Real Life

by Brandon Taylor

  Wallace feels sorry for her, but then also for himself, because this has been his life since he came to this place, alone among white people. He’s sweating again. It’s collecting on his forehead. The lake is lapping softly, its turquoise and gray water soothing. Little brown birds hop among the folded tables, pecking at loose bits of food. He could grab a table maybe, sit for a while. That might be nice, just to be in a place. He could ask Brigit to come, spend an hour or two by the lake. The prospect of seeing Brigit, who might be on her way to lab and therefore nearby, lifts his spirits. He feels equal to that task, texts her quickly before he loses his nerve. She is close by, she says, and could swing by for a little while. It’s a plan, he says, and looks around for an empty table for the two of them.

  * * *

  • • •

  THEY END UP taking a table far away from the band. This is by design. The music is always too loud and not very good, as if the volume is meant to compensate for the lack of actual music being played. Brigit is wearing soft clothes, her hair in a loose braid down her back. They’re sharing a bag of salty popcorn. Wallace is drinking water. She has a light ale in a plastic cup. They’ve got their feet up on a third chair, their arms twined loosely together.

  “How’s your weekend been?” she asks.

  “Fine, good, you know,” he says, thinking of how they saw each other yesterday and how even then he was not being entirely honest with her about his feelings. “It’s been okay.”

  She watches him from the corner of her eye, but does not say anything. She rolls a piece of popcorn around between her fingers. The lake is growing darker as the sun sinks. The air is getting cool and still. The boats are coming in, though many remain out there in the growing darkness. The lights of the shore are blooming. Wallace holds his cup to his lips, biting its plastic rim.

  “My dad died,” he says, and he feels Brigit gasp and flinch and turn to him. “Before you freak out, though, it was weeks ago, I’m fine, I’m fine.”

  “God, Wally, oh my god,” she says.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t say anything. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t apologize to me. No. Are you okay? Oh my god.”

  He is about to say that he is fine, that he is okay, but he doesn’t. Brigit is staring at him, expecting an answer, and he knows that he could give her one, the one that would make this easy, make it simple for them to move past this moment. But he does not want to do that. He doesn’t want to give her that answer. He wants to say something about the thing with his dad and Alabama and Miller and Dana and Simone. He wants to say that he’s just barely hanging on, that within he’s raw and sad and spinning down and down and down. But how does he begin to say that, to manifest it in this world, which resists all the hardness of life? It’s too real, what he wants to say. There are no parameters. When someone is shocked in this way, you don’t shock them more. You make them feel better.

  “Yep,” he says, nodding, choking the word out. “Yep.”

  “What does that even mean, Wally? ‘Yep’? What does that mean?”

  “It just—it’s hard. It’s been hard,” he says, though he isn’t sure if the hardness pertains to his father, to the strangeness of that grief, or to everything else that has gone wrong—what has been hard? Specificity. Particularity. Ascertain. Navigate. What to say? How to speak. “But I’m alive.” There is a wet ache in his voice. “I’m alive.”

  Brigit hugs him tightly. She presses her face against his sweaty hair and she just holds him tight to her. She too has reached the edge of her vocabulary for such things. She has no way to comfort him for the things that he has no way of expressing, and so they are coming as close as they can to getting at it. He can hear her heart beating hard. She smells sweet and a little like the popcorn they’ve been eating. Her body is soft and warm. There are seagulls over them, circling, riding the air currents, which makes Wallace uneasy.

  “Anyway, now you know. I’m sorry I didn’t say anything before.”

  “My god, Wallace. When was the funeral?”

  “Oh, weeks ago.”

  “You didn’t go.”

  “No, it was too far, wasn’t worth it.”

  Brigit lets this remark go without further comment, for which Wallace is grateful. She starts to eat more popcorn. He drinks his water, which is growing lukewarm. The band is starting, something lonesome, off-key, and drowning in reverb.

  Having told her about his dad, he doesn’t feel the need to tell her anything else. It feels sufficient, in a way, a part telling the whole.

