged in red, two lines leap out at him: Let’s talk. I’m worried.

  Wallace immediately closes the email. His gut tightens. He squeezes his eyes closed. Simone’s face blooms in the dark of his mind, her intelligent blue eyes gazing at him, impassive, knowing. What will she say in that immaculate office of hers, with its delicate pieces of Danish carvings and line drawings? What does it mean, worried? Wallace has had enough of other people’s worry, enough of their concern. It’s been following him around since Friday like a persistent, hacking cough.

  “Hey, Wallace,” someone says from his left. It’s Katie, coming along his bench with a look of fierce determination on her face. “I wanted to check in with you about these results. What’s the status?”

  “Oh, Katie,” he says. “I’m on damage control. Trying to recover the strain as best I can, you know.” He hates the wavering uncertainty in his voice, the tremulousness of it. He shrugs.

  “Okay, but where are we, I guess, in the big picture?”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t understand the question,” he says with a sense of sharpening dread. Katie’s patience is dwindling already, her small features narrowing. She presses a hip to the bench and folds her arms.

  “You were going to do some staining experiments, right?” Wallace nods. “Okay, so what I’m asking is, where do you see those fitting into this project? I’m trying to wrap up some stuff for this paper, and I’m just realizing I actually don’t know what the hell you’re even doing.”

  “The staining is supposed to recapitulate the previous results,” he says after a moment, slowly, thinking his way through it as best he can, trying to remember why he had even begun this in the first place. “From your work last year. We needed to repeat it, so I was doing that . . . repeating it.”

  “And that has taken a month.”

  “Yes, Katie. It’s taken a month.”

  “I just feel like I could do it myself, faster, instead of waiting around.”