  They slide lower in their chairs, which squeak a little as their thighs slip over the metal. They laugh at the sound, comical in the moment. Their laughter swells beyond its context, till it’s disproportionate, till they’re not laughing but crying hot tears. Wallace lets loose the ugly hiccupping moan of a small child or someone who has forgotten himself. Up it comes, all the tears, the frustration, the difficulty. He’s convulsing, shivering, tears and snot and coughing, crying, putting his palms flat to his eyes, his shoulders bouncing, hot, so hot, and wet. And Brigit is weeping on his shoulder, a staccato sound like animals in the underbrush, that clattering, rickety cry.

  That time in Alabama, after the man left his house, Wallace cried. His father stooped and grabbed him around the waist, and he asked him, What are you crying for, what are you crying for? The reason had seemed obvious to Wallace, but the more his father asked him, the more Wallace questioned why he was crying, until after a while he stopped. His father had done some magic trick, converted certainty to doubt with no more effort than it took to ask, What are you crying for? Why had he done that? Why?

  But here, with Brigit, the reason sharpens, its clarity terrifying. He is crying because he cannot recognize himself, because the way forward is obscured for him, because there is nothing he can do or say that will bring him happiness. He is crying because he is lodged between this life and the next, and for the first time he does not know whether it is better to stay or go. Wallace cries and cries, until eventually he is hollow and empty and there’s nothing left to cry about, until he feels like he’s being rung like a bell.

  * * *

  • • •

  THEY ARE FEELING a little waterlogged by the time it’s all over, and also feeling kind of ashamed of themselves, self-indulgent. There is something very American about this, Brigit says—that anything that feels good must come with shame.

  “It’s because we’re all Protestants,” she continues.

  “Didn’t you go to Catholic school all your life?” he asks, and she laughs at him.

  “Yes, but my point stands.”

  They go inside to get ice cream. Wallace requests a waffle bowl with vanilla, for which Brigit mocks him. Brigit herself requests chocolate on a cone, which Wallace doesn’t think is any more adventurous than vanilla. The hall is decorated with a mural of some kind, depicting the charitable actions of some white man from a long time ago; he’s giving out candy to small, strangely demonic-looking children, and the whole scene is both bucolic and horrifying. There are many people loitering, eating ice cream, talking, eating brats. The music from the outside is louder here; the band has moved on to some very earnest rock covers.

  Off to the side, a man is eating something from a cardboard bowl. He has the sort of lean face in which the muscles of his jaws are visible as they work. Wallace watches the muscles slide and shift beneath the man’s skin, which is olive colored. There is also the thickening of muscle in his neck as he swallows, the food passing down and down through his throat and into the darkness of his body. This is an ordinary act, so commonplace as to seem invisible, but when any such act is considered, there is a wild strangeness to it. Consider how the eyelid slides down over the eyeball and back, the world cast into an instant of darkness with every blink. Consider the act of breathing, which comes regularly and without effort—and yet the great surge of air that must enter and exit our b
ody is an almost violent event, tissues pushed and compressed and slid apart and opened and closed, so much blood all over the whole business of it. Ordinary acts take on strange shadows when viewed up close.

  Wallace wants him too, but the act of wanting is distinct from sexual imagination. He can comprehend this simultaneously at two levels, what it is to want—though he only ever engages the first, the most superficial, the glance, the gaze, the ascertainment of object, fetish, token. Below this, of course, is the act itself, articulated through innumerable possibilities. Fucking and sucking and chewing and pinching and grinding and sliding and hitching and thrusting and rolling and tasting and licking and biting; there’s being held, there’s being whispered to, being pushed down, being thrown up against the wall and kept there. So much of it geographical, physiological, so much specificity to it. There is sex in the mind, which follows from the identification of objects of sexual potential. Indeed, the sexual potential is but the shadow of sexual possibility projected forward; we know we want someone when we encounter them because of what could come if we just reach out and say it: Hey, look at me.

  But when Wallace looks at such people, people he wants, he always feels so much worse afterward. Being so aware of their bodies makes him aware of his own body, and he becomes aware of the way his body is both a thing on the earth and a vehicle for his entire life’s history. His body is both a tangible self and his depression, his anxiety, his wellness, his illness, his disordered eating, the fear of blood pouring out of him. It is both itself and not itself, image and afterimage. He feels unhappy when he looks at someone beautiful or desirable because he feels the gulf between himself and the other, their body and his body. An accounting of his body’s failures slides down the back of his eyes, and he sees how far from grace he’s been made and planted.

  It’s not even that he wants to be them—though queer desire has this feature baked in, so better to say it’s not just that he wants to be them. He wants to be not himself. He wants to be not depressed. He wants to be not anxious. He wants to be well. He wants to be good.

  There are ways to wrangle a body’s dimensions, but these dimensions correspond solely to the physical space it occupies. How to wrangle the body that is unreal? How to wrangle the histories of our bodies, which are inseparable from the bodies themselves and are always growing? How to change or shape that part of us? Wallace is unwell. Parts of him are falling off. It’s maudlin, he knows, but it’s also true. When he sees a good body going around in the world, he finds he’s unable to look away from both it and himself. The truly awful thing about beauty is that it reminds us of our limits. Beauty is a kind of unrelenting cruelty. It takes the truth, hones it to a terrifying keenness, and uses it to slice us to the bone.

  A good body is a monstrous thing; it stalks and hunts us in the smallest parts of ourselves. It extracts from us painful truths. When Wallace sees a good body, what he feels is thirst, or else an ache, which is the sensation of beauty forcing its way inside.

  The thing about Miller’s body is that it isn’t a beautiful body, not like this man’s, and so Wallace is able to interface with it as a sexual object. It isn’t beyond him. There is something definitively human about Miller’s body, its weight, its length, its odd angles, its pockets of fat and flesh. The places where it goes suddenly soft or hard, where it is unexpectedly supple or strong or taut. Miller’s body is accessible, understandable in all the ways that it is flawed. It is legible to Wallace. The man eating dumps out the rest of his food and leaves. Their ice cream is ready, and Brigit passes him his bowl and they go out into the evening air.

  It has gotten much darker, the water almost invisible. The clouds from earlier are overhead, thick and purple. A moist wind is blowing. Wallace can tell even at this distance that there’s rain coming fast, thunder on the horizon. It will rain, certainly.

  Their table is occupied when they return to it, so they find another, unfortunately close to the band, where the tables have been left conspicuously unoccupied. Hundreds of people are gathered now on the pier and at the tables, thronging the area. It’s maybe the last good weekend of weather for such things. Soon, they’ll have to shut it down. Just a few weeks left before the end.

  They’re at a yellow table. Brigit has both her feet up on a chair, and she is thoughtfully licking her ice cream. Wallace is eating slowly. His stomach is still uneasy, tight, quivering. There are wasps swinging through the night, attracted by the stickiness of beer left on the table and by their ice cream. He frowns at them, as if that will drive them away. Brigit laughs.

  “Can you believe tomorrow is Monday?” she asks, groaning, throwing her head back and giving it a shake. “I cannot believe this.”

  “It happens every week. It’s like some sort of trend or something.”

  “You are not a funny person.”

  “I’m aware. We all have our faults. And our gifts.”

  “You are unkind,” she says, dryly, but with no menace. “I heard you had a talk with Katie.”

  “Who you told you that?”

  “Katie.”

  “Oh, I might have figured,” he says.

  “If you want . . . well, you know.”

  “I know,” he says. “I know, thank you. But there’s nothing for it but to do it, I guess.”

  “Okay,” Brigit says, but she is not convinced. There is worry knitting her brow. Wallace wonders just what it is that Katie said, how she might have put it. “She was not thrilled you left today, by the way.”

  “I know, she seemed pissed. But she always seems pissed.”

  “That’s true. She does. It’s just because she’s graduating, though—soon she’ll be gone and all will be well.”

  “And then you,” Wallace says quietly. “Then it’s your turn.”

  “And then it’s your turn!” Brigit chirps, which makes Wallace shrink, quieten. The ice cream is cold and perfect. The vanilla is an empty flavor. He draws the spoon around his lips, letting them numb. The paper wrapping for the waffle bowl is soggy now. Brigit, sensing that she has crossed some line between them, shoots him a look of apology. But for what is she apologizing? What is the point of apologizing to him at this point?

  “Simone—” he begins, pressing his tongue to the back of his teeth, looking out over the water. “Simone wants me to think about what I want. If I really want to stay here. To stay in graduate school.”

  “Oh god,” Brigit says, rolling her eyes. “What a pretentious cunt.”

  “Brigit,” he says.

  “She is. What kind of question is that?”

  “A very serious one. There was shit with Dana yesterday. It’s not worth rehashing, but Simone is on my case.”

  Brigit grows more serious. “Is she thinking about kicking you out?”

  Wallace does not answer. He spoons more ice cream into his mouth, savors its perfect coldness. Brigit squeezes his arm.

  “Well, is she?”

  “She wants me to think very carefully about what I want,” he says. “And that’s fair. I get it.”

  “I don’t,” she says. “I don’t get it at all.”

  “Don’t pretend, Brigit. You know it’s been rough.”

  “It’s rough for everyone.”

  “Not you.”

  “That’s not true,” she says. “It’s been hard for me too. It’s been really fucking difficult.”

  “Has it?” Wallace asks, and he can tell that the question hurts her feelings. There’s a look of shock, surprise shifting into indignation.

  “You can be so selfish sometimes, Wallace. Yes, it’s been hard for me. Do you think I enjoy being in a place full of white people working myself stupid every hour of every day? Did you know that Simone asked me for Japanese recipes?”

  “You aren’t Japanese,” Wallace says, trying to be funny, but Brigit makes a disgusted sound under her breath.

  “And then—nothi
ng I do is good enough, Wally. I could literally cure cancer and Simone would look at me like, Of course, that’s what your people do. I’m not a person here, Wallace. I am not Brigit. I’m the Asian girl. I’m just a face to them. And sometimes not even that.”

  “I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m really sorry.” He hates this, the reflexive way that he responds to her. I’m sorry has so little use, is of such little worth, that to offer it seems almost an insult. He wants to swallow the words back, choke them down. In her eyes, as she absorbs the empty words, he sees the hard flat surface that separates even them, the closest among the group. They’re pressed up against either side of it, but cannot break through, cannot get to what is real. “Brigit.”

  “No, it’s fine.”

  “Brigit.”

  “Wallace,” she says.

  Both of them are tense. The ice cream slides down her fingers, and she lifts her hand to lick it clear. There are tears at the corners of her eyes. He has underestimated her suffering.

  “If you leave,” Brigit says, studying her ice-cream cone. “If you leave, I won’t know what to do with myself, and that’s the truth. But if staying is so awful for you, I want you to do that.”

  “I don’t want to leave you,” he says, “and I don’t want to be a failure.”

  “But you won’t be,” she says. “You won’t be a failure just because you leave. Especially if it makes you happy.”

  “What about you?”

  “I’ll have to get along without you,” she says, and she laughs again. “But I’ll be happy for you.”

  “Let’s just run away together,” he says, perhaps more seriously than he would like to admit. “Let’s just go away and never look back.”

  “That would be a dream,” she says, then, shaking her head, “but the thing about dreams is, you gotta wake up, Wally.”

  “Don’t I know it,” he says, but the thought of a life with Brigit, simple and easy, predicated only on the notion of what would bring them happiness, seems irresistible. They could live in her tiny house on the East Side, with its garden, making jams and sauces and reading on lazy, sunny afternoons. They could live entirely among themselves, apart from everything and everyone.